Heartbreak Soup

Apparently it’s now “traditional” for me to make sweet potato casserole with crunchy pecan topping for Thanksgiving. I made it a few times, I guess, and everyone loves it, probably because it’s loaded with butter and sugar and is for all intents a crustless sweet potato pie. I was a little grossed out by it yesterday, but then, I was feeling grossed out by a lot of things.

I was grossed out by the sadness inherent in a day that’s about the anticipation of a heavy meal that everyone inhales in minutes. I’m also grossed out by the suburbs. What a snob, right? After all, I grew up here among these strip malls and and prefab houses with their potpourri bathrooms and sectional sofas. But this isn’t my home and it hasn’t been for seven years.

Back in New York, my dad’s father is in the hospital and not doing well. Last Sunday I went out to Long Island to visit him. I’ve only had to do this once before; I’m lucky I guess. The other time I think I also panicked beforehand. Actually I used to panic before every time I would be setting out early in the morning to visit my grandparents, because of how much I love them and how irritating they are and how much I feel like they’ll never understand anything to do with my life at all and how inevitably they’ll die soon. William was always pretty good at calming me down.

So the night before I was to go out there, I called him. There was no one else I wanted to talk to. It was the wrong thing to do but I needed to do it. It made me realize that there’s still a part of me that doesn’t quite believe, yet, that we’re not together anymore and that we’re never going to be again. That part of me is kept afloat by the knowledge that somewhere out there, he’s still caring about what happens to me. And that’s what I need to let go of before I can love anybody else.

But the pull of pattern and habit is so strong. Like: settling into being lectured by William felt so normal and natural, just listening to the cadences of his voice as he told me everything I’d done wrong.

When I hung up with him I felt temporarily better, and then I felt even emptier and more alone than before.

We used to have Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house in College Park. Now we have it at my uncle’s house because my mom’s parents live in a place called Riderwood Village, where the apartment hallways are plushy carpeted and the different buildings have names like ‘Orchard House.’

I used to stay in my old bedroom in the house I grew up in when I came to stay with my parents. Now we stay in a Marriott Residence Inn.

Also I smoked pot for the first time in four months last night, with a 19 year old friend of the family who reassured me that I don’t look old (“I thought you were 22 or 24″) and wanted to talk geopolitics (“I’m just gonna lay this out there: we’re fucked.”)

Some things are traditions and some things are patterns and some things are bad habits. I can’t tell which is which anymore.

This casserole is good, though, in a “it’s bad but you can’t resist and after what you’ve been through don’t you deserve it?”way.

4 cups mashed sweet potatoes

3 eggs

1/2 cup whole milk

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 cup brown sugar

splash of vanilla

pinch of salt

Topping:

1 1/2 cups pecans

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

Combine topping ingredients in food processor and pulse a few times until they’re a fun coarse brown topping-looking type of thing.

Beat the eggs, milk, melted butter, sugar and vanilla together, then add potatoes. Plop the orange mix into a buttered casserole dish, top with topping, and cook for a while in an oven (350 for 45? 375 for 30? You want the top to be crunchy basically).

“I’m going to try to never write about you,” I whispered to the boy whose shoulder my head was on two nights ago.

Oops.

Well, here’s the thing, though!  One of the hundreds of incredibly good reasons I’ve been so wary of letting myself feel the feelings I’ve been feeling for this boy I’ve been seeing is: I don’t know if I can be with someone and still write these kinds of things.  I’ve always had this problem. I think it’s pretty common.

From fourth grade on, I kept a detailed, multi-volume, sometimes illustrated (oh man, what a gay little nerd!) diary where I mostly talked about my crushes and occasionally stuff I’d bought or eaten.  I would do a full-body involuntary shiver of embarrassment if I was forced to read any of it now, but it was a document of my life and in its way kind of awesome, like all diaries.  And in 11th grade I stopped writing in it.  Why? Well, part of it was that all the stuff I’d been recording could now be told to my first serious boyfriend, who was so fascinated by everything about me that he would happily listen to me ramble for hours about a comic book or a dress I’d seen in a vintage store.  And another part of it was that it’s hard to write about relationships when you’re in them.  When you’re happy, that’s boring, and when you’re sad, it’s sometimes hard to pin down why you’re sad, especially if it’s the kind of slow encroaching sadness that you don’t even realize is sadness until you’re sort of caught in its patterns.  Like, for example, the pattern of humoring someone who, it’s become clear, is way more into you than you’re into them, which is what was happening with Chris during all that time I wasn’t writing stuff down.

Toward the end of high school I wrote two or three entries in a rainbow-bound journal about how it felt to be cheating on Chris and then I didn’t keep a diary again until the spring of sophomore year of college, when I broke up with Nick.  That diary is the only one I still have. It’s about Theo and moving to New York and I wrote in it furiously, constantly, ridiculous things, real ‘deep thots.’

“The first thing is to be honest, really honest,” my 19 year old self had decided. “Not to tell the version I’d like someone to read, not to gloss over details to make myself look better to an imaginary audience.  The second thing is not to write a sordid confessional just for the sake of doing so, just to feel cleansed somehow, so that it ends up boring and trite like all wannabe-salacious memoirs.  Fuck fuck fuck I should not have had that coke, I have to work in five hours ….”  You get the picture.

Oh here’s a good part!
“Fucking boys. I wish I was better at shooting people down … being pursued should make me feel good, and instead it makes me feel persecuted. Also it makes me mistrust boys — are they ever sincere when they say they like me, or do they really only wanna fuck me, and the more sophisticated/analytical types justify it by convincing themselves they really like me?”

Good question, 19 year old me!  I wish I could tell you!

