I grew up listening to my neighbor play his drums. His house was diagonal from mine, and so my bedroom on weekend afternoons would be filled with a constant beat wafting through the window: a soundtrack for my life in my room. You can hear the drums from anywhere in the yard...actually, anywhere in the neighborhood. To me, the beat always sounds the same and it will go on for hours and hours.
Now that childhood is gone, it's nice to hear the same sounds in my neighborhood. The fountain in my backyard, the school buses leaving and coming daily, the little squeals of delight from the fresh lot of children galloping around our street, playing the same games we all used to play. And of course, the drums are there: the same beat as always, the same soundtrack in our lives.
When I hear the drums now, I feel as though nothing has changed. The drums mean that my neighbor is home from college, which means we're all home from college, which means we're still living back in time. At moments like this, I can close my eyes and everything feels as it used to be; perhaps the only thing that has changed is my own age, my own callousness. The children, my friends, are still playing games like "Around the House" or "Capture the Flag--" I can hear them--and that beat is still ticking away at our lives, taunting the day when we have to return to New York or State College or whereever our real world may be.
The older I've gotten, the more I've enjoyed coming home and the more thankful I am that there is such a home to come back to. It feels more and more like a respite, like I'm pushing the "Pause" button on life and sinking back to a place where the beat is strong and even and all-consuming: the drum, the pond, the children, the drum, the pond, the drum, the pond, the drum, the drum, the drum, the drum.....
It feels less and less real and lacks the pressure. Because when you're living in the past, you already know what the future's going to bring.
They say that smell is the strongest trigger of memory. I remember this on days when my memory is triggered, or in random moments when I'm thrown back to the past and I'm shocked that such a memory still exists.
I remember it when I eat a certain kind of coffee cake that my mom used to make in the mountains on family vacations in Eagles Mere. Before our family went up, all four of us would go to BJ's and buy bulk quanities of food to last us the whole month in the mountains because once there, the ride to the grocery store took an hour each way and could destroy a morning on the beach. One year, my mom bought a lot of Bisquick and started making trays of this coffee cake as a munchy in the morning before heading off to our activities or as a mid-day snack. It was a really good coffee cake: a layer of crumbly cinnamon sugary goodness baked to a crisp formed a thick layer over the top, and the edges and corners used to get burned into thick cakes of solid brown sugar. I used to pick at the top.
But the cake was still made of Bisquick, so it had a distinct, grainy texture, a warm, processed kind of scent. And I remember that smell, sometimes, and I"m specifically thrown back to a cool, dreary afternoon on the screened-in porch of our annual rental house, "Fernbrook," picking at plate after plate of coffee cake and listening to Jewel's song "Painters" on my walkman as I slowly negotiated the giant family puzzle that was constantly being slaved over. With that coffee-cake smell comes the memory of high-altitude humidity, a damp forest with the distant sound of drip, the sound of a raging brook, the understanding of a enormous, silver lake nearby and a rich green color.
I remember Fernbrook as a musty, log cabin scent, a constant wetness of fresh wood. For some reason, I remember the room that my brother and I shared being really cold and bare, even though I know the heat was unbearable. I always remember it being wet there, and especially cold on the night when my father arrived from Philadelphia looking ghostly white having just hit and killed a baby deer. He had stopped the car to gain his composure after it happened, and the car driving behind him had stopped as well to make sure he was okay. They were shocked that he hadn't been killed: the baby deer had been with its mother, and from behind it looked as though he'd hit the enormous female head-on. Two days later, when driving back to Philadelphia, my father saw the baby deer dead on the side of the highway.
His car at the time was a red honda and I have two memories of that car: one is an awkward picture that my mom took of my dad standing by it in our driveway before he turned it in, and the other is the crushed, burgandy metal with baby deer fluff jammed up in all the jagged corners. It smelled like animal and sadness.
I went to Philadelphia yesterday for about an hour and a half. I had made a dentist appointment six months back and realized that I wouldn't be in town once it was too late to cancel. So I took a five-hour train ride to get my teeth cleaned for 40 minutes.
I hadn't walked around center city Philadelphia during lunchtime on a summer day for two years-- the last time was during what I deem the worst summer of my life, after freshman year of college. That summer is blurred for me: the allergies, the depression, the trainrides, the heat, the ex-boyfriend, the therapy, the 9-5 workday. That summer was my greatest low, and until yesterday it was easily forgettable and over-shadowed by the memory of every other fabulous summer in my life.
