ShatteredButStillWhole

Lady Tomboy

Throughout the typical ups and downs of these past couple months, there’s been a theme of thoughts, that have pulled along with them a stream of targeted memories.

How in 4th grade when we were studying the middle ages and we had a series of projects we needed to do to become knighted by our teacher. We got to chose our knighted name, using Sir or Lady, our first name or last name or both. We were told to come up with our name and provide it at the ceremony. I can still feel my surprise that I was the only girl who didn’t use “Lady,” instead requesting Sir K (my first name). I can feel my combination of pride and uneasiness. And confusion. From everything we’d learned, it was the men who got to make important decisions and go out and have fun. Preferring “sir” over “lady” seemed obvious.

How in 5th grade I dressed up as Fred Astaire for Halloween, delighting in tying my bow tie (I’d only known how to tie a tie before that, from years of playing dress up in my father’s clothes). Complete with topper and black cane far taller than me, I tap danced across the stage in the school Halloween parade. It was with a similar blend of confusion, dis-ease, and pride that I accepted compliments from scads of mothers and strange looks from my peers.

How in 6th grade, when opportunities for public cross-dressing were closing down now that we were too old for Halloween parades, I found my venue in the sufficiently vague science project. I researched the history of the radio, created my own radio that received a christian station and a sports station if you were in the right place and had enough patience, and immersed myself in the life of Mr. Hertz. We each had a twenty minute slot to present our science projects to the class. Before my turn, I dodged out of the classroom and into the bathroom where I changed into what I had decided Mr. Hertz was likely to wear, with my usual touch of my father’s old ties and suit jackets. I stood in front of the class I eagerly explained the science of the radio in my over-sized masculine get-up. By the end of the presentation I was sniffing back tears, because my radio was only picking up the christian station, which I could tell because of my hours spent listening to it, but the signal was so fuzzy it was hard to hear particular words and I had failed to impress my peers and teacher. My only solace was my dapper outfit.

These examples are just a few out of a lifetime. Memories gradually shifted from the adorable tomboyish girl who liked to match her father and play dress up in his clothes to the more confusing and strange teenager who wore a bowler hat to her junior prom and asked her second high school boyfriend to put on one of her skirts before having sex with him.

It’s not as though I had no idea this gender-bending was a theme in my development. But more and more, I wonder about my parents’ reactions, or lack thereof. Because when I try to remember their reactions to my mannish qualities, I can’t. I remember my mother telling me what a flirt I am – how I’ve flirted with men of all ages since toddlerhood. I remember my father teasing me for my girly and later feminine qualities. A recent phone call with him helped me process these seemingly contradictions.

It was his birthday, so we talked for almost a full 8 minutes. He told me that his wife gave him an “everything tool” for his birthday that was a miniature version of his old one and could fit inside his pocket along with his cell phone. He’s always had an everything tool – a slightly enlarged Swiss Army knife with every tool one could need. Growing up, I relished the times he let me use it.

When I reached around 14 years, just a year after my rabbi pronounced me a woman on my bat mitzvah, I hit a second rite of passage. My father decided to upgrade his everything tool and gave me his old one. I was over the moon. I carried it everywhere. The thrill of having just the right tool for the job was potent, and somewhat stereotypically masculine. There was a time when, still closeted but no longer to myself, I was teased ruthlessly when I busted out my everything tool in a social gathering to fix a lose screw on a chair. After that, I didn’t carry it around as often, but since have gradually reintroduced it to my life.

So, when he told me about his new everything tool and I shared in his excitement, I then told him that I still use his old everything tool. His first response was, “Oh really? Do you keep the knife sharp?” A bit taken aback, and nervous that I give the right answer, which I knew existed, but I didn’t know what it was, I replied “Um, well, sometimes, I guess.”

“Hah. See that’s the difference between men and women right there. Women don’t know to keep their knives sharp.” With instinctive indignance I replied, “Well, I don’t use the knife part that often. I use the screw drivers and bottle openers and other parts more often.” He’s not one to back down. “Even with kitchen knives, women just don’t sharpen them often enough. This is just one of those things that shows the difference -” “Pa,” I interrupted, “I think most women don’t carry everything tools.”

