On Fantasy: Friday night at McNally Jackson

A pre-pandemic exploration of the idea of being more aligned with fantasy than reality— of living in a world of curated delusion as a means of coping with an exquisitely sensitive existence.

It’s Friday afternoon and I’ve taken myself into the city to write. I sit like a school child, crammed into an overpriced cafe housed in my favorite Little Italy bookshop. (As if there were another Little Italy book shop to prefer, I think, editing my own self pretension.) Writers, I’ve noted, like to identify with the niche, the less-known. We long to be “othered” in a way that is less strange than it is obscurely specific. I’d like to note here I also have a favorite Australian coffee roaster, single origin recycled paper source, and often reference a discontinued perfume my mother bought in Nantucket in my long form writing. 

My eyes move upwards, away from the screen, as the girl in front of me vacates her table— a coveted two seater, unlike the fold out bench and half desk panel I have to myself. No one moves to claim her spot after she’s gathered her coat and trendy fabric tote. I assume everyone, like I am, is consumed in appearing as if we are truly busy doing something. To prove we are not like them— those who finger the art of living as if it were as reductively trite. As if meaningful living were as easy as lingering outside hip neighborhood bars on Monday nights, ready to engage an equally passive stranger. The seat to my right opens next, a seat at the corner of the school desk curve, up against the trash can and the wall; a most coveted place. But still, I dont move. The man to my right loudly appreciates the flakiness of his croissant, brazenly clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth after each swallow, but I force my body to remain still. 

Trying to maintain the appearance of un-startled determination I move to my feet  as the sound hits my ears. There is someone calling my name. There is always someone calling my name, I’ve determined. I have this lingering feeling or have come to believe that I owe the world something-- that I owe everyone something. As the repeated cry of a child in children’s fiction calls to their friend— “Nikki!”, I realize my folly and move swiftly to the corner seat. Propping myself against the side of the trashcan, I rearrange my things, then attempt to arrange my thoughts. I’ve turned off my phone for the first time in a while. I’d like to remain out of reach, out of bounds, untouchable for a little longer.

In my corner perch I can blend with the other writer-reader wannabees. I’ve forgotten my notebook and clack clumsily instead at the keys, fingers moving less precisely than quickly.. This night is not unique, though some spirit of adventure within me tells me it could be. Noticing the attractive male seated at a two seater table diagonally to my left, I fix my sight on him and intermittently attempt to catch his eye. I catch the quick high of attention that comes from this kind of intrigue. Tonight, I’ve had two espressos and my brain is on fire.  I am more careless than I should be. I steal another glance and note— no wedding ring. Returning my gaze to the MacBook screen, I feign intense focus on this paragraph. This paragraph. This. Para. Graph. I type the same words again and again, feeling his eyes on me. For all he knows I’m writing a masterpiece. For all he knows, I could be the love of his goddamned life. This is what enchants me— the possibility of what could be.

My current boyfriend-not-boyfriend as he is so lovingly referred to (by me), is out of town, as one of us usually is. But as has been the pattern, he neglects his phone almost entirely after arriving at his destination. Instead of checking my WhatsApp messages every ten minutes, hoping for some response to my now five unanswered texts,  I’ve decided to fuck off for a little while. As much as I want him to write, as much as I long for connection, for belonging, in actuality, I’m not looking forward to his return to town this week. Some people, or dare I say, most people, exist in my mind  with greater character, goodness or excitement than one could ever possess in “real life”. 

I want him to be who I want him to be. I long for his consistency, I want his intermittent attention when he freely gives it, and I want to break him of his inconsistencies at times like these when he is away. I want to be wanted— something I believe I must earn. As if being worthy of love demands Herculean shows of deservingness. Perhaps if I were more complimentary, more distant, perhaps if I didn’t call so much, dance around his apartment or talk about art with such enthusiastic frequency— perhaps then he could give me what I needed. For me, there are two kinds of lovers. First,  those who will never be able to give me what I need. Second, those who give me exactly what I need, just until I decide it is no longer what I want. My self-diagnosed pathology? Some kind of love addict. Addicted to fantasy and potential, adept at assigning magical qualities to people who have done nothing to earn them. Tonight is no different from any other time I see an attractive member of the opposite sex. I glance again— he isn’t even that attractive, but the idea of meeting someone at this book store enthralls me. His grey cashmere scarf, gentle scruff, the way he seems to wait for me to look at him; this one has potential. 

