“I Think Ur a Contra” - Vampire Weekend

This morning I drove past a house I very much wanted to buy a couple of years ago.  With its cedar shake shingles brown as caramel and coffee and carpets of shade loving hostas I used to walk through and admire while he measured and evaluated the garage. I park by this beautiful little house most mornings now, for five minutes. Walk across the street to the Scandinavian-feeling coffee shop I love and buy a large, room for cream. Smooth my work clothes and balance my keys and cup, open the door and pivot. Walk back across a leafy street studying this house, every day. This morning, there is a face in the open and ornate lead glass window in the attic nook that I loved. The family who bought it has two small boys and a Guatemalan nanny and in 30 second observations, I watch them tend the garden and laugh, take the kids out for an early, dewy walk. The mom and the nanny always waving goodbye to the father and turning south down Bryant into the sunrise. Like co-mothers.

There’s been some self lecturing this spring. Over sadness that should be eradicated. The last bit vacuumed up into some Kashi commercial vision of carefree joy and good health. On Monday I sit in my therapist’s office with one leg tucked under myself and we talk about how you can think someone is maybe an asshole and still be sad about aspects of them.  She had a broken engagement once, which we speak of like old friends.  She said yes to a man she loved but knew it wasn’t right to marry and so then she said no at the last minute and went to stay with a friend of her mother’s and cried for a summer. And now when she talks about it - or when I talk about my own messes - tears sway up, tempting her levees and they do not break over but mine do and I think what a good woman I have for a therapist; a woman who aches with you. 

And this week she does two things: She tells me that trying not to feel is like starvation dieting. That the more I restrict and guilt myself and focus on being “strong” enough to not feel, the more it will hurt. The more that old past with its disappointments will rally up to be heard and allowed. The weaker and less tethered I will feel. And then she talks me through it and lets me admit that it is not quite hurt. It is anger. “Where do you feel it in your body?” she asks and I say “throat” - fighting to get the word out of that constricted mucusy tunnel and she nods and asks what I am angry about. And after four or five false starts I say this: I am so angry that you chose the lesser version of yourself. I am so angry that you didn’t live up to the potential I saw in you - whether you’re with me or not. I know there were glimmers of goodness and integrity and You. Didn’t. Choose. Them. And I cry and think it’s ok to still feel raw even if it doesn’t make sense. It’s ok to hold one hand of sadness and one hand of gratitude that things became what they needed to be. And I drive home, feeling freed and regrounded at the same time. 

After you part, people will say “At least you didn’t have kids” and “Thank God you didn’t buy that house” and you nod and ignore them, busy examining their relationship. Wonder how this man and woman come together and stay together and don’t wake up terrified in the night. Of staying or being left or being stuck. Wonder if one of them feels trapped or lost. Wonder if one of them is bone weary of trying to keep the other happy. I moved out of the rented house almost eleven months ago, alone. Two polite college movers pretending that I wasn’t crying when they asked what was staying and what was going. And there were no contracts to dissolve, no joint properties to sell. I left what I thought I should, still being polite back then. And you never had a conversation about ending. Enough silence and unanswered phone calls and I finally did the dirty work. Left a break up letter and evicted myself.  And then it was like we had never existed at all.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the list of things I demurred to men on in my 20’s, in my 30’s.  Shoulder length hair, no tattoos, stupid boxy shirts and lacy skirts and don’t say douche bag. And now it feels gauche to say douche bag and so I probably won’t do that. But I haven’t cut my hair in months and months and it is getting streaky with silver and the albino arches around my face that go inexplicably blond in the summer and it falls down my back and I love the heft of it. And I think I might let it grow for ages. After brunch with girlfriends, we end up back at an apartment. And in between games I go out to the hallway with a 25 year old redhead and say, “let’s run” and we spring past doorway and doorway and doorway and pool and workout room and lobby and door and door and door. And sometimes, running this fast barefoot seems like the best feeling in the world. So I run late in the grass or early in the hallway and I think life feels a lot like this now.  I can be sad in one hand, but in the other, I can be so free and fast. I can turn my car in to the city and not toward the suburb that stifled for three years and I can wish you well enough and be alone tonight. I can put down this carriage and plow, all these expectations of what you wanted me to be and I could never be. I don’t have to be anything for you, anymore.

I used to be far more attached to the value of notes. To letters and cards because this is my love language. If you can’t write it, what does it even mean? Even your words, coming out of your mouth right now, meet my brain like a court reporter. Are transcribed mentally while you talk. Are highlighted and rewritten and I bite my tongue and try to say only every tenth time I want to “I wish you would say __________________________ instead.” 

Since I’ve been listening to this song, I’ve been thinking of those old notes. Of how many years of post-its affixed to mirrors before business trips and tiny slips tucked into luggage and lunches and anniversary cards and Christmas cards and birthday cards and what did most of them mean?  Think of how easy it is to say the right thing. So easy you wonder why any men waste any time saying the wrong. And I wonder like an archaeologist at their authenticity. If I had kept them all and spread them out in a patchwork, what could we tell? I think we all meant some as much as we possibly could have then. And some were The Motions. Just gone through.  Some I wrote after I stopped trusting you and some you wrote after I started drowning you and still we kept writing.  Now, I think I care more for the spontaneous right things, the seemingly insignificant right things that men wouldn’t even know they are doing. The things someone writes back in a Monday morning email without me asking or expecting at all. The goodness that surprises me and not the hollywood promises I wanted too much.  That must have been exhausting for the men I’ve loved.  And where was the room to ever say just what they meant?

I listen to this song and I knew it from the start. I know this contra; I have been this contra and I have loved this contra. Eventually the wars figure out the defectors and the nationalists and we maybe we switch armies and life just goes on.

But these lines will stay in one hand, breaking my heart 100 years later.