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An Illustration of the Fact that Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough, Utilizing Birds and a Toothbrush and a Video Game with Vikings:
A Story That is About 96 percent True
I. Birds.
There are sometimes birds inside the Staten Island ferry. They have managed to get there via the Manhattan-side terminal, which is one of those buildings that seems to have been designed as a bird trap--low, wide open doors lead to a large, sunlit atrium with plenty of windows near the ceiling. Birds wander in and feel like they are still outside. When they want to leave, they simply fly up. They run into windows. They try again and again. It never occurs to them to fly towards the low, dark part of the room where the doors are, because birds usually fly into the sky. When the ferry comes, a door opens, and more light comes in from outside, and the birds try to escape that way. Unfortunately, they just wind up on the ferry. They are birds, and they want to be free, but the only place they can go next, because they don't know any better, is Staten Island.
I do not frequent the Staten Island ferry. I was given plenty of time to analyze the bird situation on it the day before Valentine's day in 2009, on my way to my friend Marie's wedding. With me that day was Michael, my then-boyfriend, and he was in a bad mood and he was ignoring me. This happened a lot.
Michael and I have the kind of relationship story that could not be told in full by a best man making a speech at our hypothetical wedding. He would have to gloss over most of it. On-again-off-again is shorthand and factually accurate but it does not do justice to the bizarre brands of pain we have inflicted on one another. We are both whimsical and capricious and we came together in our most dramatic and unhinged years, immediately post-college. We have both wished we met at another time, because then we might have had a real chance. Our ghosts from then still make things hard. I love him so much that I dry heave.
Michael gets in silent moods and he does not like to explain why. I hate silent moods and I hate not knowing why. We arrived at the ferry terminal after forty-five minutes of mysterious mostly-silence, and I was left to look at the birds and become very sad for them. There were the usual New York City pigeons and sparrows and a few more exotic specimens. I worried enough about the birds in the terminal, but I remain inconsolable about the birds on the boat, who got on the boat thinking they were finally free, but ended up trapped in an even smaller space with even less light and an even slimmer chance of escape. On the boat, I sat next to Michael, who crossed his arms and sighed, and I thought about how I could have brought anyone else I know to the wedding and I would have had a companion who would speak to me on the Staten Island ferry. I began to have maudlin, blurry thoughts about how I was like the birds and how Michael was like the Staten Island ferry: That I was at first stuck in a place that I did not know was a trap, and then stuck in a place that was even worse. At least I know how to get out, I thought. I looked at Michael, who had closed his eyes. We got back together almost a year ago and I thought it would finally be perfect, that he was the end, that he was my way to stop having to live a detestable chick lit life of horrible internet dates and stupid weepings about being the least lovable person in the world. But he was not an escape. The only place I was going was Staten Island, figuratively and literally. I considered nudging him and informing him of all these things, but it seemed rash, and besides, I love him. I examined my fingernails and bit a cuticle, hard.
II. Toothbrush
At work there is Justin. He is my friend. We fumed together over low bonuses in the room that is supposed to be a shower, and once, in a mostly-empty supply closet, I attended to him while he cried over his own breakup with a man in Scotland. He comes in and asks me how I am. I am in the mood to fool myself. "Oh, I'm fine!" I reply, my tone causing melanomas with its sunniness. I tell him that we decided to just be kind to each other and it will be just like we are together but without the fear of breaking up, and without sex. "And we hardly ever have sex anymore, anyway, so I won't even notice," I say. He looks at me as though I am a volcano that is due to spew lava at any moment. "Really," I say. "I'm fine. It will be fine. It will mostly be the same."
