she never gives in, she just changes her mind
my junior year in college found me stir-crazy and dissatisfied with life. in that state of mind, i flung myself into the idea of spending the second semester of my senior year abroad, in london. i applied, hoped, dreamed, and recieved an acceptance letter to UCL right after september 11th.
by then, however, my senior year was shaping up to be a barrelful of fun. friends returning from overseas, no more newspaper-running chaos, enjoying my photography class… so i wandered around for a few days, offering my indecision on the grounds that the world seemed like a much more unsafe place after 9/11. most friends and family took this with an understanding nod.
i bumped into marvin, a psychology professor i’d studied with and gotten along with famously. when he asked about whether i was still going abroad, i offered up that stock response. marvin took one look at me, smirked, and said i was being an idiot. of all people he knew, he said, i was the least likely to be afraid of anything overseas. he took a moment, looked closely at my face, and said, “no, that’s not the reason at all. it’s simply that you’ve changed your mind and you’re afraid of looking foolish so you’ve concocted this other seemingly rational reason.” seeing my surprised look of agreement, he patted me on the shoulder and said, “live your life, krissa. and don’t be afraid to turn on a dime.”
it was the first time i’d ever heard that expression outside the context of a car’s turning radius. i understood, however, that following a path simply because it was the path you’d decided to travel was no way to live a fearless life. time and time again, since that talk with marvin, i’ve had cause to remember it. take the easy route? follow through on stated desires or plans? or allow yourself the freedom to change your mind?
for years, since the termination of my last long-term, serious relationship at twenty, i’ve sworn off the idea of “love” at first sight. no, no, i said. you can like, lust, someone without knowing them well. but love? no. love takes time, and trust, and a deep understanding of the other person. love is not instant.
then i met stuart. and the combination of how well we get along, with our shared belief in fearless emotional honesty… it was like a chemical fire. i opened my heart without compunction or distrust and he did the same. and you can call it whatever you want. yes, it’s new. yes, there are years of trust and time that need to accumulate for everyone else to accept wholeheartedly the idea of true love between us. but we do.
i could have rationalized this by calling it a different kind of love, or something leading up to love. that would have allowed my prior beliefs to rest comfortably in place while making room for this amazing, inspiring, deeply loving and beautiful man in my life.
but i didn’t. i’m not rationalizing anything. i have fallen in love. i have changed my mind. i have switched my path. i will continue to do what it takes to keep him in my life. i love him, and i have thrown my arms around him without the slightest reservation. for me to do anything less radical would be an insult to this beautiful thing we’ve found in each other. so i’ve turned on a dime.
and i couldn’t be happier.
city of bankerly love
i’m a little disturbed by philadelphia. specifically, the corner of 17th and walnut. here in the heart of “center city” i’m sitting at an internet cafe. let me rephrase that. the ING Direct Cafe. wherein casual passerbys can purchase incredibly inexpensive coffee, use free internet, and chat with the baristas who are, it seems… qualified banking experts.
beyond my fear that i’m going to walk out of here with an unwanted checking account attached to my back… how sad is it that bankers are now serving coffee to plebians? what DO they put on their nametags at business school reunions?
oh, it just got worse. now they’re playing oasis.
heart, meet sleeve
blogging is often a game of coquetterie, where the writer flashes a little leg and lets the reader play the seductive game of reading between the lines. i do it just as well as the next blogger, i fully admit.
the thing is, none of that today. i’m in love. i’m in love with the most beautiful man i’ve ever met, and i have no cute or coy way to say it. i met him a week ago. i’ve spent every night with him since. we’ve stayed up late, whispering secrets and telling stories. he pulls me to him on the subway platform and kisses me with promise and purpose and my knees turn to water. he tells me the truth and listens to my truths, and this week has been spent wandering around new york, arm in arm, an island of two.
i love him for so many reasons, they’d sound like a resume if you heard them. but most of all, because i’ve finally found the man i can be fearlessly open with, the man i can pour myself into. i have finally given my heart to someone and had them recieve it with joy and care.
