the vanishing point

I've started to believe in dreams again, and he has long been my favorite. We've been many things to each other in both our time together and apart. There haven't been words to describe most of them. We are something like friends-- we've settled there with relative ease before-- but there is simply no denying that, together, we come alive. He wakes me up from a life I otherwise sleep through. And I burn into him. We'll always share that much in common: we bear each other's scars.

I pulled up to his house with giddy anticipation. We were celebrating his birthday, and I got out of my car with cupcakes in hand. I was met by a lawn full of wishes. I plucked the tallest, roundest one, and closed my eyes, blowing the seeds apart-- mostly into my own face. They stuck gracelessly in my hair and eyelashes, and I giggled, shaking them off as I waited at the door for a face I see far too infrequently.

He appeared, and we embraced for a long while. I felt an ease come over me that I hadn't felt in too long, a happiness I scarcely could contain. How can you contain it when you're so close to the things you've wanted for longer than you're willing to admit?

I left the cupcakes in the kitchen and we sat for a while on opposite couches, catching each other up on our day-to-day lives. How busy he has been. How busy I have been. We covered the bullet points of the Venn diagram of us, focusing on the middle-- the things and people we have in common. We talked about the foreseeable future-- about the career he is preparing for, and the one I'm hoping to embark on.

"I really hope you get it," he said.

"I'm too scared to think about it too deeply. To really want it," I said.

"Why?" he asked.

"Then it becomes real. Hope is dangerous. It's dangerous to want so much."

We both smiled, caught off-guard by what I'd said without exactly meaning to say it. I looked away.

We spent the lovely afternoon that we had both desperately needed. We played childhood games, laughing at silly jokes that no one else ever seems to appreciate. I sang a bashful solo "Happy Birthday" over a half-dozen chocolate and vanilla cupcakes. "This is where I make a wish?" he asked.

I immediately flashed back to another spring, another birthday, sitting in his car, in the unseasonable cold. That was the night we had first discovered our mutual feelings for one another, and I'd remembered that I still had birthday candles in my purse from my best friend's party weeks before. I retrieved a candle, though neither of us carried a lighter.

"Well, make a wish anyway," I had said, holding a single white birthday candle between my thumb and forefinger. It all felt like the end of a John Hughes movie.

He knew better than to question it, and closed his eyes, blowing the imaginary flame between us. A few moments went by, with me nestled against his chest. "I'm surprised you didn't ask me what I wished for," he said.

I looked him in the eye. "If I ask, then it won't come true."

Our lips found each other for the first time. The first taste of magic.

"That's what I wished for," he had laughed, running his fingers through my long, straight hair.

Extraneous memory, I thought, back in the present, in his kitchen again. "This is where you make your wish," I confirmed. "Wish wisely."

He closed his eyes and blew out the very real flames that flickered over three of the cupcakes. We chose our flavors. "I can't tell you what it is," he teased.

"Nope," I said, scooping a bit of chocolate frosting off with my finger.

He sat next to me on the couch, and held out his arm for me. I froze. So close to the things you've wanted. I quietly buried my head in his chest, listening to the familiar, unfamiliar beating of his heart. So long ago. We curled up into one another, in an innocent intimacy that I thought we'd grown too old and jaded for. So many thoughts echoed. Safe. Warm. The right things always come back around. 

"I owed you a cuddle," he explained.

"Right," I giggled. "This is for me."

"I don't know how things are going to play out," he said, "but... you're special. The way you speak. Your intelligence. Your fire. I wish I had just a little bit of that fire."

I laughed. "You are fire! I've never seen anyone push themselves like you do."

"Not like you," he sighed.

I squinted reflexively. "You really don't see yourself, do you?" It was rhetorical, but it had finally dawned on me. He'd been pushing himself to prove a worth that, although intrinsic to me, was a blind spot for him. It felt, for a moment, like the stories of our grandmothers, waiting patiently for the loves of their lives to return from war. Only the war was man against himself.

"I have met so many people. I've dated..." I trailed off. In the interim, I had even fallen very much in love. "But the bottom line is... nobody is you."

He pulled me closer, nuzzling his face into my hair. "Nobody is you," he mused. "No matter what happens, whether we end up together or not, I could never forget you. I mean, there are far better out there than I. But I'll never find another Katie."

"There aren't," I said. I've always hated when he says those things. I never know whether he has placed me on an undeserved pedestal, or if there is a subtext I'm afraid to read-- but I don't like the thought of either. "And even if there are, why would I ever deserve better than you?"

"Because you're Katie."

"The world is full of Katies."

"I mean, I may meet other Katies, but none of them will ever be you. Nobody is you."

We sat together for a long while. He pulled me close, listening to me inhale and exhale, and I held him, words failing me. It's the simple things, I thought, that make life's complexities bearable.

"Do you ever wonder what if?" I asked. He emboldens me.

"Of course I do. All the time." His eyes burned into mine. "Just because I'm not always around doesn't mean I don't think about you. I just don't ever want to hurt you."

"Don't worry about me," I sighed. "I think I've already done all the crying over you that I'll ever do."

I remembered so many similarities in the way it had ended. He had told me I was the first person he thought about when he woke up in the morning and the last on his mind when he went to sleep at night.