It is not mostly the same. I visit Michael a few days later and we watch Lost on his computer. This is the same. We cuddle a little bit and murmur monosyllabic nonsense words to each other. This is the same. The differences arise when I leave. He no longer wheedles at me to spend the night. He no longer decides to come home with me. He no longer walks me to the bus stop and kisses me goodbye as I am stepping onto the bus. He no longer even walks me downstairs to the front door. He opens the apartment door for me and kisses me on the forehead and says he will see me later. It is very cold and windy outside and I bawl the entire way to the bus stop. I arrive at the bus stop and stand in the corner of the shelter. A curly-haired fat man in grey sweatpants waits too. An older woman carrying several shopping bags shows up. She nods and smiles at the fat man but ignores me. They start a conversation. Soon, two hipster girls are there as well, and they compliment the woman on her furry hat, and a moment later, everyone else waiting for the bus is embroiled in a lively conversation. I remain apart, crying, with snot running down my face and into my hair and freezing into vile, stringy globules. I turn to face the corner. I feel like nothing other than Michael's little green toothbrush in my bathroom, never changing position in the toothbrush cup anymore, but always leaning towards the far corner, away from the sink, away from the absent hand that used to grab it, its slant so extreme that its head bows as though mortified at the fact of its abandonment. I have gone to move it a few times, feeling pity for the poor thing, but the futility of the gesture always stops me at the last moment. I imagine that these near-rescues make things even worse.
As my job requires me to do, I go to see the ladies at the bank. The ladies at the bank are my wise men. If fate ever allows me to get married, they should serve proudly as my matrons of honor, because it will be by following their advice that anything good ever happens to me. Of course, I rarely follow their advice. Their names are Mavis and Yat Ling. They wear pearls and brightly colored skirt suits and could be anywhere from twelve to twenty-five years older than me. We speak of new bank accounts and closed bank accounts and an accounting discrepancy in a bank account, and then they ask, delicately as always, why it is that I am crying.
III.Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough
In fifth grade, my four best friends and I used to sing on the school bus. We sang songs we made up and we sang contemporary light radio hits by people like Amy Grant and Paula Abdul. One day, when I was not there, my four friends decided to audition to sing, in the school talent show, "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough" by Patty Smythe (not to be confused with Patti Smith). A dumb, ten-year-old-girl fight about something of such little consequence that nobody remembers it today kept me from joining them. It was even put to a vote, and my four best friends voted me out.
Furious and vindictive, I decided to put together my own, much better, talent show act. Unfortunately, I did not have other friends, and at that age I was too self-conscious to be on stage at school alone. In fifth grade, I felt monstrous in appearance--gawkily skinny, permed, bespectacled, and bucktoothed--and I was socially awkward to the point that my teacher had bullied my parents into taking me for counselling. The only person I could convince to join me was Alexandra, who was a pathological liar and the only girl I considered uglier than myself. She looked like a gopher tortoise. I am not sure why she agreed to be in the talent show with me.
I decided that we would dance. I knew I could dance better than my friends could sing. I had recently won second place in the state of Florida for ballet in the Stars of Tomorrow dance competition. Alexandra did not dance, but I figured I could teach her. Ballet would not hold audience appeal in an elementary school, so I decided we would do a jazz dance to the song "Conga" by Gloria Estefan. We would wear black hotpants and hawaiian shirts tied up above our bare navels and just below our budding gestures towards cleavage. I choreographed the dance, which was rife with moments of Alexandra wiggling in place while I did complicated jumps and turns around her, and we spent hours practicing it in Alexandra's garage. It was not a bad dance. Her mother would sometimes come out and urge us to make the dance more "loose" and move our hips in a sexier way. At the time, this annoyed me, because my dance training did not leave room in my heart for loose, uncounted movements, and because her hip undulations looked idiotic. Looking back, I find her instructions more creepy than annoying.
We auditioned for the talent show. The groups who got in were revealed over the PA system a few days later, with the morning announcements. We did not get in. My singing friends did get in. I was certain that Alexandra and I did get in and that the announcement-reader had simply overlooked our names. I convinced myself and Alexandra and my singing friends that this was true. To their credit, my singing friends were graceful about this whole thing and did not gloat once. I hated them for it.