I grew bitter towards Philadelphia after that summer, developed distaste for the city and for the law profession. I decided that summer that I didn't want to be a lawyer and months later, once again in New York and back to my normal, happy self, I decided I would hide in New York City forever, build my life here, and turn my back on the place where I grew up.
I should have known that that sentiment would change. I should have known I'd be drawn back to Philadelphia six months ago, when I was again overcome with the urge to be a lawyer, felt compelled to take a law class and allowed myself to be hooked in and obsessed.
I was exasperated when I got to Philly yesterday. My phone had shut down on me, it was hot and I was late to the dentist. But something felt oddly right when I was there, something felt a little more calm, a little more therapeutic: the older man at the dentist who looked at me and couldn't stop smiling and initiating conversation, the narrow sidewalks, the light traffic, the sunlit streets that aren't overshadowed by enormous buildings, and the business people
lollygagging down the street who have somehow burned out the flame under their asses and learned to enjoy a full lunch hour. And then there was me, and I practically plowed the pedestrians over, just to be early to catch the train back.
I dreamed last night about Philadelphia, during the moments when I was actually able to sleep. I dreamed of Spanish and dogs and sun and calm. And I woke up this morning no longer opposed to leaving New York when the time comes, no longer feeling like I need constant stimulation to help me deal with my life, no longer feeling the need to hide under tall buildings.
On a Sunday evening in late May, she is more relaxed than she has been in weeks. Muscles and hands are warm from her recent work-out, belly is swollen with a healthy, homemade dinner, and the sound of sizzling butter cackles under the rich swell of classical piano that tenderly overwhelms the small space. The voices of loved ones that drone in the corners, the feeling that we are all looming on the edge of possibility, and if only we had the courage to jump...
Her friend calls this new phase comfortable, sings her praises at her new peace of mind, her relaxation of the soul. She does not know what she did-- maybe she just learned to love herself a little bit more. Maybe it was a gift from God, a message in the form of beautiful compliments and a mirror image of her own advice. Perhaps she was just ready to open her eyes.
The smell of dried sweat, the tinkle of bells, the human munching--sweet, silent, content.
And then a voice that shatters the soft lull, and she smiles.
This is the theme of my week: toxic people are like toxic drugs.
Toxic people are like toxic drugs: they can only become toxic once they're part of our beings, and they somehow feel good and addictive even as they eat us away.
I've been having moments of clarity this week about the harmful people in our lives, those individuals who make us hurt, but who we seem so afraid to let go of. And why? I wonder, because the people who hurt us the most seem to be those who we fear losing most strongly. Those that really need to leave are those who we really want to stay.
I wonder why we destroy ourselves this much. Perhaps it's in the hope of change, that one more day or week or year will improve the situation, for it's scary to release something that hasn't yet reached its full potential. Or maybe it's because many of us always want to see the good, and so we use that potential for good as an excuse for the overwhelming bad. Maybe it's because we blame ourselves: we see that this person is only toxic to us and so blame
ourselves for the harm, because it certainly can't be them.
But here's the thing: we're all poisonous if we get under the skin of the wrong person at the wrong time. And so the point is that toxicity is not about the toxic person, toxicity is about the victim. Toxic people are like toxic drugs: we
choose to swallow them down, even if it feels like we can't help it.
And we choose to put up with people and make excuses for them and sacrifice our own good for the sake of their potential. We choose to succumb to the poison because it's too scary to think of the detox. But here's a secret following my moments of clarity this week: the fear of what's beyond is worse than what's actually there. The fear is paralyzing but the detox is painless. And no one changes unless they really want to.
I often use the band-aid analogy when I talk about ridding ourselves of people that are less than good for us or breaking up with boyfriends or girlfriends. I remember being young whenever I think of it, having a cut on my leg that was covered with a band-aid until it was finally time to take the smelly, itchy thing off. I remember crying at the pain as I slowly tore it away from each little peach-fuzzy hair and howling with the fear of ripping another follicle apart. And I remember my grandmother telling me to just rip the damn thing off and get it over with.
To this day I'm still bad at ripping band-aids off, but I'm getting better at throwing bad relationships away. Toxic friends are like toxic drugs which are like smelly band-aids covering healed skin: the scariest part is the
prospect of losing it, of each day exploding apart, the howling fear of detox, and the easy part is just ripping the damn thing off.
