writer

She was right.

This sucks, he writes.
He writes, I love you.
Please don’t feel like you can’t change your mind.
He writes, Think about staying, e.
Think about staying.
He writes: Fuck You.
Give me my fucking key back and..Get…The Fuck…Out.

She’s moving back to Brooklyn. It didn’t work out. What a mess, she thinks. She needs to find a place to live. Can’t believe she gave up her rent-controlled apartment. So glad she kept her job. Fuck. She needs to find a place. She needs to find a mover. She needs to tell her boss. She should tell him after she has things sorted. Christ, she thinks: so embarrassed. Didn’t she just make a heart-felt plea to work from Connecticut? She asked everyone to get behind her like she knew what she wanted. She just asked.

And Steve won’t let her say goodbye to Corrine.

A baby, just 6-months old, she held Corrine in her arms. Baked her first birthday cupcake, watched as she dove in with both hands, purple frosting becoming the first blush and lipstick Corrine would wear. She picked out Corrine’s second Halloween costume, painted on her whiskers, and watched Corrine become a black cat, circling her brand new tail, mesmerized by her own transformation. I have a tail, Er-in. I have a tail! She taught Corrine to say Peace Out, Er-in!, snapping fingers in a wild Z; taught her to say Obama and held her hand as they walked the neighborhood; listened as Corrine ‘counted’ the yard signs: One O-ba-ma, ‘nuther O-ba-ma….there’s a ‘nuther ‘bama, Er-in! She dressed that two-and-a-half-year-old-miniature-self in leopard skin stretch pants and hot-pink patent-leather Chucks, and caught Corrine when she jumped, without notice, from couches and stairways and beds, yelling SUUUU-PER-Cor-ry! Corrine, not at all understanding that she couldn’t actually fly.

She’d never be the one to break the news.

She’s moving to a new house. That’s what Steve’s told Corrine. And he won’t let her say goodbye. My daughter, he says. Who you’re abandoning, he says.

He’s keeping Taco-The-Cat-That-Fetches. Taco, who would trot back, string in mouth, and patiently wait, tail twitching, for her to throw the string down the wooden stairs one more time. She loves that cat. She fucking loves that cat. That cat would climb into her mouth just to get a little closer to her.

The thing was, she had already told her best friend, Jake, walking down 14th Street. It was exactly three years ago. Right on the corner of First Avenue, as they waited for the walk symbol, which was weird because when did they ever wait for the walk symbol? Never.

She told him: He’s Trouble.

Trouble, she said.

When I come back to you in two years, crying, she said, don’t feel sorry for me.

She actually said that, for Christ’s sake. She should listen to herself. And: Sooner. Right away. Jake shouldn’t listen to her, though, because now she needs him to feel sorry for her a little.

But she was right. Even in the timing. So: she’s got that.

She was right.

Sean Penn.

It was because of Sean Penn. It was because of a lot of things and then it was because of Sean Penn. Because Sean Penn looked so different in Milk and she couldn’t believe it and so she looked up photographs and compared different Sean Penns. That’s why. The difference between his massiveness in Mystic River and his frailness in Milk. How he took up so much space and then took up so little. She thought: That. Is. Amazing.

She was laughing and looking at Sean Penns on her computer. Hey, she said, Check. This. Out! Sean Penn looks SOoo different.

And Thomas turns to her, and—just like this—he says: Jesus Christ, Erin. I’m SICK of hearing about fucking Sean Penn!

I don’t fu-cking CARE. That’s what he said. Just like that. And stormed out of the room.

Corrine was at her grandmother’s and they just got home from seeing Milk, so she swears she couldn’t have been talking about Sean Penn for long, maybe a half hour—a half hour off-and-on—max. It wasn’t days or anything. She doesn’t even have that kind of attention span.

He hated her, she thought. Or at least he hated when she was happy or excited. That’s what she realized, staring at Sean Penns after he left the room: she realized something about her excitement made him miserable.

It struck her: Maybe someone else would be excited with her. Or happy for her. Some other person might like her.

That’s what she thought, staring at Sean Penns after he left the room.

This is making my hair fall out.

She showed up at her stylist’s shop with a bottle of product. She sat down, placed the bottle on his stand, and told her stylist very directly: “This is making my hair fall out.”

She wanted a different product that did exactly the same things, except not that. She had really loved it; the way it kept her hair in place, the way it wasn’t too heavy or oily and didn’t make her hair too stiff.  Her stylist sat down on his doctor-like stool and studied the ingredients on the back of the bottle. It felt like ages had passed when he finally looked up at her, held up the bottle, and said: “I don’t think this is the culprit; a lot of things can make your hair fall out.”  He began to list “a lot of things,” like diet and stress and the-change-of-seasons, continuing on as he cut her hair, with other-reason-after-possible-reason, until she was fully annoyed.

She had only recently learned about sulfate-whatevers and parabin-whatnots, words that she had seen on the packaging of products announcing they were “Free Of!” thus making suspect everything she’d used before, all her bottles now potential-carriers. Truthfully, she didn’t know much about it all, but the more her hair continued to fall out and the more she searched for a reason, the more she was convinced of this product’s guilt, a product she used often, and was not “free of” anything in particular.

Now, there she sat, watching her stylist trim the ends of the long brown hair that remained listening to his never-ending list.

They had not occurred to her, those other questions. The ones that led to other solutions. That required other actions. But of course, she thought, settling into the news.  If only it were all contained in one small bottle, so easily swapped for another. If only she could hold the problem and solution at once in the palm of her hand.

Bare-Knuckle Dating

It’s like the world is one big boxing ring and dating is like a match with infinity-bouts of infinity-rounds of infinity-minutes.

You don’t even know what fight you’re in. You just go from one to the next.

At some point you notice you’ve got a swollen right hand and a left fist you can barely close. The other guy is five for five, all KOs, and all you can think is: Keep ‘em off balance, win. Win and you can get out of the ring for good.

But the thing is: You’re not Sugar Ray Leonard, 1976, photos of the ones you love taped to your socks.

My journey has ended. My dream is fulfilled. This is bare-knuckle boxing. No one lifts the rope up for you when you enter the ring. And no one touches gloves with you before the fighting begins. There are no girls, increasingly less-dressed as the night advances, girls wearing platform heels, circling the ring, holding up cards that mark the moment. There’s no one to let you know where you are in the midst of it all, or to give you just a minute of rest. Instead, somehow when you arrive you’re in the middle of the ring and it’s the middle of the fight and you’re already a bit dazed.

The fact is, your ring work isn’t epic. You think I’ll probably kiss the canvas. You’re not even in shape, or not as in shape as the other guy. There are no weight classes; half the time he’s twice as big as you. There are no coaches or trainers; no one to help set the strategy or cheer you on. No one yelling Gloves up! Gloves UP! or What did we practice? Stay steady! when you’re feeling the pain.

There’s no cornerman waiting to offer you water, to reduce the swelling, to stop the inevitable bleeding. And there’s certainly not the third man in the ring to call out the long series of obvious and intentional fouls, the head-butts and low blows.

You can’t go the distance, and there’s no one there to throw in the towel.

Keep ‘em off balance, win.
I’m finished…I’ve fought my last fight.
My journey has ended.
My dream is fulfilled. – Sugar Ray Leonard, 1976