and he lives in england. and he’s moving here. and there will be days and weeks and months of details and questions and job searches and visas and phone calls and longing and laughter down the phone lines – and i hope you can all be there for the ride. and i hope you have ideas and advice. because we’re doing this. one way or another.
so whether you believe in true love, this quickly, is not a matter we need to discuss. i don’t know if i did either. but then i met him. and he kissed me. and i held his hand and i hold his heart. he’s what i’ve always been looking for and never knew existed …
and he loves me.
flash! bam! alakazam!
you’ll have to forgive me, cookie monsters. the rose-colored glasses i’ve found make it difficult to read webpages. getting hit by lightning leaves you too electrified to touch a keyboard. floating ten feet off the ground, well…
leaves precious little time for blogging.
so give me a minute to gather my wits again, wipe this grin off my face, grab a cupcake, and tell you everything. soon.
let me tell you exactly about a girl like me
stepping out of the elevator for my cigarette break, this burly older man steps in line with me, and begins a completely unsolicited conversation about the magazine company i work for, whose masthead is listed in the elevator.
he says he’s polish. his cheeks are red and his goatee is disturbingly white and straight-bristled. he looks like santa claus’s hard-partying brother. as we exit the building, i light up my cigarette and prepare to walk away, having answered in short responses his questions about the company. but he persists, explaining he was once a journalist in poland, and that he rode the trans-siberian railroad once, back in the grandeur of the soviet era.
this all seems normal. until he leans far too close and says with a lecherous smile, “and i was traveling with a mistress, she was a girl just like you, a beautiful girl. she was wild! man was she -”
this is the point where i step back about a foot, a hard smile pulls across my face, and i say, “i’m sorry, i’m meeting someone. have a nice day.” i turn heel in my boots and stalk the other way.
for someone who always complains about letting people’s affronts shock me into a polite silence, i’m quite proud of the sudden instinct that drove me to walk away quite clearly uninterested in letting him finish that sentence. must be something in the air. something strong.
great loves
over a year ago, i stood at the edge of a dance floor, watching one of the most beautiful friends in my life sailing around the room on the arm of the only man she’d ever, and will ever, love. i cried, the only time i cried at her wedding, and her father came up to me quietly and put his arm around my shoulder.
“this will happen for you, too. and we’ll be there, my family, to cry happy tears for you.” his comforting arm, his intuition, and his kindness just made me cry harder, so he took me outside for a cigarette and told me funny stories about growing up in india.
the intervening year and its disappointments has built up a hard ugly layer of cynicism over a belief i’ve cherished for years – that great love is really the only thing worth fighting for and nothing trumps it. for reasons that will stay close to my heart, reasons both personal and external, something’s happened to slough off that scar tissue of disappointed detachment.
i remember what it felt like to watch her dance with him and know i’d find that someday. i look at my coupled friends with renewed appreciation of their passion. i believe in great love again. i always did. i can’t believe i spent a year blustering otherwise.
welcome, spring.
tom petty said it best
here’s the thing: i haven’t heard back from any of the six law schools i applied to. i sent all my applications in about a month before they were due, so this is an understandable delay. it’s not like it means i’m more likely to get rejected just because it’s taking longer to hear back.
but the waiting.
there are so many things i want to do, every day, that i struggle with the knowledge that i’m planning on laying three years of my life effectively into cement. law school means pursuing a scary, unknown and difficult dream i have. laying down plans for the future. but it also means forfeiting a lot of today. it means no crazy exciting travel for three years. less time with friends. much less money. less of that careless bohemian hither-tither wandering that makes my otherwise bougie life worth living. looked at carefully on the scales, both paths – the going and the not-going – have their merits and downsides.
and the waiting.
every day that i wait, i evaluate with more clarity how i’ll deal if i don’t get in … anywhere. don’t flatter me. it’s a possibility. and i may be a soaring romantic when it comes to some things, but in matters of les cartes d’avenir, i like to be realistic. so there stands the hairy ugly beast that is rejection. that is not getting in anywhere. and what will i do? how will i say to my loved-ones and cheerers-on, “yes, i was planning on going, and no, i’m not doing so.” my pride, drat my wounded pride!
