Upset

Yesterday was my third anniversary.

I adore the fact that it’s one day before Valentine’s Day so the pressure is off — we go out to eat a day early, someplace nice. My husband wears his wedding suit, showers, shaves, removes any stray back-of-the-neck messiness, and let me say — he cleans up good.

I put on a dress, which is a rarity — full makeup, beautiful heels. I even curled my hair once, back when I had more of it, though trying to curl what I’ve got going on now would certainly be a fun experiment (any advice?).

This all went according to plan. I looked beautiful, my husband looked handsome, and we hustled our way through the cold and the block and a half to Our Place.

Tapas 177, bar upstairs, restaurant downstairs, dance floor adjacent to the dining room. We considered having our wedding there before we pulled the killswitch and opted for Vegas. Everything is lit up in red, a romantic version of ladies in Amsterdam windows. Usually we sit upstairs, chat with the bartenders and the waitresses while they’re waiting for their trays to fill. They let me smoke my e-cig up there, they’ll let Nate smoke after hours up there. We scoot our barstools together so we can lean on each other, and some of the drinks come for free and we hassle the owner for one of the black and white employee shirts. It’s the first place we ever went on a date — the owner, Demetrio, remembers. We’ve been up on the roof past 2AM, seen the light on, and walked straight in to free drinks and sincere hellos.

It’s Our Place.

I didn’t want to go.

I was exhausted from work and the week, and I felt anxious, edgy. I just wanted to exchange cards, little gifts, and be together — but we went, and we sat downstairs. It felt proper that way.

But we were all the way in the back, next to the wine cellar door, and near enough to the kitchen to hear every shout of “coming in!” and next to a trio of remarkably underdressed Asian kids who kept pulling out their iPhone 6+s to watch YouTube videos and take selfies. We might have been right under a speaker.

I started with a Midnight Manhattan — bourbon, lavender tea syrup, and orange zest — because it felt comforting, classy, a piece of a larger event, and we toasted to three years together, four months married. But as the courses arrived, and we began to talk about our weeks, our stories, the ambient noise became a cacophony and the talk became ridicule, and I couldn’t stand to be wearing a dress, or being tipsy, or wearing make-up and I had to get out of there.

I hated pleading with my husband through the beginnings of a panic attack. Please, I need to leave — he tried to calm me, to focus on my breathing, to meditate, but it was too much, and too loud, and I was about to fly out of my skin, so I left.

I went home and scrubbed off the make-up, but not the shame or the anger and I laid in bed, waiting for him (unaware that the waitress had been watching and offered him a shot for having to deal with that crazy girl — I could kill her), trying to breathe deeply instead of wading through the shallows that never give you enough oxygen, trying to quiet myself, and find solace in Spring Fashion magazines.

It wasn’t ten minutes before he was home, sitting beside my curled body on our bed, and I was so afraid he was angry with me. But, with my head in his lap, he told me he was only upset that I was going through this, and he held me until I could fall asleep on my own.

We didn’t exchange presents, or laugh as much as I would have liked, or even have the dessert-coffee-scotch combination I love so terribly. But we were close, and understanding, and so completely in love that, to me at least, it didn’t matter.

And that, to me, is a happy anniversary.

Galentines

My first kiss was at 15. He was my first boyfriend, but the relationship lasted a month. He “couldn’t do it anymore,” for reasons that are still unclear.

The first time I made out was at 17. I met him at a Zox concert and we kissed in the rain. I saw him once more before that relationship ended — I skipped work, my mother found out, and I was grounded “forever.” In reality, forever lasted a few weeks, but I broke it off anyway; he didn’t have a car, his boarding school was an hour away, and my pragmatic side didn’t see a happy future.

The first real relationship I had came after high school graduation, after we had both chosen where to go to college. We fell in love quickly, but he moved 300 miles away, and we saw each other roughly every three weeks for two and a half years. We were finally in the same city, but he took that for granted, and I broke both our hearts by leaving him.

The first boyfriend I saw regularly came into my life at 20, and we became official shortly after I turned 21. He was emotionally abusive, and I clung to him long after we were officially broken up, letting him use me for sex at his convenience, carrying on a secret half relationship for six months after I finally decided to leave.

Then I let my husband, and all of that came to an end.

—-

Today is “Galentine’s Day,” an unofficial yet-to-be-Hallmarked holiday meant to be spent with the women you love most in life. It also marks the third anniversary of beginning my relationship with my husband, so I won’t be drinking wine tonight with my friends at Solera, or pouring myself a glass at home and Skyping the “friend fam” from my breakfast bar. And, in a way, that’s sad.