Besides, I know my current beau isn’t “the one”. Though for the last seven months, I’ve tried to convince us both he could be. I imagine him cramped into the cafe bookstore, surrounded by artsy, wannnabe-artsy types. He is uncomfortable, fidgeting, bored. He doesn’t understand my world— I know he doesn’t understand the poeticism of my spirit. Yet somehow, I am able to understand him. This often seems to be the case— I can see people but few truly see me. I say this without self-pity, only with a small tinge of familiar ache. As a spirited child, my sensitivity made me strong, I learned quickly I was different and how to tailor my emotional responses to those I’d see others portray. Being different is always a bit of a curse but often more of a blessing, I’ve decided. The world in my head and the one I experience along-side it are frighteningly enchanting, hauntingly exquisite, evisceratingly raw. Operating in wild extremes keeps life exciting, though sometimes disappointing and often lonely. 

Loneliness. A human experience I fear but one I’m trying to embrace. I want to be better at being alone. I want to return to my childhood practices of self-seclusion from the noisy, obstinate outside world. To disappear into a book for an hour or six; to create stories and characters in my mind, or become lost in the soaring scores of a musical whose content I barely understood. 

He gets up from the table to leave— this stranger is leaving—and I do what I can to pass the moment as quickly as possible without breaking my focus from my screen though I monitor his movements from my peripheral vision. I feel like I owe him a nod, or a gentle last minute look of acknowledgement. As if I am curtseying to my dance partner of the past hour— an unspoken tango left hanging in the balance between us. 

The fantasy passed, but the story of the encounter remains unerased— one I will embellish and distort in retellings until I begin to believe the lie of it, just as I did with boyfriend-not-boyfriend when we first met. Bragging to anyone who’d listen, I spoke of how upon my lettting my hair down he told me, “the world went into slow motion”. It isn’t a complete departure from the truth, but was more along the lines of, “your hair looked like it went in slow motion”. But after I’d told my version of the story once, I became a runaway train, even tricking myself into believing in a greater intention behind a statement he’d never made. 

By our second date, I’d envisioned a small wedding and two toffee colored babies. An Argentinian-Italian, Cuban-Polish Christmas, and the stupid topics we’d fight over in our aging years. One could imagine my disappointment when he told me he doesn’t believe in marriage. His truth didn’t fit into the image of us I’d created, but still I‘ll behave as if it does. And yet, I’m still surprised when I am let down, without exception, by each individual that fails to meet the standard I’ve pre-created for them in my mind. I’ve cancelled plans, deleted phone numbers, even blocked men over the slightest hint of being slighted. I’ve trained myself to think that attention is love— that affection, however small in action means commitment, and that a lover’s promises are immutable. I’ve played myself unlike anyone else can. That's me; the eternally inventive fool. 

Maybe it’s better this way, I think. I read a draft of this essay to another man as he lays in my bed. He falls asleep as I read and upon realizing his absence-- I am relieved. I’m not actually ready for someone to know me this well. To know my inner workings and have the opportunity to shy away. I’m not ready to be disappointed again, so instead, I run my fingers across his forearms. I smooth my skin against his doughy softness. I move my fingers across his skin the same way I do for my not-boyfriend, a favor he asks me for as he falls asleep. I repeat it now for this someone else and  wonder if all acts of love are truly this transferable when you have a need as strong as mine. A need to want, to have, to touch, to give.

 I reach over and kiss the man in my bed on the back of his neck, an inch below his hairline. I think of how I will write this moment into a poem. How I will romanticize the image of a hungover thirty year old man in my windowless room, wrapped in my dusty red sheets as I sit beside him typing quietly, trying not to break the illusion of this moment in my mind. Me, thinking and typing, typing and imagining. My face smudged with last night’s makeup; back hunched and stomach hanging over faded Limited Too underwear. A little sad, a little manic, lost in a dream. 