I knew I’d killed the conversation, though at 7 1/2 minutes I’d done pretty well. There was a silence. Then there was his standard ending line, “Well, I guess neither of us have anything left to say, do we.” He was no longer comfortable and the conversation ended. I hung up the phone and laughed to myself for a while. Only my father could feminize my use of his old everything tool. I relayed this story to a lesbian friend I saw later that day. She looked at me with sorrow and expressed her sympathy that he couldn’t handle my “masculine of center” gender expression, inextricable from my sexual orientation. I continued to laugh and she mused that it was good I could see the humor in it.

I’d never seen anything but humor in it. But, I suppose, there must be something between my reality and his voiced perception. There could be any number of things, discomfort, unfamiliarity, fear, rejection. In the tangled ball of twine that is my relationship to my father and my relationship to my own gender and sexuality, I think I found an end to follow.

Home

Sunday was one of those days when I could genuinely say that I am delighted to be alive. I felt that joy and relief so intensely that I didn’t even express it, because to describe how much I wanted to be alive on Sunday would require an understanding of how much I didn’t want to be alive at other junctures.

It was the dance competition in a world so small that I fear using many specifics without outing this blog. So I will call it home. When I was at home, I saw other people reflecting back at me so many qualities I never thought I’d see in another, let alone really understand, about myself. I saw other dykes dancing out their Astaire-like dreams with his grace, style and charm in their confidently construed versions of feminine. There was even another one with an insulin pump hidden artfully beneath her tails.

At home, I was part of a team who loved me for exactly who I am. They expressed concern when my blood sugar dropped and I collapsed in rehearsal before we went on – as much for concern for me as a human as for me as the team soloist. Some I loved like sisters, others a more maternal quality. They didn’t tiptoe around my differences, for some they shared and those they didn’t, they celebrated. As the smallest, youngest and spryest, I was affectionately given nicknames like “baby dyke” and “little star.” We talked about when we’d learned how to tie a tie as we made our windsor knots for the leads’ costumes. And I didn’t stand out for stating that I was about 6 years old when I persuaded my father to let me tie his tie for him. Sharon said her father taught her as a teen so that she would be a useful wife for her future husband. We were all misunderstood, but at home it was simple.

To combine the holistic acceptance and appreciation with the sheer joy of dance, the adrenaline of competition and the high of performance attention was ecstasy, pure and simple. So many psychiatrists in the hospital and the partial program afterwards told me “you’re lucky you’re alive right now” in a tone that felt intended to make me shrink back in shame and regret. Instead, I felt unlucky, stuck, and irritated. Those feelings do appear from time to time. But at home, I felt lucky to be alive and next time I’m homesick I’ll know which place it is for which I yearn.

Vomiting

Isn’t it funny how far we can travel, how fast we can go, yet we can’t escape ourselves?

Some turns take us closer or farther away, but escape is impossible.

Vomiting is like a u-turn.

I vomit and I think about how grateful I am for the logistical complexity of the act. Where will it go? Will the receptacle spatter? If yes, how can I wipe off my face? Will I have access to mouthwash, for after? Can I take my abort cocktail of benzos and compazine or will they come back up, wasting perfectly good drugs? Without these logistics, how would I have handled the trauma? I can only ease through it on the occasional road trip, trunk loaded up and ready to process.

Because I can go down all of those roads, most of which fork off into side streets, but I’ll still come back to me, deep within. To feeling ultimately alone. I don’t like vomiting when other people are there, even if they’re medical providers or loved ones, because I still feel alone and the contrast of peoples’ presences just highlights the feeling.

I remember when I was worried I was developing gastroparesis. When I was experiencing early satiety and just starting to lose weight. Like it was the baked potato that just came up, I remember my first undigested, gen-u-ine, gastroparesis upchuck. I had made my popular rice pasta and spinach with thai peanut sauce dish (I hope no one googles that recipe and happens upon this tale, a cruel sequel) and began to feel nauseated and hot. Sitting atop the toilet seat, wringing my hair in my hands, I heaved up the meal into the bathtub. K and I stared at it. I was drawn, perversely, to its similarity to how it looked in the pan.

I can picture it liked that baked potato, like it was minutes ago, because that’s what gastroparesis looks like. It looks like that rice pasta dish. And it looks like that post-in note I still have, the one where I jotted down my notes from the doctor’s call post-pathology that reads, “it seems like the gut is not moving.” And it looks like those pink plastic tubs that they gave me when I walked into the ER even without voicing my complaint in this major urban hospital, I’d accrued so many frequent flier miles.

Body Surfing

I realized I would be alone this evening.

