Black and Sun

Saturday Dennis drove from Kentucky to Massachusetts. Pulled into the driveway at 4:30 a.m. The next chapter of my life has now begun. Or rather, it is now time for me to begin the next chapter of my new life. Now that I have nothing left to complain about. [As if. I can always find something to complain about, otherwise I’d have no blog!]

As Dennis drove across the country in his little blue car, I became restless. A little frightened. Do I know what I’m doing? I kept asking myself. As if I had an answer to give myself. Dammit, answer me! my frantic mind swore at some other part of self presumed to know anything about anything. And in the absence of an answer I balked at my vast potential to fuck everything up.

And as if to prove my frantic, foreboding mind right, I pulled out an old journal one night and flipped open to a random page. The page contained my reflections upon arriving in New Zealand. The sea was an unimaginable color blue. I was happy and hopeful. I’d never been so excited in my life, I wrote. With the hindsight of seven years, I read my reflections cynically. How naïve I was, thought my frantic mind. So I flipped to another page towards the back of the journal. Where I found fodder for my frantic mind. Malaise and discontentment had set in. Questioning whether it was me, or Simon, or New Zealand that made me unhappy. Why couldn’t I ever just be happy?

My frantic mind sneered. You see, you’ll never be happy, you’ll just fuck everything up. You’re better off alone. And I began to count down the days left to be alone. The abundance of alone time I had been loathing these last several months, now strangely coveting.

But you know what? It’s not like that.

Dennis pulled into the driveway at 4:30 Sunday morning and ate the blueberries I left him as a midnight snack and then climbed into bed. But not before mailing two postcards. One to me: I’d cross 3,230 miles for you…And I just did! One to the cats: Dear black cats – Behave yourselves! Which we received the day before yesterday. And everything is fine. My frantic mind hasn’t imploded under the immense pressure not to fuck up my life. I think the thin voice of my rational mind must’ve spoken up when I was sleeping and told my frantic mind to put a sock in it. So now it’s back in its corner, quietly chewing on its sock.

And now I have someone to come home to in the evenings. Which is good, because my job is sucking more than ever. But now I can come home and chatter glibly about how much my job sucks, how horrible traffic was driving home, what I want to eat for dinner. And I go off to taekwondo and come home and we cook dinner – and I’m eating better now, not just pasta and frozen meatballs and whatever else I can heat up in a bowl – and Dennis plays with his iPod, and I doze off reading my book. And this weekend we’re going to do some gardening – and I’m going to pretend that I don’t kill everything that grows in dirt – and we’re going to go see Fahrenheit 911, and we’re going to go swimming at Walden Pond. And it’s just normal. How things should be. Can I sustain contentment? Maybe…if I quit asking myself that blasted question…

I’m in Nashville. For work. Staying at this monstrosity of a hotel and convention center that is The Gaylord Opryland.

Surreal doesn’t even begin to sum it up. From the little private balcony outside my room, I can look down on a waterfall and dozens of species of greenery, a simulated rain forest dotted with white-clothed restaurant tables. To the other side is a swamp, replete with cypress stumps and Spanish moss. Plump, brightly clad families with bouncy, sugar-happy kids pay to take boat rides around the food court. Nine acres of man-made nature co-existing in harmony with gift shops, steak houses and Chick-Fil-A, all encapsulated beneath a giant dome of glass. Climate-controlled and not a mosquito in sight. A biosphere for the fucked up state of the human race.

And heading meaningfully towards the conference center along the Garden Walkway are the corporate-logo-crested-golf-shirt-and-khaki-pants-wearing-laptop-toting conference attendees. Of which I am one. Oh lord, of which I am one. I head straight to the usability lab, where I take refuge in my flimsy purpose for being here, and from whence I reemerge ten hours later, head spinning, stomach aching, wondering what the hell I’m doing in a conference center wearing a golf shirt two sizes too big.

But if the Opryland Conference Center exists in Nashville, so does my blog-buddy and ethernet poetess, Annie. Whom I have finally gotten to meet in person.