It Took a Quarantine and City Wide Lockdown to Realize Time and Distance Weren’t What Was Keeping Us Apart: On Losing Your Dog and Your Boyfriend During Quarantine 

A Modern Love- esque exploration of love in the time of Corona, of loss all at once, of looking forward when the world has stopped.

There’s a kind of grief that exists; a compounded, deep, sensation of drowning in the overwhelm of loss. This form of grief is different from that of losing a close friend over a fight, separate from that of mourning a loss of self when knee-deep in a new relationship. Different still from being stuck in your apartment for a stationary, quiet, and indeterminable period of time. Instead, it’s the kind that should paralyze you but doesn’t— it does the opposite. When this loss sets in, you keep moving simply because your body and brain both recognize you must. If you were to stop right now, at this moment, you would surely never be able to start back up again— the gravity of it would sink you. 

To say my relationship wasn’t panning out the way I would have liked when returning to the city after recovering from COVID-19 would be an understatement. My 9-month guy finally turned boyfriend was supposed to pick me up from the airport at Newark that morning, but as I sat staring blankly out my Uber en route home from JFK, it became clear how much had changed in my three week absence. The two bits of happiness I’d been grasping onto to get me through long days in quarantine while quite sick and contagious had been talking to Jimmy at night on the phone, and hugging my dog, Sasha. 

Having once moved back home a few years ago after a mental health hiccup had afforded me quality time with Sash— she became my best friend and companion through the process of putting my head back together. On the days my mood swings made me impossible, difficult and depression stricken, she would nudge my bedroom door open and sit on the floor beside my bed as I cried. She sat with me through nine medication changes, countless FaceTime therapy sessions, woke me in the mornings with wet kisses, endured many a long walk and found her place beneath my legs as they hung off the couch at night. But in the last few years, Sasha had begun to slow down, and an MRI revealed bone spurs growing on her spine that frequently rendered her back legs useless. She did her best to follow us around the house, but her movements grew slower by the day, as she voicelessly told us she was soon to be gone. 

My romantic life seemed to be dying a similar, slow death. Jimmy and I saw each other infrequently, an inconvenience I attributed to our opposite work schedules. He was a pilot at the major airline at which I worked as a flight attendant. After he’d switched to an aircraft that flew mostly international trips, my junior domestic schedule became difficult to align with his. Seeing each other was a treat, for me at least. We’d spend two or three days together at his place, cooking, debating, running, laughing. But over the last few months, he’d been preoccupied with greater priorities. A photo collection to arrange, a mother and sister to visit in Jersey, a kiteboarding hobby that consumed the majority of his days off. When Jimmy cancelled on plans to see me after five weeks apart, I knew in my gut that something wasn’t right. 

Two weeks after my return to New York and his telling me to fly into JFK, that he’d pick me up the next day from my place, he had still failed to catch up with me.  Citing excuses of helping his mother, organizing said photo collection and a sinus headache, Jimmy was disappearing from my life, inching away so slowly I might not have noticed had I not been stuck in my apartment with little to do. The day Sasha was put down, my mother called me in tears; she woke to the pup not being able to move her body and they had decided to let her go in peace. I wouldn’t be able to get on a flight that day to be there with her, and we agreed I’d participate over FaceTime. I called Jimmy, asking if he would come sit with me. His response took my any lingering hope  I had for a future for the relationship and smashed it into tiny shards. 

“Do you need me to be there? Or do you want me to be there? Because there’s a big difference, Kiki. If you need me to be there, there are bigger problems with you than just missing me”.

This is the point at which a rational person puts down the phone, gathers their dignity, and excises this person from one’s life. Clearly, he wasn’t busy. Clearly, he could come see me and sit with me that evening, but it became clearer still he didn’t simply want to. But in a state of shock over losing my furry best friend, I began to beg him to come, asking over and again, 

“Can’t you just try?”, I managed between sobs.