I had my apartment to clean, emails to respond to, holiday cards to write, and dinner to cook. There was plenty to do, but I had the feeling that I needed company. So I found an old episode of This American Life to listen to as I worked. I didn’t have energy to go to the Castro for the night, I told my friend I couldn’t because I had to do a client home visit early tomorrow morning. It was one of those cozy evenings – or evenings that could be perfectly calm and peaceful if it weren’t for my mind and its errant urges.

And I’m lying in bed at the end of a successful evening – healthy and safe. I won’t have many more alone like this once I move in to my new home with my dear friend, C, as a housemate. I’m feeling grateful for the ability to lie here with Bailey, the stuffed bear S-J gave me after my hernia surgery. We nuzzle noses and cozy into the covers, knowing that the better our ability to lie here at peace and alone the better our ability to find peace, true peace, with others.

I’d told myself I should hold off on romance until I didn’t need it as a crutch. And it’s calling me now. I’m not quite where I wanted to be when I found it, but I can’t withhold myself from the healing powers of people. S said to me the other day, “of course you’re an extrovert because you love people and they feed you.” It’s true, they do, like juice for a low, they relentlessly bring me up. Running into an old dance partner at the grocery store. Dinner with a co-worker and her neighbors. Meeting a client’s family for a Saturday morning assessment while orienting a new study volunteer. Going to a dance class. Dance team practice. Group facilitation. I feel like I’m on a continuous body surf; kept going by people, all of whom inspire me and fill me with joy.

I don’t want to need them to stay afloat. But it’s okay to need them to pick me up here and there. This balance, another one to strive for.

Raging Guilt

Traveling to the east coast to see old friends and family routinely takes me on an emotional journey along the zoom out trail of my life’s trajectory. How much has happened in a year, how much pain and love I feel connected to Philadelphia. I’m not sure where to start here. I ache to write, I yearn for some catharsis, I know there’s too much inside of me right now.

I’m thinking a lot about rage. I’ve had some long talks with a couple of old friends recently who are going through tough times. They both seemed to be experiencing a lot of unnecessary guilt and the tragic oft female phenomenon of turning rage inwards. I’ve been working on this in myself for years. I’ve known for a long time that my self-destruction is, at its core, unexpressed and inexpressible outward rage. The chasm between knowing and internalizing still feels too vast for a successful leap. I still struggle with pulling hair, micromanaging my chronic illnesses the best that I can, and offering myself up like a sacrificial animal for use as needed; sexual, social, emotional, practical.

I write to find out if I’ll read it back to myself and get closer to my true self. To the forgiveness and self-love I preach about and search for, endlessly. When I think of rage I instantly feel fear. Fear of the repercussions of its expression and fear of a loss of control.

I used to climb our kitchen counters to be able to reach the dishes and food in the cupboards. During dinner one evening, I jumped up onto the blue tiled counter-top to pull down a glass so that I could have water along side my glass of milk. For some reason my sister, giggling mischievously, pulled on my feet sticking out from my perch in the kitchen and laughed victoriously as I came tumbling down. I shrieked out of surprise and preparedness for a sisterly battle.

My father grew furious. Red in the face, he yelled at my sister about the danger she put me in. I remember feeling guilty – a sense of impending trouble as a result of his violent defense of me. Violent, because next he led her upstairs where he spanked her hard as he yelled that she better never do this again. I knew his spankings all too well, and I could hear everything, so I knew this was a particularly harsh one. I sat at our dining room table with my mother as we listened. I felt terrified for my sister and myself, and guilty as though responsible for the series of events.

My mother looked at me in away made me feel rebuked, though I cannot know how much that was a projection (even in my private recalling this, I have a need to defend her?). She said in a scary voice under her breath, “all of the neighbors can hear this. Someone might well call the police on him.”

I can still feel myself knowing that this too would be entirely my fault. My sister was getting beaten because my father wanted to punish her for hurting: me and he would get locked up for this same reason: me. My mother was upset that this was happening so audibly in our city row house: me.  And he loved me because I had that effect on people, my mother told me I was charming and flirtatious with men: me. She said he loved me best: me. She told me I acted as an “instigator” so I could have him to myself: me.

And this whole ordeal is sealed in my senses’ memories. I know because of how viscerally I feel myself being there, so small, scared, and guilt-ridden.

When I try to think about how to access my rage I instinctively feel guilt, instead. And when I try to think about why, this memory flashes through my muscles. I don’t think I need external validation, though that is what it often feels like would help. I think I’m still waiting (why so passive a verb?) to feel that I deserve the self-preservation to which such rage might permit me access.