oh, the waiting!
when i first started to seriously consider the rejection beast, i flippantly said to a friend, “well, if i don’t get in, then i’ll definitely write a novel.” i was mostly kidding. i’m sort of not anymore. lengthy inspiring discussions with stuart, as well as the myriad of recent encouragement that’s poured out of friends and readers alike, has made me take a harder look at a path i thought i’d decided against years ago. who knows. don’t count any chickens before their parents meet and mate. i may not write anything. i may switch jobs. i may travel. i may fall in love. i may start up windsurfing or wood carving. i may, very well, do anything i’d like to do.
but the point is, the waiting will be over, eventually. until then, there are only two things i DO know:
1. if i get in, then i have the choice of going to law school. which is what i want.
2. if i don’t, the world remains as it always has been: my oyster.
maybe the waiting isn’t the hardest part. maybe it’s really just the choosing.
..and every stranger’s face i see reminds me that i long to be..
if the sky is light when you go to sleep and dark when you wake up, is that the inverse of sleep?
where exactly on the spreadsheet of forward-marching time does the elastic exhaustion of jet lag live?
i finally fell asleep last night [this morning? tonight?] by tucking my head into the corner of one seat and shoving my feet into the seat-pocket of the other. it only lasted an hour, but it was the closest i came, after three espressos at the airport and two cokes on the plane, to approximating the sensation of sleeping on a grounded horizontal surface. but while it mimicked my tendency to shove one arm, crooked, under the pillow that supports my head, it was lacking severely in the chalk-marked-dead-body aspect of my leg pattern – that is, one stretched out and the other pulled up and bent at the knee, usually corresponding to which side my head is turned to.
and worst, most ignoble of all, the shortness of air on planes makes me drool tenfold my usual amount. so there you have me: feet shoved into seat pocket, arms clenched around head, hands clenched at chin, lower back poked by seat buckles, collecting buckets of drool.
the dreams of the inverse-night plane-sleeper are either lost in low-oxygen ether, or remembered and exceedingly bizarre. the sound of a passenger snoring made strange dream-babies with the constant rumble of the engine and the uneven hum of the wing slicing through clouds. it left me dreaming of driving down the road in a car with long hairy arms instead of a steering wheel. as i tried to navigate the rumbling machine down the road by jerking at the weird forearms that protruded from the dashboard, some part of my still restlessly-conscious brain thought,
this flying thing is for suckers.
as a child, i had very little jetlag because i actually slept on these netherworld overnight flights. i’d stretch my tiny body across the two seats my mother always miraculously procured for me and dream my way over the atlantic, or mediterranean, or the wilds of the sahara, or the caribbean. as i got older and taller, i discovered other tricks of the flyer’s trade. the seat-rest foot-tuck. using the pillow as a bridge between the edge of your seat and the window. exactly where to fold your coat so that the metal arm of the chair doesn’t cut into your ribcage.
but still the relentless march of my age takes its toll and i find myself more and more disoriented after every international jaunt. it’s like i’m stoned. my body is on autopilot, so that i’ve taken a shower, gotten on the subway, and spent three hours at work without even choosing these movements. i’m fine. friendly, even. until some tiny grain of sand gets wedged in the machinery of forward-motion. like i can’t find my lighter, even though i’m sure i put it in my coat. or someone questions the simple writing-down of a phone number. or the printer stupidly chooses 11×14 instead of 8×11. or my finger gets briefly trapped between the drawer and desk-frame.
and the exhausted frustration makes my inner child [the one who used to love sleeping on airplanes and playing make-pretend in airports] beat her tiny fists against my breastplate from the inside, so that suddenly i am fighting a wailing scream that will end only when i collapse to the ground and sleep for what feels like it should be eight solid days.
olha que coisa mais linda, mais cheia de graca…
it was precisely the moment where i was drunkenly kicking sand around on the beach last night, arguing the value of techological innovation with fabio, wearing tiny red gingham shorts and a white button down, smoking a cigarette and drinking a caipirinha, that i realized…
this is the life.