After school, I dragged Alexandra to the aptly-named Mrs. Butts, the talent show's organizer, so she could apologize to us for the morning announcement-reader's unfortunate mistake. She did no such thing. "Can you double-check the list?" I asked, when she assured us that the announcement-reader did not err. She shook her head, her bloused elbows primly planted on her kitsch-filled desk, and told me that it wouldn't be necessary. "So we really didn't get in?" My voice rose incredulously. "Are you serious?" She said she was serious. I asked her if she could explain why. She shook her head. I told her that she was going to explain why or I wasn't going to leave.
She snorted. "Laura Podolnick," she said, pushing her glasses down over her nose and peering at me over the frames. "You have been making quite a reputation for yourself at this school." This statement, which terrified me, must have been true, because Mrs. Butts had never had me in a class.
I crossed my arms, glared at her, and stood my ground. "We should have gotten in. I am more talented than anyone else who auditioned. I won second place in the state of Florida for ballet. Second place in the whole STATE. It's not fair. You're biased because you don't like me."
"I like you just fine, Miss Podolnick," she said icily.
"You do not," I said. I started to cry. "Look, can you please reconsider? I HAVE to be in the talent show. I don't want anything else in the whole world. Please. I'll do anything." I fell onto my knees. Alexandra, by this time, had retreated to the doorway and was not uttering a sound.
Mrs. Butts rose from her desk and marched over to where I kneeled on the dingy linoleum-tiled floor. "If this is the first time you have not gotten what you've wanted, you have been a very lucky little girl," she said. "Now stand up and go on home."
I didn't really have a choice, so I did.
The talent show incident was certainly not the first time I didn't get what I wanted, but because Mrs. Butts framed it that way, it is the earliest instance I remember of not getting something I wanted very badly. I remained humiliated for a month. I did not go see my friends sing. I sang the song "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough" in the shower for years. I still know all the words. Winning a different talent show the next year, at middle school in Boston, did not ease the pain. I found Alexandra on Facebook. She is a lawyer and she is engaged and she looks more like a gopher tortoise than ever. I did not 'friend' her.
Every time I have a breakup, the phrase "sometimes love just ain't enough" runs in my head. It is terrible. And, of course, it calls to mind the talent show incident, which was weirdly the first time in my life that I was as morose and disconsolate as I always become during a romantic breakup.
IV. Birds
We get off the ferry and the birds remain on board, flying into windows and perched on seats and meandering on the floor, pecking for potato-chip crumbs around the feet of departing eaters. We make our way to the Staten Island Railroad, and Michael warms up a bit. His head rests on my shoulder and I am relieved and think that the day will wind up being okay after all. I leave my thoughts of trapped birds with the trapped birds on the boat. We arrive at the wedding and sit down.
Sometime during the wedding, it dawns on me once and for all that I never want to marry Michael. This is a thought I've entertained before, mostly during fights, but I'd never realized it so suddenly and so finally. I simply do not trust Michael to not get in a mood on our wedding day. I do not trust Michael to show up. And if he did, I do not trust him not to leave me a few years later. The wedding ends and I look at him and he looks at me and I feel as though he had a similar realization. We call a cab to take us to the reception. We are in front of the church. Michael is on the phone with the cab company and behind him is the bridal party and the family of the bride and groom. Everyone is laughing and taking pictures and my friend Marie looks very beautiful and serene and grown up. Michael sits on the curb and rolls his eyes, still on the phone. The contrast is too much for me. "Michael," I say. "What. Is. Wrong. Now."
He explodes. "Nothing is wrong! Leave me alone! Jesus Christ! Stop asking me if something is wrong!" The laughing, joyous people behind us look over. There is a secure, peaceful, happy married couple surrounded by people they love, and then there is me, with Michael, dysfunctional and immature and messy. I am humiliated. I feel that something nebulous has gone terribly wrong in my life and that something else nebulous is very unfair.
The cab comes and tears spill down my face. I am not talking. Michael pokes at me and I give one-word answers and hateful shrugs. We arrive at the reception and we are two hours early. Marie has arranged a happy hour before the reception, to accommodate people who live out of the area and have nowhere else to go between the wedding and the reception. Michael and I are the first and only people there. We are in a large pink room with filled with beautifully set tables. There's a table with coffee and tea in the middle of the room. Michael gets coffee. I sit at a table. He comes to join me. He asks what's wrong. His voice is strained, dangerous.
