Lucky in Love 08-16-2008

It’s a gorgeous summer Saturday in New York, so this will have to be a quick post, as my bicycle and I are yearning for the sunshine. But before I go out a-frolicking, I want to report back to all of you, loyal readers, who have undoubtedly been AT THE ABSOLUTE EDGES OF YOUR SEATS wondering how my love life is going. So here’s the report:

I am on a romantic sabbatical, meaning that I am taking some time off of my normal romantic misadventures to think and to study, and to possibly publish a tawdry expose about each of my exes. Since this is the first time that I’ve been actively and wholly single in about a decade, I’m having a really self-indulgent time going to yoga and reading and riding my bike and napping, while changing jobs and moving apartments on the side. Still, I’m a little bored. To fill the time, I’ve spent hours upon hours slogging around in the sordid details of every single one of my crumbled love affairs, reviewing each ghastly breakup, and agonizing over a long history of love gone awry.

I’ve realized in this excrutiating and exhilerating exercise just how much I’ve learned from all these gorgeous and disastrous lover affairs, and I feel admittedly lucky and, surprisingly, have very few regrets.

Here are the top ten things that I’ve learned from my lovers over the years:

10. How to blanch a tomato

9. How to build a fire

8. How to surf (kind of)

7. How to roll a joint

6. How to merengue

5. How to strip and re-finish wood furniture

4. How to play the banjo

3. How to change a tire

2. How to build a bike

1. How to escape when being chased by wild turkeys or other fowl

Not bad, huh? Makes me feel like quite the renaissance woman.

I hope that all the survivors on the other side of those crashed-and-burned loves have tread off as well with some kind of new skill, something that they learned along the way. Because every time I change a tire, I grin ruefully at the memory of a sweet roadside kiss with a jack in my hand. And every time I’m being chased by wild turkeys…well, that hasn’t happened again. But if it does, I’ll remember a romantic Thanksgiving spent in the mountains of Arizona. And every time I slip the skin off a tomato and am left holding its exposed flesh gently in my palm, I feel a distinct and wonderful stretch in my heart that is remembering what it felt like to be in love for the first time.

And if that’s not lucky, I don’t know what is.

Newyorkiversary. 5.27.2008

On May 27, 2007, I went to a pool party. It was already so hot in Tucson, and I laid stretched out across the concrete with my feet dangling in the water, feeling the sun bake my chest. “I’m going to leave here with a burn,” I thought, and I didn’t mind at all. All around me, friends were chatting, flirting, talking, draping arms around one another. Someone was moving into the house, and his piles of boxes shifting from porch to kitchen, and then disappearing into his room reminded me of the ones I’d dropped off at the post office the day before. My suitcases, with what was left, were packed and sitting by the door. I only had the clothes I was wearing; everything else was folded and sealed and waiting.

I jumped in.

Wearing jeans in the pool is a lot of work. It seemed like I was underwater for a very long time, sunglasses drifting off my face and floating towards the surface. My hair, recently so much shorter than it always had been, swirled around my face. Someone’s kid was laughing up above, and I could hear it, through a tunnel, but all I saw was water and light. I surfaced with a splash, cracked a joke, asked the kid to grab my sunglasses for me, and stretched out in the sun again. I was dry in 20 minutes.

Later that day, when we all went out for dinner, I realized that I’d left my keys at the party, which is probably the hundredth place I’d left them over the course of a decade. And then I realized that I didn’t really need them anymore, that those keys didn’t open anything that was mine. I didn’t need to go back for them; I was done.

And then Lu drove me to the airport and I moved to New York.

Well, it wasn’t quite that easy. My suitcase was too heavy, and so we had to lug it back off the baggage check area, and open it up and move things around, and try to put a pair of shoes in my backpack, and throw away the shampoo. This poignant and dramatic moment I’d imagined, where my friends would watch me drop off my bags and walk gracefully towards the gate; that moment wasn’t mine. My moment was me squatting on the floor of the Tucson International Airport with a nest of my clothes spread out all around me, forty minutes before my flight, head a little light from beer and sun, my shirt smelling like chlorine, my sunburn starting to show, asking Lu if she thought I could get away with a 52 pound bag.

That’s my moment. And it makes me grin and grin and grin.

I’ve lived in Newyorkcity for one year. It’s been twelve months and it’s been a thousand. Here I am. Who would’ve guessed. It’s starting to get hot here, now, and I’m sitting in my room with my feet propped up on my guitar, thinking absently that it’s almost time for me to put in my window unit, and dreaming up – you’ve guessed it- the TOP TEN LESSONS I’VE LEARNED IN NEW YORK! (drumroll!!!!)

10. People really do wear skinny jeans. More people than you ever would imagine. And no one looks good in them.

9. When your friends say to you, “It’s time to go to Cubbyhole!” you should say to yourself “I’ve had too much to drink. It’s time to go home.”

8. The cab driver does not know where he’s going.

7. I am a Mac person.

6. Sometimes a career is just a career.

5. There is very little worth doing between 14th Street and 59th Street.

4. The secret to revolving doors is not using your hands.

3. It doesn’t matter if it’s dog poop or human poop. You should get off the train and get in a different car.

2. The G train is a long wait for a bad ride.

1. I am capable of anything.