There is an Argentinian author named Manuel Puig who once told an interviewer about his struggles writing. He said he wrote everyday, and that he felt a strong urge to write, but that he had to force himself to sit down and do it. He said that every time he sat down to write it was a struggle: writing for him was a painful mess of forced creativity that he had to squeeze out of his pours for hours a day: something that he couldn't live without, but that would end up killing him anyway.
Sometimes I feel this way: an inner battle constantly seething between by desperate need to write and the pain that ensues while the words travel from my head to the page. What an exhausting endeavor the writer has; it's like catching boiling rice on a fork: we can scoop and scoop forever, in search of the words that describe the churning feeling inside, and must strugle with all our might to catch them and hold on the moment when they gurgle forth.
In my house growing up, we always had books. In the first house I lived in, my parents built a bookshelf in the living room before I was born, so that for as far back as I remember, there has always been a wall of books in my life. When we moved across the street when I was in kindergarten, one of the first things my parents did was have a book shelf built in the new living room. The book shelf was twice the size of the one from our old house, but somehow we had enough books. I have always valued books because I have always admired that wall.
Most of the books on the wall belonged to my dad. There was, and still is, a complete set of encyclopedias from the 1950s, every law book he ever used, books in latin, paperback novels with covers that are slowly disconnecting from the literature within and some history books too. When you take a book down from the shelf, there's always the chance that you'll find his words in it-- his jotted notes in that flawless handwriting of his calling to the present from 30 years ago. I think my father saved every book he ever read and preserved them on our bookshelf as a testiment to his brilliance and his profound respect for academia.
In the past few years, I have started to do the same. When it comes to the end of each semester, and my books have been read and highlighted and yet still preserved under my ginger care, I don't even think of selling them back. For some reason, I feel that I will one day need them again, I will one day want to reference back, and that need to re-read them trumps my desire to make a profit. If a book has my jotted notes, it also has a piece of my brain, and thus cannot be let go, just as my father's 20-something brilliance is still up on that shelf and taught me how to love reading through that wall.
Perhaps I save my books because I want to build my own wall one day: one that will fill a side of my living room and imprint in my children the value of all those words, the inspiration in all those pages. Perhaps I look to preserve myself in the same way my father did so accidentally: through my immediate responses in the margins of page after page.
When I was in high school, we had to read the book, "The Great Gatsby." I remember that it was on the book shelf, and my dad found it and gave it to me. It was his copy, it was old and yellowed and gingerly used, just like all the books up there. I bought my own copy of the book though, and I ended up filling every inch with highlights and margin notes, comments that I still go back to today in awe because I find they sum up humanity in ways I can only dream of.
No, I never wrote in a single one of my father's books. That was his wall, that is his memory. And I will create my own.
When I used to take art classes in high school, I remember the fear of a blank canvas being common. Students, including myself, would express their anxiety at the thought of starting their piece; they would feel intimidated by that daunting expanse of whiteness that could soon become their greatest work or their most miserable failure. I remember feeling that too. Going to the art store was fun and inspiring, but placing the canvas or paper down on the kitchen table and standing above it, with a pencil poised in my left hand, was a different story. A canvas, in the moments before you place your first stroke, becomes a bleached beast that rears it's body upwards and taunts your very attempt at transforming into something beyond it's pure, colorless perfection.
I don't remember how I used to start my art. I can't recall exactly that first stroke that I made of each painting or drawing. What I remember is the moment of terror before and the moments of intense focus and concentration after. I remember wasting my body and my back slaving over canvases that used to be white or blue or yellow. I remember putting in the last stroke and making the decision to never put another one on. But the jump in, the second when I began to stain and destroy the blank available space is lost to me: perhaps my brain blocked it out because the memory was just that scary.
I feel the same feeling today when I start to write. When I click "new document" and a white canvas pops in front of my eyes to say hello. I find my name is the easiest thing to write first--ironic how I'm willing to claim it as my own before the damage has even been done.
And I feel the same with life, with the great expanse on the horizon that calls out to me post-graduation. Someone told me last week that I should take advantage of the time after I graduate to take a job that's really cool and interesting, something that I will be passionate about and enjoy. I imagine that like staring at an array of colored pencils, freshly sharpened in a box, and needing to pick the best color to start with: they are beautiful and exciting and they make me smile, and yet they represent either my greatest work or my most miserable failure. Perhaps I'm silly for worrying about the future so soon, when I haven't even finished my Junior year of college, but I find it taunting me even from so far away. The white bleached beast thrashing and seething in its own perfection, looming ahead of me, just daring me to make my first mark.