I tell him. I tell him in the clipped tones of a school principal speaking to a wayward student that I'm mad that he yelled at me and I'm mad about his six-hour-long mood. He sighs, more with disgust than resignation, and says he is not sure he wants to be in this relationship. This is a line he delivers regularly, pretty much any time we have an argument. Usually, it puts me into please-love-me mode and my desperation, my fear of being abandoned, my remembrance of how much worse everything in the world was without him, keeps us together. It is bad. But this time, I reply in the same clipped tones, as though I am delivering a punishment, "Well, I'm sure I don't."
He narrows his eyes. He asks if I want to just do the reception and discuss it later. I should say yes, but something in me can't do it. Something in me says "No. We have to do it now." So we do.
We hurl flaming arrows at each other across our newly carved chasm. I tell him he is not a talented actor and it would behoove him to find a real career. He tells me he hates me and he calls me a cunt. I tell him he'll never have anyone half as good as I am. He says he's had people ten times as good as I am. He calls me a spoiled brat. I tell him he's a psychopath and an alcoholic and that no amount of therapy will fix him and that he needs medication or to be committed. I cite everything crazy he has ever done. I correct his grammar. I tell him he's stupid. I do not mean most of these things, but the misery and hurt that swarm in my brain form these alien thoughts and spew them out sans permission.
He storms out of the reception. I follow him. He is outside, calling a cab, his other hand in his coat , like Napoleon. I grab his phone and tell him he can't leave me here. He says I can come with him, but he's going. It is about twenty degrees out. My coat is inside. I'm shaking with fury. We throw more flaming arrows and launch several cannonballs. Twenty minutes later and the cab has not come. Other people are starting to arrive. I am sobbing. He yells at me. I yell at him. He calls another cab. The bridal party arrives. I stumble inside to try to find Marie and explain what happened, but she's not there. I wander around the reception hall, weeping, unable to find her, and eventually I am lost in a maze of maroon-carpted hallways. I pause to reorient myself and I feel like a bird again, and like a bird, I go towards the light. The light is the room where the reception is. Marie is not there. I find her husband instead, and ask him to give her the message. He takes me into the hall and tells me it is okay. He is very nice, but it's not okay.
Back outside with Michael. Apparently the second cab came and did not see us, and it left. He calls another one. We sit side by side on a bench. He asks if I can pay for the cab, his eyes so big and sad and lovely that I almost say yes and beg him to love me. But I don't. I announce that I am not paying for shit anymore. I emphasize the word "shit." I never use "shit" as a non-fecal noun, but I am broken. In the cab, we have to pull over so Michael can go to an ATM. He has the cab drive us back to the Staten Island Railroad station, rather than all the way to Brooklyn or even to the ferry. By the time we are waiting for the train, we are holding each other and crying. Dying soldiers belong to no army. I tell him how much I wish it could have worked. How when I was little I sometimes wished for things so hard that the sheer force of my indomitable will would seem to form them out of thin air. How sometimes it felt like that was what our relationship was like. I rest my head on his shoulder and he holds my hand and I wonder if some of the birds that are stuck on the ferry don't really think they are stuck. I wonder of some of them chose to be on the ferry, maybe because it was warm and less scary than flying free.
V. Vikings
There is a wonderful game on the internet that involves freeing vikings trapped in ice and helping them get back to their longboat. Here is the link: http://www.nitrome.com/games/icebreaker/. I cannot recommend this game highly enough.
The day after we broke, I played the vikings game and sometimes sent Michael long, sad emails. The vikings game is nice because it gets harder, but not evenly so. There will be a few easy levels that you solve quickly, and then a very hard one that takes half a day. I also felt like a good samaritan every time I saved a little viking and his friend bopped him with a hammer to free him from his ice. The whoop he let out might as well have been a personal thank you note, reminding me that somewhere in the world, someone appreciated my persistence. It did not matter much that this someone was merely a collection of pixels. For a few seconds, I was a benevolent, white-glad norse god casting thunderbolts that helped and did not hinder.