Psych Ward Time

I studied for my LMSW exam in spare moments during my 10 day experience at the psych ward, as a patient. My friends from the hospital sat next to me pleading for “another one.”

“Okay, do you want a diagnostic question or a medication question?”

“Let’s do another diagnosis one, those are fun.”

I studied by reading the questions aloud as my peers and I took turns responding. We were all usually correct. And as a result felt an unsettling combination of satisfaction and fury. “You mean, that’s all you have to answer to get licensed? I could pass this test! Are the questions on the test really that easy? No wonder the social workers around here …!”

We were, again, reminded of the ultimate irony of this place. The staff, in their eternal striving to keep control over camp looney, had to rely on a sense that they were in more control and had more sanity than us, the patients. The delicate balance of order relied on the distinction between patients and providers, and order was often lost.

When someone refused to sit for his or her morning vitals before eating breakfast, or knocked a chair over in a sprint to the last cookie on the lunch tray, or a fight broke out over which TV channel to watch, the Mental Health Aids ran to the rescue.  Sometimes the naughty patient would be told that s/he would not be allowed to go on the daily outing to the picnic tables or the hospital gift shop. Or worse, that they would have to sit next to an MHA throughout a meal. So the patient would laugh, as the staff was routinely too frazzled to ever take us out anyway. And sitting next to the MHA was much more a punishment for them than for the patient.

And in this fashion, we reduced each other to more and more mundane levels. In this world that was small each morning as we awoke, tiny by lunch time, and infinitesimal by bedtime, one didn’t need to do much to create a stir.  A patient tattled on her roommate’s stash of contraband candy under her mattress prompting a search of all bedrooms on the ward. Another threw a tantrum on weigh-in Sunday, refusing to be weighed because she was “not in the eating disorder unit.” The tantrum led to chair throwing and a swift trip to the isolation room complete with injectable benzodiazepines and arm restraints. I quickly found kinship with Julia who was watching this happen from a bird’s eye view and laughing. Laughing at the common insanity, and laughing that we were part of it, and laughing because we were all the same.

At the end of each day, we were supposed to have a closing unit meeting. The one time this actually happened, a young blonde woman exuding newness and fear led the patients in a bedtime gratitude exercise. We went around in a circle and were instructed to say one thing that went well or that we were grateful for in the course of that day. Her over-eagerness was a dead giveaway to her scarcely masked terror of our crazies. When it was Amanda’s turn, she said she was happy that she did her laundry that day. “That’s your high point? I hate doing my laundry!” Newbie exclaimed incredulously. Kim came to Amanda’s rescue, “well duhh, you’re not the one locked up with manic depression.” We all scoffed, she was told to study her psych textbooks some more, and nonverbally told that the meeting was over as we left to invade the kitchen in case there was any ice cream left from bedtime snack.

Time moves differently inside a psych ward. The sameness, the routines, and the general lack of activity made days drag on. Yet the boredom of captivity lent itself to socializing such that bonds between patients were swift, and close relationships expedited. When you first walk into the ward, you reek of newness. You’re carrying some belongings, you look traumatized and scared, and you avoid eye contact with the patients. Simultaneously, the patients eye you, wondering if you’ll join their click, be a loner, start some interesting chaos, or have some annoying paranoia or delusion that will disrupt our sleep or board games.

But soon enough you’ll have changed into something more comfortable and fall into line at the meds window before a meal.  You won’t want to believe it yet — but your willingness to wait in a long line of crazy people to talk to an overworked, sharp-tongued psychiatric nurse who will ignore your pleas because “the doctor prescribed it and you’re standing here till you swallow it”, just so you can eat the unidentifiable dinner mush and fight for your plastic knife privileges — is transforming you into one of us at rapid pace. And once you’re in, anything’s fair game.

“So, what are you in for?”

“Um, you mean, um?”

“Yeah, why you here?”

“Oh. Right. Well, I tried to kill myself.”

“Yeah. Me too. A bunch of us. We think that’s why we’re on this unit but some of those guys didn’t, they just have drug problems.”

Bill joined the conversation. Without needing to point to the deep, fresh scars along his throat and wrists he echoed, “me too. It almost worked.”

“So did mine. I was in the ICU.”

“Yeah, me too. How’d you do it?”

“Pills.”

“What kind?”

“Percocet.”

“Ohh what a high. Now that’s a good way to go.”

