fixation.

This is the plan, yes? “Step by tedious step, we stumble away from abject failure.”

This is the plan.

Good to hear.

Edmund Fitzgerald

beerlabelsinmotion:

One of my favorite porters of all time, Edmund Fitzgerald by Great Lakes Brewing Company. This beer taught me that beer is more than just Bud Light and Miller Lite.

Absolutely perfect.

I’ve said things I didn’t mean, but I’d already said them out loud - forgive me, if you can find out how.

The final thing I wrote in Los Angeles didn’t post. I’ve never really gotten the hang of the Tumblr iPad app, so it could have been my fault. It’s not in my drafts, it’s not here. The words felt so important at the time, but I’m not particularly broken up that they’re gone. It really upset me at the time. Three days later, I don’t remember what the words were that I so regretted losing.

I worry about that a lot. I love to write my way through whatever I’m experiencing. I write very differently when we’re in the thick of it versus when I have the luxury of reflecting. I’m a person with big emotions and it’s in my nature to be as passionate as possible about anything worth giving my time to, and I realize that about myself a little more every day. Sometimes I don’t talk about the big things because maybe they’re not so big. Maybe tomorrow they hurt more, maybe they hurt less, but living through things out loud validates them in a way that maybe I’m not ready for. When I say this out loud, when I write this down, something gets actualized, and maybe it doesn’t deserve that.

A good friend of mine is better than anyone I’ve ever met at realizing when I’m thinking my way through a thing, and I have always appreciated that he asks me what I’m thinking before he knows I’m ready to vocalize it. He’s also particularly good at realizing that I haven’t worked my way through it enough to communicate well, but it’s always seemed to me that he doesn’t mind being part of the process and that makes me feel comfortable enough to just start talking. That’s different.

I felt big things two days ago, and I wrote about them in a way that felt too vulnerable and raw and then I put those words into the world anyway. Now I don’t have the faintest idea what I was so scared of. I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. I don’t know if those are feelings that deserved validation and reflection as they are, I don’t know if they’re ones that should have been laid to rest. It becomes more difficult by the day to prioritize and to know what’s real. 

But through that, I’m focusing. Friends have been particularly kind to me through this most recent round of uncertainty. I’ve been selectively careless with some feelings and swallowed others and even if it looks like I’m spinning out, I promise I’m trying. The most rewarding thing anyone can do for me right now is believe me. I am trying. One day at a time didn’t work and now I’m going hour by hour. If it gets down to minutes, we’ll handle it then. But thank you to those who have listened, who continue to listen, who handle the minutes and the hours and the days as necessary. Thank you, thank you. I would be little without you.

The weather is warmer than I expected, I tell you, and you laugh and shake your head and remind me that it’s summer and not all places are where I come from. My skin warms when we cross streets and immediately becomes too cool when we enter the shadow of buildings. I cross in the middle of the street so I can stay in the sun and you follow me without asking. I wish it was always going to be that way.

You tell me that there’s a version of me that you really like, and I don’t hear the rest because all I can think about are the versions of me that you hate. A few silences later I tell you that you don’t exist and you say “I’m right here” while grabbing my arm. It’s the first time we touch and it seems like you realize that, too. We are continuing to not talk about it and I start to feel like I’m about to break.

I tell you that I want to be a writer and it’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. Hearing it in my voice is disorienting and I want to repeat it until it sounds comfortable, but I suspect it never will. I scramble for an answer for when you ask me what I want to write and don’t find it in time. I make something up and you don’t believe it and you know that I don’t either.

The city and I are swirling at rates that don’t sync up. We’re too short, too tall, too fast, too slow. It always takes you the same amount of steps to realize I’m not with you. You never come back, but you wait for me to catch up and that will always be good enough. I ask where we’re going even though I don’t know where we are and you tell me I’ll know when we get there.

I tell you that I feel like I’m waiting for the universe to give me an answer in a speech I’ve given tens of times. The words fall out of my mouth in order in a way that’s calculated and rehearsed and somehow now that I’m saying them to you, I realize how unhappy I am. I tell you that I’m angry and I’m grateful that you don’t ask me at what.

The thing I’m waiting for is you and it takes a five hour flight and a bottle of wine before I realize it. I think about running away and wonder if I have the strength to just point at a map. I want to ask you to come with me and my throat catches me before I get the chance. I tell you instead that we should be pen pals. You ask me to send you a postcard every time I miss you and I tell you that I’m not sure I’m ready to ask you to hold on to any more of my feelings. You tell me you can handle it and I believe you.

We never reach our intended destination. We choose to fall down the wrong streets, our voices echoing off of things that are bigger than us. I tell you what you already know and I’m grateful that you listen. We’re smart enough to not make predictions. We’ll know when we get there.

My paternal grandfather passed on in 1995, the day before my tenth birthday. I don’t remember much about it, to be honest. I remember that we all spent a lot of time in the hospital, that I missed my first (and what would have been only) track practice, that a younger cousin was playing on the back of a chair and fell off and broke her collar bone in the ICU waiting room, and that I rode alone with my older brother to get milk and donuts from a nearby convenience store. 

What I also remember is that my father pulled nine-year-old me aside and told me that if there was one thing he wanted me to learn and remember for the rest of my life, it was that honesty and direct communication are the most important things in the world. It’s been eighteen years so I can’t quite remember how the whole conversation went, but the gist was that sometimes bad things happen, and what you have to do is be honest, no matter how much it hurts.

It comes as no surprise to me that the very first thing my father said to me today when we spoke on the phone was that he had cancer. He tends to deliver bad news the same way I do - little exposition with no small talk. My mother and I have a habit of leading out with “everyone is okay, but…” when we have to make unfortunate phone calls. If I had called her directly after totalling the van two weeks ago and made small talk for 30 seconds, I’m pretty sure she would have lost her mind when I got to the important “by the way, no one died” part of the conversation. My father and I communicate far less frequently than my mother and I do, so we don’t really have a precedent for these sorts of things. No small talk, no beating around the bush, just an announcement that he has cancer and will be starting radiation therapy tomorrow.

I have long said that one of the major issues I have to overcome is my desire to assign equal importance to every single thing in my life. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, so the saying goes, but I don’t think anyone ever expects someone to take it to the extremes that I do. I am a perfectionist. I care about something or I don’t, and if I care about it I’m going to give it everything I have. I will go to the ends of the earth for you if you ask. I do not have a threshold; I do not break. I will figure it out, whatever it is.

This one, though. This one, I’m not sure about. Cancer keeps taking people, invading their bodies and making them not understand themselves. I’ve watched person after person get taken down piece by piece and I am sick and fucking tired of it. We are approaching the fourth anniversary of losing Harry’s father to cancer, the one year anniversary of losing a friend to cancer, and today is the day I will remember as the one where I found out my father has cancer.

I am sick of saying that the world isn’t fair. I am sick and goddamn tired of watching human bodies succumb to a disease we can’t figure out. Human beings are incredible. We are limitless. Together, we can accomplish anything. But we can’t fix this. I can’t fix this. It is incomprehensible to me that we can’t figure this out.

I don’t have an eloquent way to wrap this up. I don’t know what my feelings are and I sort of have to figure that out before I work on vocalizing whatever it is I need to vocalize. But, cancer, fuck you. Fuck you, for real. It’s not eloquent, and I couldn’t care any less.