Last night Annie picked me up and took me far away from this lush hell on earth. She transported me to The Lipstick Lounge, Nashville’s strangely classy local gay bar, where we ate burgers and drank beer and played very bad pool in a cozy upstairs room amidst vintage photos of heroic women. Where we got fawned over by beautiful boys that had no intention of taking us home. “Gay boys are so affirming,” Annie said. It’s true. And so are gay girls. I felt affirmed. Downstairs Tuesday Night Karaoke was in full swing. The ladies were getting rowdy. We sat down at a corner table of assorted gay and straight girls and boys and watched beautiful people sing karaoke extraordinarily well. Everybody clapped and yelled. Everybody loved everybody. Everybody was so damn cool. I was beside myself with happiness. I was mesmerized. Another beer down the hatch and Annie got up on stage and sang Debbie Gibson in a sultry alto. I sat in the corner — the shy, straight girl in black — and grinned till my cheeks hurt. I could have stayed in this little world forever.

I want to be gay and live in Nashville, I said to Annie, in the car heading back to my hotel. I was only half kidding. I think what I meant was, I want to be real.

Back in the contrived elegance of the Opryland Cascades Lobby, I sat down in an armchair and tried to call Dennis. No answer, just a message, he’s in Denver tonight, staying with his brother.

I’m plunged into dissonance. I don’t want to go back up to my hotel room with its sterile, scratchy hotel sheets. I don’t want to put my corporate golf shirt and khakis back on tomorrow. I don’t want to go back to my corporate job. I don’t want to go to work every day just so I can someday pay for an overpriced mortgage for a house in the suburbs that I don’t even want. If I knew what I wanted to do, I’d throw the towel at the corporate wall and go off and do it. But I don’t. I don’t yet. I only know that I want to be real. I want to be cool. I want to be affirmed. I want to be someone that people like to be around.

I think I’m on the precipice. Teetering. A fall might do me some good.

I moved last weekend. Said goodbye to the trees outside my window, threw my bedroom into a box. Dennis came into town to do all the work. I shuttled furniture around the rooms till it looked just so. Fussed over curtains. Filled the drawers and cupboards. Put rugs on the floor. Set up my big rimu New Zealand bed.

And within a weekend we had a home. A bedroom and a spare, living room, dining room, kitchen. Two black cats perched in the windows – Marley gets the front and Tosca the back; when they meet in the hallway they hiss. But those are the only squabbles. No roommates fighting in the kitchen.

Then Dennis went back to LA for his last two weeks of gainful employment. The last trip to the airport. June 13 he’ll load up his car and drive east.

My new route to work gets me there ten minutes faster. But coming home to my own empty house is something I’ll have to get used to. Like clomping around in my mom’s grown-up shoes, it feels too big for my little girl feet. I remember now why I chose to endure roommates rather than live alone – it’s easier to fill up your alone space when you’re shutting out unwanted company, than when you have all the alone space in the world, all to yourself.

I turn on the radio for company; circulate the same five CDs over and over. Toss toy mice for the cats. Cook dinner to fill my new home with smell. Take long baths. Tuesday I bought myself a chocolate pie and ate half in one sitting…because I could…feeling rebellious like a kid left home alone. Ate the other half Wednesday.

Tonight I began to tackle the rest of the unpacked boxes. But I got sidetracked. Nobody to interrupt me, I spent the evening pouring through Dennis’ photo albums. I’d seen the pictures before — he showed me, narrated. But now, alone, I studied each photo, looking for threads connecting the boy to the man he’d one day become. I know the man; I know some things you don’t yet know, I think, looking at the grinning, joking little boy. But you know so many things I’ll never know. Who were you? How did you grow to become the Dennis I now know? I know the stories, I try to connect the pictures along the chronology of places and events. I can never figure out where the long-hair pictures fall. And absent are the college years. I know that this is when the joviality began to cast shadows, the gentleness took on an edge. I look into the eyes of the friends and girlfriends, trying to decipher what they’re saying to the boy on the other side of the camera.

I learn too much and nothing at all from this exercise. I learn that you should never presume to know all there is to know of a person. I look forward to all the yet unrevealed things I’ll discover in the man I think I know.

The boxes are still on the floor. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll finish what I started…