Bill scoffed. “Pills never work. They take too long, just fuck up your organs but you can be saved even a while later.” It feels like a playground one-upping game, but with such implicit understanding that there’s an added support group element of solidarity. As Amanda put it, “you spend all your time here trying to get out only to realize that the only people who really understand you are back here on the inside.”

Amanda, Michael and Kim were all undergoing ECT. Bill’s psychiatrist had told him that he would have to start that soon because the meds weren’t helping but he was desperate not to, terrified at the idea. Ever monotone, Amanda sighed “Well I wish this would backfire and kill me. But the odds are low. Something like one in a thousand. I dunno.”

“Well if only takes out one of us, I want it to be me,” Michael joked in retort. Joked because he knew he was being funny, but not because he didn’t mean it.

“Oh yeah, I’ll fight you for it,” she shot back.

“Well, Kim would probably win this one anyway. The scrawny thing would throw one of her tantrums.” We all laughed our assent.

There was such tenderness amongst us. Why would you want to die? You’re beautiful. You’re thin. You’re smart. You have a husband who always comes to visiting hours. You have a son. You’re going places, girl. You’re so funny and friendly. We found reasons for each other to live, but we still understood that while they could save someone they could also be meaningless. Caring for my peers in there was restorative and humanizing. Two pieces of healing I never got from a helping professional on the unit. Sometimes I remember the emotional goodbyes and I hear Bill or John or Amanda telling me to take care of myself. And those words echo more than anyone else’s because they understand the enormity of the order. It was just 10 days, but it was psych ward time.

Smells Like Patients

The phrase has been ringing in my ears and heart for days.

I was carpooling with someone who works for the same hospital where I work and making mundane small talk about the lunch spots on campus. I began to extoll the good value of the cafeteria food, how the salad bar prices don’t go by weight so you can pack in the veggies and the frozen yogurt stand prices the same.

There are so many options, the prices are so good… There’s enough detail in this cafeteria talk to say how little we really have to say to each other. I don’t mind talking a lot about nothing for the sake of friendly ritual exchange.

Yeah, but doesn’t it smell like patients? he asks, his final voiced skepticism of the cafeteria. He’s a Panda Express man.

For the first time in the ride, I’m speechless. I let out an instinctive laugh to mask my horror. He hears that as encouragement, as being in the same otherizing place.

You know, the patients come down from their rooms or right after they’re discharged and they’re all over. It smells like patients in there.

He said it again. And my muscles all tighten, my heart rate speeds up, I need. To. Get. Out. Of. This. Car. So I stutter.

Hah, I don’t know. I never noticed that. Actually, during lunch time it’s mostly providers who are there.

I had to refute his fear by reinforcing it. Breaking bread with patients is scary. Being the dependent, pathetic, sick, patient is such a terrifying thought that patients have to be dehumanized into a bad odor. At least he was reasonably transparent with his fear. Because I see and hear the distancing, put-downs, insecure insistence on using professional titles, among a variety of fear-masking tactics given titles like professionalism.

Sometimes when I’m walking the hospital hallways talking to patients or colleagues and feel my blood sugar dropping or a wave of nausea, I wonder if I smell like patients. Even when I’m feeling fine, but slip into the bathroom to take injections or pills, I wonder if I smell like patients. And at any time of day, the phrase can run through my head, because it is a short-hand for a fear so deep and so potent that few can even identify it. But for those of us who smell like patients, who know that when we’re tangled in tubes, wearing medical equipment that can’t get wet, or in too much pain to move, bathing moves down a notch on the priority list. And we know that it’s not our odor that’s truly off-putting, instead it’s the state of our whole selves.

Edge

When you’ve seen over the edge, can you ever come back? That’s what

I wonder. Is that

why my mother used to tell me to step back from edges of

subway platforms? Not because I might

fall

But because I might

not.

I might look over the edge

and come back again,

never to forget the wooden planks, litter, rats, the sights on the

other side.

I don’t just remember the sight, I feel it, I know it too

intimately.

I’ve heard “you got lucky” too

many times.

I’m alive now, can I escape

my almosts?

Autobioarchaeology

Nighttime excavating. My nighttime is defined as the time after I’ve had the final interpersonal exchange of the daytime, but before I am asleep. It is my most feared and cherished time of each block of 24 hours.

