If we had the rest of our lives together, where would you take me?  Would you clasp my hand for take off and still give me the heart of things?  An artichoke, the best pour of wine, the middle of the sandwich, the perfect bite. Would you let me complain about the mosquitoes and hills?  Would you still pull me close when I complained of the sweat?  Would you take me to a lake at night and undress me, lead me to the water with you hand, without talking, naked in the water against you.  Lake warmth and us.  Would you hold me as if there were no mourning?  If we had the rest of our lives together, what song would you hear that reminded you of me?  Would you make a list of them and email it to me?  Would you love me more when it was overcast?  How long would it take for you to begin to like the things I like just because I do?  If we had forever, would you hold on that long, or would you turn the station and down a new road looking for brighter leaves and new paths?

Every day I’d learn to love something because you did, and I’d collect your songs; I’d sing them to Linus in bed, when we missed you.  Then I’d cry because I loved you so much, your hands, in our sleep, with the smell of your head, with the rise and fall of your sleeping body.  After a while, would I let go, begin to raise my voice, let work become my priority?  Would the things I thought I liked roll my eyes?  Would I stop being an us, and instead be me, beside you, like siblings?  You’re right, that’s what scares me most.  Once the sex is gone, and backs become land for scratches instead of shifting planes when we move, I’d cry.  Worse, I wouldn’t cry.  I’d be numb and live for my children instead of you.  That scares me, becoming siblings with an equal who used to want.  It scares me more than alone ever will.

–Stephanie Klein, circa 2005

I’ll never get it out, all the feelings I have.

I’ll never get them to you in a way you understand

I’ll never know how to say it in a way that won’t make you grieve

Because the second that they come out, these words that I want to say,

The second that they make it to you, they’ll tangle, and you’ll leave.

And I can’t win, and I can’t take it,

all this hiding and pretending, with a cover on my heart 

Because you want it light and fun from the first time 

And I want it deep and thrown together in a mess

Because then it’s real, everything out, painted on each other. 

No room for excuses or reasons or well thought out decisions, no room for what’s right, what’s expected or what’s should, only space for what’s real, what’s there when we stop thinking, the core of it, what we really want. And no matter how I put it, no matter what size fits that day, it’s always gonna come back to being with you. 

I hate pretending, acting like it doesn’t bother me, choking it down, making you believe I care less than I do. I hate the work I have to throw in front of how I really feel. 

Can’t you just take me without all the chase and work?

Can’t you take my real work– 

The way I need to discuss it all, can’t you take the real work, the part when I want to talk about nothing, and everything, and to sound like a crazy jealous person, can’t you work on that with me, out in the open? Can’t we just stay in bed and just be us? 

Can’t you sing to me, and make it all okay, 

Can’t you just get it without a letter 

Can’t you just show up 

And deliver. 

Can’t you just escape with me 

And let it just be us 

Analysis over, 

Just between us, no mouths talking, 

Can’t we just be what we are to each other, 

Forever.

It wasn’t all that long ago. I stayed awake with anxiety, a hot laptop leaving red wormy marks on my stomach. I only noticed them when I got up to pee. I was in too much pain to feel pain. The way I felt then is how I sometimes feel now, quite frankly. It’s the sort of emotional pain that kind of sits and rocks, like the lapping water in your canoe. It’s the type of pain that makes you feel small. It’s childlike.

I know this is odd, but it’s the only way I know how to explain the feeling. It’s as if you’ve boarded a ship, and you know you should be looking out at sea, watching gulls, or learning knots, but you can’t stop noticing the mate’s hands. They’re stained a kind of navy, as if they’ve been cleaned with plastic wrap, scrubbed several times, but it’s no use. You know you should be intrigued by all the people boarding, asking questions about the charted path, but you’re just staring at his green boots, and their gummy soles. And you wonder who taught him to mop and if he sleeps alone.

Someone’s talking to you all the while– asking "child" questions, saying things like, "Oh, boy, do you see that? Do you know what part of the boat that is?" But you don’t really hear them, just the words strung together with an overeager inflection. It makes you want to never look up again.

It can feel like the moments you’re living aren’t quite as real because you’re not paying attention to them. This isn’t the real you. This isn’t who you are, this quiet, this isolated, this stranded. Soon everything that’s happening to you isn’t even you anymore. They aren’t your sleepless nights because it’s not your problem.

When my nights were sleepless, not all that long ago, I felt lonely and worried. I didn’t want to turn off the lights and have to face the night because it would only bring morning. If I stayed awake, it meant I never set the feelings aside for rest, so I never had to wake up to them again. I’d write on my white screen, play speed word games, read, and hope that maybe there was someone online to talk to, a lighthouse in my night.