Michael asked me to meet up with him on Sunday, two days after we broke. I agreed to meet him in a park. We met. The breakup felt more like a no-fault disaster that we had both experienced, like a tornado, than like a decision we both made. He cried. He said he was sorry. I said it was okay. He wondered, his voice breaking, tears spilling down his face and forming perfect droplets on his wool coat, if we could try again. I said we could not. I did not say that it was because I knew this breakup would happen over and over again, in the same way, for the same reasons, for the rest of our lives, because it already has happened too many times. I said we could be kind to each other and act like we still loved each other, because we do, and I find it dishonest to act in a way that is not in accordance with the truth. I petted his head as I delivered this rationalization.
I agree that this is a copout. I defend my position on long, messy breakups--that they are good and I will have them--less through logic and more through a plea for understanding. I stand on a soapbox in a town square and ask you to consider my plight. My roommate handed me a very silly book about breakups: "It's Called A Breakup Because It Is Broken," with the caveat that it is a very silly book but has some good advice and might be distracting. I read it and it had advice for people who are not me. It wanted me not to contact Michael for sixty days. It wanted me to put all his things in a box. It wanted me to keep a journal about how I'm doing. I am doing very badly. I am not putting that toothbrush in a box, and when I am forced to ignore someone for a long time, I do not forget and heal--I stalk and imagine. I tell people I will get over Michael in the exact same amount of time whether I hang out with him every day or whether I never see him again. It is not out of sight, out of mind for me. My mind needs no inspiration. It is tenacious. It will spend days and days trying to save the same viking, and it will not rest until the viking is in his longboat, emitting a very grateful whoop. I am a Norse god and I could ignore Michael for eternity and not go a minute without imagining his face. There are special clauses for Norse gods. Breakup books are not written for us. We do not go by the same rules.
Those are my excuses, anyway. I am not sure whether they are actually true or just possibly true. The thing that I know is true is that seeing Michael hurts, but it hurts a lot less than not seeing him, so I do it.
VI. Toothbrush
The toothbrush is in a slightly different place this morning than it was last night. Maybe my toothbrush or my roommate's toothbrush bumped against it. This relieves me.
Michael still has pictures of me in his room, hanging on the wall. There is a framed post-it note I left him this summer. It reads, in my scrawly, boyish handwriting "Hie! I love my MOE! Lauro!" Somehow, we had taken to calling each other moe, mo, boe, and bo. These words can function as prefixes and suffixes as well: bolove, lovebo, molove, sexbo, etc. We also say coe and lub and squische and squirte and vipscoo and combab and remis and fakslan. We switch t to d and a hard c or a k to g and f to v. We basically voice unvoiced consonants. I tend towards twin languages in relationships, but none had ever gotten so elaborate as mine with Michael. I take this, as well as the fact that we can both vibrate our eyes and that we both tested "dirty" on a sense of humor test while all our friends tested "clean," as evidence that maybe we are meant to be, anyway. There is more evidence, but these things always struck me as the most poignant.
VII. Birds
On the way back from the wedding, the Staten Island ferry is devoid of birds. Maybe they are sleeping. It is dark out. I teeter on stiletto heels as I pace for awhile, too sad to sit down.
Part of me is relieved, but only a part. Most of me is inside out.
VIII. Vikings
I beat the vikings game last night. Michael is playing it now, too. I might start over from level one, because my life feels emptier now, and I cannot bear it.
IX. Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough
I address this to Michael. In 2005, in our first round, we broke up on July 13th (though we were back together in a week) because you decided you could never really love me. I took it very hard and began writing a story about it. I never finished the story, but it was supposed to be like this one, albeit a little more whimsical. It was going to be called "I want to know what love is and I Want You To Show Me: A Plea to a Non-Lover, A Non-Friend, and the Guy Named Kenny Whose Birthday It Was At the Office Today." Here is an excerpt that I deem relevant now:
Non-lover.