I’ve spent most of my life either single or close enough to it, and the people who loved me, each and every day, were a ragtag crew of women, some now married, some dating, some engaged, and some single.

And I wish, especially for the single ones, that I could spend tomorrow with them.

—-

I was never good at being alone. I hated being around couples, save one. They never made me feel like a third wheel to their bicycle; instead, we all rode our own side by side.

Apart from them, though, relationships made me miserable. I so wanted to be loved by a guy that seeing it in front of me was deeply sad. But I always had My Girls.

The girls whose houses I would sleep over so often that their mothers would start to parent me as much as their own child. The girl who would hug me when I cried over these mini-relationship breakups, convinced I would never love again. The girls who would take my drunken phone calls and laugh at my slurring “I love you”s. The girls who would listen to me rattle off my host of bad decisions, and tell me that I was going to be fine. The girls who would split packs of cigarettes with me in high school because we were ‘so badass.’ The girls who planned out my weekends freshman year of college, because I was friendless, and miserable, and didn’t know what to do with my free time. The girls who would call me during American Idol to critique the performances. The girls who always encouraged me to keep writing, who always told me how talented I was, and to never give up. The girls who would pick me up when I fell — sometimes literally — and bring me down when I was off my rocker.

This is for all of those girls, who have been there long before any boy came along, and far before my husband. The ones who I called when I got engaged, who flew to Las Vegas on their last pennies for my wedding, who rapped at my reception (and then collapsed from dehydration — yes, this really happened). The ones who listened to me go through my lowest lows of mental illness, and always promised to be there for me.

And I knew they meant it, because they always have been.

This is for you, My Girls.

Sports Bras To Work

When I was a young A-cup, I did everything I could to enhance my bust. I bought low-cut shirts and incredibly padded push-up bras. All of my clothes were fitted — read: tight. Jeans may as well have been painted on. I bought a button up that could only be buttoned to below my bust, like an added bustier. I was trying so hard to attract attention, that I didn’t think much about what I liked, what I wanted to wear.

This ceased for a time after I ‘landed’ my first boyfriend, my first love syndrome. For two and a half years, I took a break from trying so damn hard. I went so far as to make a uniform of hoodies and jeans, of my strangest ‘man repeller’ outfits, of tanktops and shorts, and IDon’tGiveAFuck.

Until that relationship ended.

It was my decision, and much to do with sex — namely, that he didn’t seem to want to have any. I had my own place, but he shared an on-campus apartment with four roommates. That was where we stayed: in a two-bedroom place with a literal roommate, and a guy who slept on the couch. Every time I showered there, I’d walk out of the bathroom with a towel around my body and a towel on my head almost directly into the living where two or more guys would be lounging around, watching TV or playing Halo 3. I learned to bring my change of clothes into the bathroom with me to avoid running into The Roommate just as I was about to undress. It was less than ideal, but we never chose to spend more time at my place — or rather, he didn’t want to.

The last day we were together, I was changing clothes to go for a run, and he kept his eyes fixed firmly on his monitor instead of the body of his soon-to-be ex girlfriend, who he would never have sex with again.

And so the cycle started again, but with a twist: I still rocked the sweatshirts and jeans to class, but come party time my inner slut was given time to shine.

I gave her free reign under the liberation of alcohol. I had my one and only one-night-stand while wearing a short white velvet dress and angel wings after about five large screwdrivers. I played a good deal of beer pong and followed some guy around a party — to be fair, I didn’t realize this is what I was doing. In retrospect, it must have been completely obvious, but he did make out with me on a few occasions, so it must have been more cute than obnoxious. I wore a lot of sheer white shirts with black bras underneath. I wore a lot of short shorts. I reinstated my push-up bras.

And I was into it, even stayed in this frame of mind and dress after I snagged first a quasi-boyfriend, and then made it official after about six months. Even then, I made sure to keep the eyes on me. If they stayed there, if it was clear that I could fuck almost any guy at almost any time, this new boyfriend would see and stay. It helped that I was out of his league — which I don’t say to be mean; at the time, I cherished our relationship, co-dependent and emotionally abusive thing that it was — but (without vanity), he got kind of lucky.

That was probably an unconscious choice. Pick someone inexperienced, slightly odd looking, and emotionally broken, and he should stick like Velcro. Which he did, until rrrrrrip! — my obsession with being wanted, being cherish, being needed by a man led to me chasing one on a two week trip home.