“Try to do what, Kiki?”, he sighed exasperatedly. It wasn’t about that afternoon anymore. It was everything I’d felt the throughout the entirety of the relationship; he didn’t really ever make an effort to be present. There was always something more important than me, always a convenient excuse about scheduling or work. But even with all the time in the world he couldn’t manage putting aside a few hours to see me when I asked for it; when I really needed it. He just didn’t get it. And chances were if he didn’t get it then, he was probably never going to.

Despite the crushing weight of these losses, I haven’t totally succumbed to the full body depression I feel looming just over my shoulder. I still get out of bed in the morning though now, it takes extra effort. An emptiness engulfs me during the day time, one that allows me to clean my apartment, fold my laundry, do some writing. Mindless tasks keep me going, moving towards a life that has to be neater than the one I’ve been living. Earbuds have made permanent homes in my ears— not that I listen to any of the music I play from the Spotify playlist entitled, “You Needed Love, I Needed You”. The noise keeps my brain sort of busy, sort of distracted from circling back to the same handful of thoughts that plague me as I try to fall asleep each night. 

In the daytime, when the emptiness begins to become too light— as if I am outside of my body, watching strands of myself come in and out of view, I walk. 

I walk for as long as I think I can manage, knowing I’ll have to double back to get home. Up to seven miles elapse one afternoon walking with my roommate to Greenpoint and back. We both walk with headphones in, feet pounding the sidewalk, as if we could walk away the sadness and leave it behind in our footprints. 

When I get home, I pour a drink. I try to make myself eat, but most nights I have no appetite. Just before bed, I take a half milligram of Xanax to make sure I stay asleep through the night. In the meantime, before sleep comes, I lay alone, pestered by the same three thoughts: 

1. The thought of my dog being buried— both of the weight of the dirt, the awkwardness of her body after she passed, how she was held, that I wasn’t there.

2. I am reminded I am alone, that I must have done something to deserve this aloneness, I search for the reason I‘ve become disposable.

3. This feels like the Big Sad I had when I had to move home, except, I can’t move back home again, I have to just get through this sadness alone. I have to figure out a way to endure this pain, when I literally cannot run away from it. 

I saw something on Instagram that says you don’t have to be optimistic about the future, just challenge yourself to be curious— that’s enough. So, I try to get my brain to focus on curiosity, instead of the recurrent reminders of loss. 

Here we go: I’m curious as to when I will begin to feel better; when the brain fog of grief will lift and I will actually want to open my mouth to speak. 

Curiosity also makes me wonder if this is just a shit patch in my life, just as I’m sure it is in much heavier ways for many other people right now. Maybe one for me that paves the way for really good karma to flood in behind it. I’m curious about the person I will be after the summer ends. I’m curious about when I’ll feel ready to love again. I make a blueberry pie after taking up the old favorite hobby of baking again. The smell of pie baking as it permeates the air in my small home makes me curious about the adventure of adding cinnamon to the filling. I’m curious as to when I’ll develop an appetite for food again; I’m curious about what life looks like now, once I choose to start truly living it. I’m curious as to when I’ll find myself moving again without having to think about it, and when the world will follow suit. 

On Change: Returning to a Time, an Era, a Past Self

An examination of returning to an emotional landmark two years after loss, of rediscovery of self and the cyclical nature of being.

I returned to my grandfather’s house exactly two years after the date of his death. The visit was unexpected, for me at least. My mom had flown into the city to take a short trip upstate to the family summer house. Extensive work had begun on remodeling the property, “reclaiming the earth” as she called it and intermittent oversight was required. I lived in Brooklyn, thirty minutes from the airport I tried to avoid at all costs to fly out of for work. I woke that morning at 9 am, an hour before our planned meeting time at Budget car rental in East Elmhurst feeling both relieved to have a reason to get out of bed, and simultaneously wishing I could redraw the rose colored comforter over my head and remain motionless all day. The summer’s passing had the same effect on me it did every year. A slow loss of the hypomania (one that made San Fransisco skylines more enchanting, kisses from strangers that much more intoxicating), one that drove me through countless sleepless nights and many early mornings had given way to a gentle numbness and consuming melancholy that would remain with me until the Spring.