I’m having sleepless nights again.

3 YEARS AGO: Weighty
5 YEARS AGO: The Girl Can Sing

I love this. These Ray Lamontagne moments, where you’re just sitting at a bar with a glass of Rioja, listening to the soulful voice, the one that sings about flowers falling from hair, about how he’s been to hell and back, so most things bore him. It’s this sleepy lullaby that reminds you of your life—the one you’d always imagined for yourself. A life of laps and walking barefoot on soft spring grass as the afternoon turns to “just before supper” time. Braids and true love. Picnic blankets and Sundays in the park that you didn’t hold onto tight enough the first time they happened. A slow life of lingering kisses and eyes that want to stay closed and open at the same time.

A YEAR AGO: Desperate to Be a Housewife

Never bleach your teeth the night before a dinner party, Mother said,
because you won’t get a good nights sleep.
You’ll be afraid of swallowing too much bleach,
so you’ll drool on your pillows,
and in the morning when you should be marinating the lamb,
you’ll instead be stripping your marital bed and applying too much eye concealer.
Your teeth will be too sensitive to taste anything,
leaving your guests to guinea pig it through the meal.
Hardly able to eat, you’ll wince in pain as you sip your soup,
and everyone will think you have an eating disorder.
Or a boyfriend.
Then you’ll go to sleep crying
and have to strip the bed again in the morning.
And I’ll have to hear about it.

A lot of my college Friday nights were spent with Hal Sirowitz, except he didn’t know it. I went to the Lower East side to watch him slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Bob Holman was the master of ceremonies, and as such surveyed the audience for would-be judges. He always picked me; I think because I was a white girl. I never had the guts to perform there, and I still don’t. I’m not really a poet, and a lot of what goes on there isn’t really poetry; it’s comedy. Which brings me back to Hal Sirowitz’s collection of poems about things his mother, father, and therapist said. I could write these for days.

Unlike the poem above that I wrote today, I drafted this next bit a while ago as I was getting ready for the Costume Institute’s Benefit at the MET. I swallowed, but did not taste sushi, as I wrote this, in tribute to Mr. Hal Sirowitz:

Never go to a party hungry, Mother said,
because you’ll eat too much greasy food once you arrive.
And then you’ll be too tired to dance,
and your lips will look too shiny,
like you spent too much time applying Mac products.
Then he’ll be afraid you’re not a natural beauty,
so he won’t ask you to dance.
Then you, with your distended stomach,
will cry and ruin your mascara,
which will drip and damage your dress.
Then I’ll have to pick it up from the cleaners.

These days, though mostly the nights, have become a blur.  I hear the wails in my sleep, stirring beneath a tent of comfort, hoping they’ll quiet.  I read them poetry after they eat, trying to avoid the whole eat/sleep cycle where babies become dependent on eating in order to sleep.  I never thought I’d be the type to read poetry.  Little Women or Anne of Green Gables, yes.  Guess How Much I Love You, certainly.  But the other day, I gravitated toward my favorite poet, Sharon Olds, and randomly opened the book to a poem titled New Mother.  Sometimes I read something and think, I want that, that clarity, those words, the images and the way they’re culled together, weaved into a bright tapestry where threads don’t fall loose.  These words are not mine, but I wish they were:

A week after our child was born,
you cornered me in the spare room
and we sank down on the bed.
You kissed me and kissed me, my milk undid its
burning slip-knot through my nipples,
soaking my shirt.  All week I had smelled of milk,
fresh milk, sour.  I began to throb:
my sex had been torn easily as cloth by the
crown of her head, I’d been cut with a knife and
sewn, the stitches pulling at my skin–
and the first time you’re broken, you don’t know
you’ll be healed again, better than before.
I lay in fear and blood and milk
while you kissed and kissed me, your lips hot and swollen
as a teen-age boy’s, your sex dry and big,
all of you so tender, you hung over me,
over the nest of the stitches, over the
splitting and tearing, with the patience of someone who
finds a wounded animal in the woods
and stays with it, not leaving its side
until it is whole, until it can run again.

I love the way Olds does that, makes me imagine someone caring for a wounded animal, nurturing it, when speaking of sex again, for the first time.  I wish I could do this more in my writing.  Part of me fears it, fears it will appear overwritten.  In poetry it’s one thing, but in a memoir, would it seem out of place?  I wish my head worked this way, leaned in these directions, for clarity and the art of it.