He was an artist with thick hair, a mustache, and a collarbone tattoo. At that time in my life, that was Kryptonite. The first time I saw him tagged in a Facebook picture with my friend Jameson, I thought he was attractive. Some months later, I friended him, and fell in love with his drawings. The first night we met, we went swimming in a lake at night in our underwear. When I jumped off the wooden dock and into the lake, the clasp on the front of my bra broke irrevocably and I wore his clothes home.

It was a disaster waiting to happen.

But what a sweet disaster it was. Yes, I got drunk and kissed him in a tent in my side yard. Yes, we continued to make out throughout the night, sleeping only a few precious hours on the ground. Yes, he told me he wanted to sleep with me more than anything. But we held hands on a midnight walk to Dunkin Donuts; I was barefoot, and he offered me his shoes. While the other two sleep-over guys snored next to him, I traced the lines of his tattoo (Be strong, I love you) which he had gotten while his father was dying, or just after. It was romantic and ethereal, fantastic in the true sense of the word:

— “imaginative or fanciful; remote from reality”

When I had left my boyfriend in New York, I was having a panic attack in our parking lot. I needed him to come to me, put his arms around me and kiss the side of my head as he used to, until the shaking stopped. Instead, I wheezed and cried and couldn’t catch my breath, but he told me be quiet, the neighbors will hear!

Technically, we broke up.

I was indecisive about telling him while laughing with my girlfriends over tomato soup, our hangover cure, but I couldn’t stop myself from giving him what he was owed — the truth. That, however, wasn’t the problem. He didn’t care that I had kissed another guy or why I had done it. He forgave me instantly, or so he said; I believe he merely didn’t want to lose me, his little trophy girl.

And technically, we broke up, technically he lost me, but we continued to sleep together on and off for a year. I cheated on two boyfriends with him, one who became my husband.

There’s a term for that I believe: slut.

A slut is “a woman who has many casual sexual partners.” A slut is “a woman with low standards of cleanliness.” A slut is “an immoral or dissolute woman; a prostitute.” A slut is “an individual who is considered to have loose sexual morals or who is sexually promiscuous.” A slut is “a woman of a low or loose character; a bold or impudent girl; a hussy, jade.”

I had three casual sexual partners in the course of six months, sometimes overlapping them, always looping back to them. I certainly preferred dry shampoo to a shower, but that was because my bathroom was freezing. I cheated — an immoral, dissolute act that went against everything I had ever believed. I was loose with my sexual morality. I felt low in my character.

But I would never say I was a slut.

I was 23 and confused. I did things that were against my morals, that were wrong by most standards, but I was trying my best to be happy, and didn’t know how. I never aimed to hurt anyone — in fact, I lied and concealed truths so as to minimize pain felt by anyone but myself. If there was any mistake I made, it was following the advice of a twice-broken heart — believe me, they’re unreliable.

It wasn’t until I abandoned all that, though, that I put away the clothes I used to put myself on sexual display. That came when I left my mistakes, my tumult of perplexity, in the past and committed fully to the man who is now my husband. I went through everything I owned and everything that reminded me of that girl I once was went into trash bags — not because the clothes didn’t flatter me, or that I didn’t feel confident in them, but that they made me physically uncomfortable. Perhaps that was the anxiety diagnosis talking, but I believe not because I haven’t worn those clothes or anything like them since.

Instead, I embraced menswear (I’m wearing a sweater of my husband’s now). I embraced basics. I embraced clothes that made me feel confident, cool, and effortlessly woman-like without feeling like a bikini babe posing beside a car.

Now, I put together outfits that feel like myself instead of a highlighter for my body. My pants may still be tight, but that’s my choice. I may wear scoopnecks that hint at cleavage, but I chose them because they make me feel good. I wear heels because I love being six feet tall and thin and strutting around like I’m a contestant on ANTM. And sometimes, I wear sportsbras to work, because I want a long slim line instead of accenting my breasts. That’s me.

I’m also the girl who sexts her husband from the office, who takes masturbation breaks, who watches and enjoys porn, and who has slept with five men — who will only ever sleep with five men.

If what I wear now or what I wore at 23 makes me a slut, fine. If my enjoyment of sex, the partners I’ve had, and when I had them makes me a slut, I’ll take it. Because I’ve had a few casual sex partners. I’ve cheated multiple times. I’m certainly bold and impudent, and think showering is a waste of valuable morning time. So call me a slut, and I’ll take that scarlet S and craft an amazing outfit out of it.