I see a massive pile in an abandoned lot; splintering wood, milk crates, crumpled up papers, broken electronics, molding food, dead leaves, all towering into a nearly perfectly shaped pyramid. I stand there, my 5’2.25″ giving scale to the tower that turns out to be yards higher than it looked at first glance. And I stand there, pitiful with my trowel. Lending absurdity to the scale.

I remember the social worker from the clinic telling me it was a problem I couldn’t be alone and relaxed at age 16. I remember another one telling me that I had to believe I could be comfortable alone in my own skin at some point without any self-destructive desires or tendencies at age 21. And at age 24 I see a shrink downtown with a similar sentiment.

When I gave him the history of his predecessors, he said that maybe I need that time. That until my excavation is complete, I’ll always have it. And I agreed, with similar ambivalence to my fearful love of nighttime. Because sometimes I feel like Sisyphus. Because as much as I excavate, trowel-ful at a time, the pile grows. Adding losses, memories, diseases… sometimes I fantasize of running away from this life – from every person and responsibility in my world – to go on a full time excavation and not return until I’ve made a big enough dent I can feel more awake, genuine and present in my daily life… or maybe to run away from the fated task.

E is for Embrace

Written June 30, 2012 in a Manhattan subway.

I’m taking the E train through my past life. I’m watching it pass by without exiting the subway but taking in stares at the mosaic tiles coming together to spell stations stops that overflow etched memories. The conductor is calling out their names; monotonic as a table of contents in which no chapter carries more or less weight.

Elmhurst Ave. Partial hospitalization program. Preceded by psych ER for first overdose.

Grand ave. Trader Joe’s.

Jackson Heights. Hours of waiting, transferring, going to school, work.

90th ave. Sexual assault.

Northern Blvd. 1st Queens apartment. Which stop did K and I fall out of love?

Steinway. 3D movie in Astoria.

Back up a few stops to Jackson Heights – get off the E and transfer to the 7 train towards Flushing. Off at 46th and Bliss. Dunkin donuts coffee to sip on while perusing the $1 book table outside of the thrift store on the way to the final Queens apt. 

That time we ran down Queens blvd from the train at 1am and the boys chased us and grabbed K’s butt. She was so hysterical she wouldn’t even let me comfort her. Were we in love then? Did she lover herself? Did I love myself? In love would’ve been impossible. Maybe we were co-dependently kidding ourselves.

Queens Plaza. I feel a wave of nausea entering. It’s a familiar feeling in the train – the time-old question of where to vomit. Carrying around Petco dog poop bags in rolls to open up and vomit in 5-10 times throughout the day. Sometimes people noticed. If so, I usually got my own row on the subway.The practical questions: enough bags? readily accessible for when the vomit comes?

On crutches. Take Q32 or Q60 to Queens Plaza, hope elevator is working. It is! Hope for good samaritan to give me a seat on the subway. Thank you! Hope elevator is working at destination station.

Lexington Ave & 53rd St. Transfer to Hunter College. Met J there! And Professors G and K. Thank you for shaping and improving how I think and observe. 

Walk to Cosi from that stop for organizing meetings. We planned our take down of Big Pharma in there. I think we at least empowered and taught some organization skills to diabetics. 

Philly has so many scars yet holds one of the softest spaces in my heart, perhaps because despite them all I made it out alive and me. NYC, in its last year, held inexpressible amounts of pain for me. I could have sat for hours at each of the subway stops as the enormity of the events they still hold began to sink in. I still haven’t gone much further than the chapter titles in the processing work. NYC also gave me so much in 6 years! How much I grew, learned, and lived.

Maybe maturing (again my fascination with age, how infrequently it works for me and continuously befuddles me) is about being comfortable sitting on this train – sitting in in consistencies, ambivalences and contradictions. Knowing better to document them than to battle them.

Cities have always been my home. I’ve rarely felt a particular building as my home as much as a whole city. I like to learn the curvatures of its metro system by heart, to heart. Its parks, the best public bathrooms, clinics, cheap movie theaters, coffee spots. Places to sit and be alone, places to sit and watch people without being bothered, and how to sit in public and open myself up to the scintillating conversation of once-strangers. 

They all hold me. When I left SF with my preloaded clipper card and arrived to NYC with my preloaded metrocard I felt I have a parent in each place. The curve of the E train as it crosses Queens to Manhattan and goes downtown via 8th avenue wraps around me in a warm, gritty, embrace.

I hurt hard here, I loved hard here, I played hard here, I learned hard here. The subway map, like a palm to be read, remembers.