There are pages and pages of this kind of stuff and then the last few pages are like this: “I wish William would call … I must be strong and eliminate him from my life as soon as possible …” (two pages later) “This is the crippling self-destructive feature built into women that’s kept us from achieving our goals for years, despite our obvious superiority. I am so smart to have figured this out.” (Two pages later) “I sort of don’t want to ruin my good mood by writing.”

The last entry starts like this: “August.  Oh, being in love. What a rough development in my life. How will I ever get anything done?”

Okay, yes, in the six years that elapsed between that August and this past one, I did accomplish some stuff.  And I did write about William, a little, but we fought about it when I did, even when it was stupid stuff like his opinions of the season finale of Project Runway.  But I didn’t write about our relationship until it was ending.

“Writing about a relationship while you’re in it, especially in a public forum, always kills it, unless you’re Calvin Fucking Trillin,” I wrote recently. But is that really true?  It’s hard to say what kills things sometimes. (“You should be password protected.”)

I want to be able to write about what’s happening right now, but I want just as badly not to jinx it, because what’s happening is, mostly, good.  Terrifying, though!  Maybe one of the things that’s terrifying is this sense that I have to choose between analyzing my experiences or just having them.  The impulse to tell and tell and tell is, for now, gone, but that in and of itself scares me.  And so I find myself (okay, I know, I know, sorry!) wondering: is it possible to care about someone else without giving up any part of yourself?

I woke up this morning filled with the kind of nervous dread that feels just like coming down with the flu: it’s characterized by nausea, almost-feverishness, and an overwhelming desire to just lie in a dark room with closed eyes until the feeling passes. I know from experience, though, that lying in the dark not only doesn’t encourage the feeling to pass but also adds an overlay of feeling failed and pathetic.  So I got up and put on pants and shakily walked to the corner to buy a green tea and a pb&j bagel, and I ate it on the subway on the way to see Emma, my tattoo artist.

I felt a little self-conscious just now typing “my tattoo artist.” I would never say “my hairstylist” though I guess I do sort of have one (her name’s Shiho!)  There’s a certain weird  sort of possessive entitled Jennifer Anistonness to saying “my” yoga teacher, “my” manicurist, “my” bikini waxer.  These people obviously do not belong to anybody besides themselves.  But here’s why it’s okay to call Emma my tattoo artist: would you feel self-conscious about saying “my doctor” or “my therapist”?  Emma is a lot closer to those categories than she is to being some sort of aesthetician.  Actually sometimes I feel like the only difference between Emma and a doctor or therapist is that she’s much, much more expensive.

Today when I came into the shop Emma was finishing up a consultation with a woman who’s getting sleeves because, now that she’s almost finished with acupuncture school, she’s totally sure she’ll never have another 9 to 5 office job again so she doesn’t have to hide her tattoos on her core the way she’s been doing.  She had all kinds of incredibly specific ideas and visions and needs about what her first sleeve would be like, and she showed Emma (and me, because I happened to be there) pictures of intricately decorated Ukranian eggs, and talked about wanting fish because she has “a lot of fire.”  Over the course of her tattoo consultation, I learned: that she’s Ukranian and Jewish, born there but raised here, that her husband’s name is Bear, that she has two kids, a boy and a girl, 4 and 2, and that she gave birth to the first (Caleb) when she was 24, that doctors didn’t think he would live but he did and is fine now, that she has always felt a psychic connection to Caleb but that Bear has been closer to her daughter since the very moment of conception (“We just made a baby, didn’t we?” he said).  That she has stretch marks on her first tattoos and such low sensitivity to pain that she used to have 6 gauge rings in her nipples, but that her one tattoo that’s partly in her armpit made her cry involuntarily because of the nerves there.  That she teaches yoga at her kids’ daycare.  That she once damaged a freshly inked tattoo during a “moment of passion.”  All of this stuff was going to inform the designs that Emma is going to put on this woman’s body.

At one point, the woman started talking about her ideas for her right arm, but Emma cautioned her against it.  “It’s  story, it has to tell itself in order.  This arm will inform the other one.”

For the next few hours, as I sat alternately gritting my teeth and chatting with Emma, I thought about my tattoos telling a story.  It’s a long story and maybe about as interesting as hearing about somebody’s dream they had.   It starts with the little heart and then it goes to the fish swimming down my shoulder blades, the chrysanthemum on my right shoulder, the poppies on my right arm, the crown of thorns starfish on my left arm, and now the smaller starfish on my left shoulder.  It’s definitely not over — in fact, I have another appointment in December to finish the shading work Emma started today.  It’s the story of the last six years of my life since I moved to New York.

Emma is trying to have a baby with her partner John so we talked about that a lot.  He only has two tattoos and she did both of them; she’s never been into guys with a lot of tattoos.  I guess I haven’t either.  I told her that Jake was the first guy I’d ever been with who had as many tattoos as I did and I described them to her: the “Mom” on one shoulder and the devil girl pinup on the other, the now-infamous portrait of Serge Gainsbourg on his back.  “Ah, so he’s got Mommy issues and thinks all women are either idealized virgins or dirty whores, and he’s pretentious but he doesn’t care if you think so,” she said.

Tattoos really do tell a story!

I told her about William’s tattoo, the outlines of a band of stars that encircle his bicep, and how I’d always wanted him to go ahead and get the stars filled in.  How, at several points in our relationship, he was just about to get the stars filled in, sort of like how he was just about to start riding his bike to work or start smoking less pot or start looking for a less shitty job.

“If you ever see him with those stars filled in, you’re going to have to marry him!” Emma told me.  But I’m pretty sure that’s never going to happen.