But I won’t put myself on display anymore for the attention of men, plural. If I’m on display, it’s for two people: myself, and my husband. That’s all I care about.

And if the rest makes me a slut? Fantastic.

I’ll be your little slut.

Lost

I used to be good at things, you know. I used to succeed without involving much effort and have time leftover to write and I was always reading and socializing and I worked hard and made money. I used to be able to do this, and now I’m afraid that I’m not doing any of it right. Maybe I just need to admit to myself that I’m afraid. I’m scared. I’m worried. I’m afraid.

I’m not giving enough time to my writing, when that’s really the most important thing. It’s always been the most important thing, ever since I was in second grade and I wrote my first poem, and was praised — it all fell upon me like glittering snow: you’re gifted you have a talent that’s amazing I don’t know how you do it and on and on until I was something of a star to some people, but now — I’m unfulfilled potential. I’m sitting on this novel inside of me, and instead of letting it out, word by word, until it’s finished, I’m smothering it. My enthusiasm, my excitement of the idea of it is smothering, too, and maybe I’m not ever meant to write a novel. Maybe I don’t have the thing that keeps you writing, the grit, the goddamned grit that makes you succeed in your ventures when it’s just you and a computer. What don’t you do then? What’s keeping you?

And I have pieces to write, pieces I believe in that I pitched to places that matter, place where I will be read all in the hope of becoming something. A literary agent from a high profile company contacted me based on one of those pieces, and now? I’m just someone else with a WordPress account and some deadlines to meet. The website that published the article that got the agent’s attention won’t take any more of my ideas. They won’t even answer my emails. That’s also the only piece I’ve ever been paid for — digressions. I have more work to be done, more words to write, things to say that could be good — no, enough of being modest, they could be fantastic — if I only set aside the time. I only seem to get work done on the second floor of a coffee shop and then I can write for about five hours, but it’s a cold walk, so cold that I sit at home and wait on the ideas and turn in pieces that could have been brilliant. What good is publication if your work is mediocre? Or even if it’s merely good? There are so many people who are good, and to succeed you have to be amazing — you have to be shining above your peers so that your light drowns everyone else out.

And I could. I believe I could, without vanity, without any inflation of my ego, but there are other things, other preoccupations and projects — there is my darling magazine that brings hope to so many writers like me. It gives them a place to write the prose that isn’t candy but warm, hearty bread that nourishes people, that feeds those that make it and those that eat it, but my bakery is getting busier all the time. My inbox is never empty and the drafts keep pouring in and I love it — I asked for it and hoped for it — but I’m getting to the point where I’ll soon need help. And no one will love it like I do, no one can look at a piece of writing and see what it needs like I can, or pick out a talented writer from one piece in a veritable sea of pieces, and know that they fit here, on the island of misfit talent. Where do I get the time?

And what if, what if I’m not cut out for podcasting? I’ve grown a little recording of two girls talking into being plucked from the ether by one of the largest networks in the country, and I listen to the other shows — my peers, comrades in arms — and I don’t know what I’m doing there. I can’t speak intelligently or humorously at length, and I come to recordings too prepared, with quotes from newspapers that I read verbatim and, though I’ve quit stuttering, I now pause when I lose my place in a sentence, building suspense out of which is meant to come insight, but instead, I simply finish a normal thought, and I wonder why anyone is listening. I wish there were feedback coming in, but instead it’s silence and I don’t know where to go from here.

I’m lost, and some of it is my brain chemistry convincing me of certain failure when really things are progressing normally, and some of it is being 26 and wanting to achieve something amidst my quarter-life-crisis, and some of it is jealousy — absolute jealousy of those who are more successful, more talented, more glorified, just more than me —

— and I’m failing my husband who has held me up all this time. He needs a partner and I’m so trapped in my head by disease and self-interested delusion that I forget to look through the bars and see. This is not a one-woman-show. He is not something I climb on top of to stay afloat. He is my sanity, and sometimes he is the one to take away the knives, and to hold me through the tears, and provide the support I want and criticisms I need, but he is my husband, and I am afraid that I am doing a very poor job of being his wife.

I am lost, and I’m tired of looking for the way. Would I even know if I found it? For now I will sit where I am and wait for something to come, whether it be a deus ex machina or simply a coherent thought, but if you need me, I will be here. Sitting — waiting for something to come.