I arrived late, calling my Uber ten minutes past my scheduled departure time. The absence of a usual anxiety over keeping someone waiting tipped me off as to my current mental state. That and the fact that my strong cup of coffee before leaving the house had little effect on my energy levels. Last night’s Xanax might have been the culprit as I’d attempted to anesthetize myself to sleep, desperately longing for an impermeable membrane between my feelings, thoughts and actions.

Mom didn’t seem to be bothered I was late, and I didnt have the energy to read her body language or word choice as I normally might have. We found our way to our allotted car for the next three days, four rows deeper into the lot than either of us might have preferred as a sharp October wind kicked through our hair and under our t-shirts.

 Once in the car, I started up the navigation app on my phone as mom pulled into reverse, casually asking if I wouldn’t mind stopping by “Dad’s house”. She was referring to my deceased grandfather’s house that was being remodled and put up for sale. The broker and appraiser happened to be there that day, and a summons on the property had also been issued that she wanted to see in person. I unemotionally agreed, where else did I have to be today or any time for the next week anyway?

On the bumpy drive along Grand Central Parkway, it struck me today was the 30th, the last day of September. It was my ex of four year’s birthday, and also the date my grandfather passed in his home two years ago. We pulled up to the house, one I’d pulled up to many times in my life, as a child and adult alike; both as passive passenger and determined pilot. Either for a summertime visit or on a mission to help care for him in the last weeks of his life. The exterior mirrored the picture I had in my head of what the house had looked like for years. This place had been both a respite and in more recent years, a deeply dreaded locale. A certain clumsiness engulfed my limbs as I picked up one foot, then the other, to make my way up the sheet rock walkway to the front door. It felt oddly formal for us to enter the house this way, as the driveway level kitchen entrance had been our primary point of entry for years. But as my grandfather’s health deteriorated and his marriage to a certain goldigging witch had elapsed, we had been banished to the front door on the house’s second level; a visitor’s entrance.

I’d avoided the house in the two years since his passing and after subsequent family clean- out events. The last year of visits had come to feel consistently overwrought with emotion and made me sick with smell. The plumbing had gone literally to shit and in his stuborness, my grandfather refused to have it replaced or repaired for years. Once the house had been remodeled, “made pretty for sale”, I’d passed on the opportunity to revisit the home that had been a staple landmark in my existence to this point. My associatied feelings with the place had become “too much”, just as my feelings for the ex boyfriend who I’d left — or had he left me— shortly after my grandfather’s passing. I’d become adept at running from the painful images or places that would recollect the memories of those months, of that heavier time. But today, under guerrilla attack, I found myself opening the wrought iron gate that gave way to the hard wood of the house’s front door and stepping inside.

The interior of the home, while remarkably different in appearance, felt very much the same as it always had; familair, musty, laden with memory and the effects of the passage of time, of the legacy of a family, a culture, a patriarchal paragon. A short walk from the former dining room to the kitchen brought me around to the master bedroom with its newly installed master bath. While the room was not one that technically existed as I knew it, it was the only safe place I felt like I could sit and breathe for a moment, waiting for my mom to finish her conversation with the broker. I wanted to take notes in my phone, or on a piece of paper to remember this moment, this one right now, and memorialize the weight of today’s visit in how it related to the past and what had become my present. But instead, I sat on the toilet, pants to my knees, retrieved my nicotine vape from my limp pocket, took a hit, and cried.

Why the tears were coming, I couldn’t be sure, but it felt damned good to have a moment of release after a week of alternately crawling or floating out of my own skin as the mania faded and darkness set in. My face felt like it did two years ago, swollen, likely from the drinking and pills the night before. I’d just dyed my hair a dark shade of brown as I used to wear it that year, a distinct departure from the golden brown and blonde I’d worked at on Carribean vacations and paid dearly for at the salon to achieve this past summer. A cloaking mechanism from the past had returned, just as this house, this feeling, and these memories did; uninvited, unwelcome, but unyielding in their presence, in their refusal to dissipate.