We are sitting by the Hudson river on a Wednesday afternoon, in a silence that I want to believe--that I have almost convinced myself to believe--is comfortable and indicative of our peace and mutual deep understanding, and not just that our connection is characterized by static and discord. Not just that we really don't have much to say.
"I am not in love with you," you say finally, almost deadpan in your seriousness, your complete and terrifying emotionless monotone that sounds the same whether you are being funny or being sincere.
The thing is, I'm not in love with you either. That is what I think and what I say, but it's a defensive move. The real thing is that I am not sure. I can argue it either way, just like I can with everything else.
There are things I love about you. There are also things I hate about you, things that annoy me and make me wonder why I am your girlfriend. Was your girlfriend.
The last time I was in love, there was no question that it was love. A wise person may or may not have once said that if you have to ask, it's not. If that's true, then I'm not in love with you.
Later that night:
Last week, maybe the week before, you left an undershirt at my house. You left it in my bed. I knew it was there, and I rummaged for it last night before I went to sleep, and I hugged it and smelled it and smelled you and I cried and cried. I felt myself grasping for dear life on some sort of skin that you managed to slip out of while we were holding each other, like a trapped snake in a cartoon. That at one moment, I was hugging something big and warm and alive and the next minute, I was hugging a hollow and small shell, a piece of white cotton you left at the battle scene to distract me while you got away. That was a sensation I could not handle, so I put your shirt over my pillow, like a pillowcase, and cried into a chest that was too soft and cold to be yours. It still wasn't realistic enough, because you are not just a limbless torso, so I arranged the rest of my pillows into the shape of your body--legs, arms, head--and weepily begged it to adore me until 3 am, when the eight sleeping pills I took to calm down finally kicked in and I passed out, the pillow standing in for your right arm cradling my head and bending sharply to rest like your hand on my waist.
And I am left to wonder: Of what is such mourning indicative, if not love? Maybe it's not the kind of love that lasts a lifetime. I never thought about marrying you and spending the rest of my life with you. I'll admit that freely, and even a little savagely, as a small poke to the ribs of someone who beat me senseless with "I'm not in love with you." But I so want to be with you right now. I want to be with you more than anything else. Back at the Hudson, you said that you said that you loved the time we spent together, and we could still have that, but we could both date other people. The idea of you dating other people--the idea of you thinking about dating other people, taking other people home with you and kissing them and touching them and looking up at them with your lovely dark brown eyes that I used to think were black until I stared into them wanting to know all of you--is an idea that makes me break down crying on the subway when I realize that you might be able to fall in love with anyone in that car except me.
The thing that strikes me about this excerpt is that our issues have changed. We no longer doubt we love each other. We cry about loving each other in parks and on boats and while waiting for cabs to come take us from the wedding where we broke up. In 2005, we were younger and more able to slip in and out of relationships and quasi-relationships and non-relationships without consequence or care. Now everything we do has an incredible weight. Your head is heavier as it rests on my stomach and my hand is heavier as it rests on your face. It is as though with years we also pick up mass. What was once a feather is now a block of lead. So it carries great gravity when I say that I love you.
In 2005, I did not fathom that two people could love each other this much, have no operational barriers like distance, and still not work. It did not seem possible. Perhaps what has happened is that we have become too heavy for one another to hold. Perhaps we make each other heavy, because we carry not only each other but everything that has happened between us. Ghosts are very heavy in 2009. Still, it does not seem logical, and as I say the word "logical" you roll your eyes. The phrase "sometimes love just ain't enough" sweeps around my head like a banner held by a running fool making laps of my brain, but it is just too hard to believe. The thing that keeps me going is the caveat of "sometimes." If sometimes love just ain't enough, it follows that sometimes it is. I wish more than anything in the world that this second possibility were the case for us. But I have become accustomed now to not getting what I want, and this is probably a wish nobody can grant, not even a benevolent Norse god. Still, I will wish it anyway, because what else am I going to do.
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