I often worry that I cannot trust my thoughts. A visit to the psych ward the January after that late September had gifted me that specific and exhausting neurosis. A good trigger like today, or the few in the past week, including a new relationship, excessive drinking, or too much time alone would bring the questioning back to the forefront of my mind. Was I going crazy again? Was this unexplainable crying and return of old behaviors indicative of my eventual loss on a grip of reality?

We left the house shortly after arriving then after a pit stop at the cemetery and at mom’s suggestion, ended up at an outdoor outlet mall an hour away. As mom shopped, I walked aimlessly without my bag, phone or wallet. I felt like an alien, walking around with emptied hands and pockets in a sea of commercialism, surrounded by people concerned with one thing; receiving or spending money.

A woman without a handbag appears dangerous, like a car ride without a seatbelt, a man without an island, a seagull without a sea like plant unearthed from the soil. A woman with her purse has somewhere to be, things to carry for the next imminent event in her day-- she has a sense of responsibility, and distinct sense of purpose, at least for that hour she’d hang it on her arm or clutch it to her side. And there I was, handbagless, purposeless, feelingless and numb, floating in and out of shops, absentmindedly fingering soft fabrics and gazing on the rich brown leather. I didn't want to be at the outlet mall any more than I did my grandfather’s house that day, nor the cemetery or diner after.

I wanted to be there for my mother as I had two years ago, emotionally available at the very least. Not that she needed someone’s shoulder to cry on— her wellspring of inner strength was one I had not inherited— she appeared to be unbreakable, immovable, though sometimes able to be bent, to let the sadness embody her just long enough for a few tears, a few sorrowful words. The opposite could be said for my ex, a beautiful but troubled soul with a drug addiction that engulfed our lives and sent every well laid foundational brick hurtling into the chaos that comes with unbridled lying and deep emotional instability-- truthfully, on both our parts. I’d spent the months leading up to that September desperately trying to make him whole, make us, my family, everyone but myself whole. The relationship ended with an ultimate betrayal of the dedication I’d poured into him and into the partnership I once imagined to be unbreakable. The year ended with the loss of not only one of the favorite permanent fixtures in my life, the kind you never expect to be truly gone, but  also of the relationship and the person  I’d let take precedence over my own self interest, to the point of complete loss of my entire self. In attempting to mend everyone’s brokenness, I allowed myself to be shattered. 

After shopping, I sat at a diner with my mother, hoping for a momentary return of the feeling of wholeness I’d fought for the last 24 months. I waited through half a cheeseburger, a cup of diner coffee and through dessert. The overwhelming memory of that loss, that the person that I’d been before had returned, and my new life in my budding relationship had returned me to the old trick of giving more than I received in an attempt to win favor. If I could love someone more than myself, they should be sure to stay. This recurrent draining of self was unearthing the crevasses that remained deep inside me. I felt more lost than ever.

There is some internal fracturing that planting graveside hot pink flowers, buying new suede boots, or even eating lemon pie with your mother at a diner cannot mend. Like the realization that a strong cup of coffee hasn’t returned you to who you were last month, or who you’ve wanted to become in the past two years. Or the moment you remember you still want to be the person who can fix everyone else’s hurt; who could tend to their wounds and fill the holes in them as if you were epoxy. As if you were stronger than super glue, than loss, than grief itself. Someone who always has the right answers and knows just when to offer them. Someone who can be blissfully self sufficient and simultaneously just-vulnerable-enough to enchant but never burden the people she hopes to keep in her life.

But then there becomes something precious too in the moment you discover that you are not any of those things, and never could be. And even that perhaps now, you are willing to accept you are maybe not ok— that you can’t hold it together all the time or endlessly carry the burdens of others.  But, that chances are you will again be ok, even though it may feel impossible now. And maybe you’ll be more than ok, maybe stronger, maybe better, to be ready to bend and be broken again. 

There are some seasons that return just as you’d begun to settle into the next. Some moments that unearth you, untether you, remind you of who you used to be. And those, I remember now, are inevitable, occasionally painful, but necessary for priming one to grow into the next Spring, the next Summer, ready to face another Fall or Winter to come. I’m not sure which season will bring me back to me again, but I know I am sure to return, just as I am sure again to find myself adrift, as is the nature of this existence.