I had said everything I needed to say, and probably more, reasoning to him, and to myself, that I didn't want to be the one with regrets someday. "That means something," I had told him. "You don't find that all the time. You don't just walk away from that."

But he did.

Ours is a love story that has spanned across springs, across too many empty seasons. Years go by, and they do so with more urgency. They build up speed; they gather momentum. More candles top our cakes. Maybe they're just enough to wish on now.

But I know, deep down, what happens next. For now, he will go back to his life, to working tirelessly to prove of himself things that I have never questioned. And I will go back to tirelessly throwing spaghetti at the wall of my own life, just maybe daring to hope a little harder for the things I know to be real-- for the things I already want too much.

But there is a point on the horizon where I have long seen our paths meeting. It is impossible to tell where. Maybe it is merely an optical illusion. Maybe it's akin to a mirage when you're dying of thirst, alone in a desert, and all you can think about is lifesaving water. But I wonder if I will find him there, someday, at the vanishing point.

Goodbyes have never been our forte. It's always been the emotional equivalent of pulling magnets apart. And no matter how many hours we while away together, it always comes too soon.

We stood on his lawn, and without a word, he plucked a dandelion, blowing its seeds far and wide,  his wishes vanishing with them into thin air.

Someday, I figure, we will see where they land.

mother's day

My mother, tending to a baby squirrel, Mother's Day 2015.

Happy Mother's Day, readers!

Today, I am reminded of how lucky I was to have grown up surrounded by strong women, particularly my own mother. When I think of my mother, I think of the tiny blonde force of nature who has never failed to leave those around her better than she found them.

I arrived late to a family party this afternoon, after an overnight at my volunteer ambulance company. It shouldn't have surprised me that, at the height of the party, she was sitting in a patch of dirt in the backyard, tending to a motherless baby squirrel. Nothing could better capture the essence of the woman who raised me.

Growing up, my brother and I witnessed her earnest, tireless drive to heal everything she found broken in the world. She has always been the kind of person who stops homeless people to ask them what they need, finding them later with blankets, food, and bottled water. As a stay-at-home mom during our early years, she generously offered to watch several of our peers with struggling single parents. And she took the tenderest care of her ailing mother-in-law, my beloved Nene, spending endless hours running errands, organizing a cornucopia of geriatric medications, and driving her on appointment after appointment, without complaint. My mother, quite simply, has never had anything in this world that she wasn't willing to share, whether it was her money, her time, or her uncommon gift of kindness.

In turn, I have had to share her-- not only with my brother, but with many she meets. Born a nurturer, she has been a motherly figure to many from her early days as the big sister of a large family, to her work as a nurse. My grandpa refers to her jokingly as "Mother Teresa without the religion," and he is not far off. There are many gifts to have in this world, but I have found none quite so rare as hers. She is pure heart.

She was a relatively young mom-- merely 23 years of age when I was born. It couldn't have been easy, and we didn't make it any easier for her. I was precocious. I rolled my eyes at her too much. I had too many opinions that I voiced too loudly, way too early on. I went through days of hormonal teenage angst that lasted well into my twenties. But my mom has loved me through it all.

I hope that I have begun to live up to the example she has set for us. I hope that my brother and I are somehow continuations of the legacy of compassion and caring that we simply could not ignore. I hope, someday, to be able to impart these gifts to another generation.

But, as a woman divorcing in my thirtieth year, I do not have the luxury of knowing whether children are in the cards for me-- which has been a difficult concept to come to terms with. Strongly maternal myself, I always imagined that I would someday have a family of my own, and I planned my life accordingly. But things fall apart, sometimes, in ways you can't quite piece back together. There are things you can change. There are things you can't.

Whatever life holds in store for me, I am lucky to have had her beautiful example to learn and to grow by. Though I may never quite live up to it, I couldn't be more thankful for the opportunity to try, every day, to fill the very big shoes of the very little woman I call my mom.

the other girl

I didn't even know she existed until the guy I'd been dating posted a vlog entry on YouTube. Although he spoke in generalities with characteristic charm, he chronicled a date he'd gone on after Easter dinner-- a date that I had not been party to. It was a clear enough time marker, and I knew I had been home alone, likely hoping to hear from him. That's the problem with smart girls. Until then, she had been theoretical. He had merely reserved her space. If I want to date other people. If I want options. She had been other people. She had been options. She had been if.

Moving forward, I never really cared to venture about who she was. I'd promptly removed myself from an overly complicated equation with one-too-many variables. I had solved, quite simply, for the appropriate "x" and I didn't look back.

I never knew her name or her face.

But she knows mine.

This is all weeks behind me now. I lead a busy life, and it's scarcely crossed my mind. Yesterday, however, the plot thickened. While talking to a new potential, he revealed that he knew the other girl, and that she'd been poking around, trying to learn what she could. He curiously knew my ex's name, and details too on-point to come from anyone but the girl in line behind me.

"How does she know we're friends? How does she even know who I am?" I demanded. It was uncomfortable, vulnerable, in the way it must feel being watched behind a one-way mirror. Someone was clearly looking at me, but I had no way to see to the other side.

He didn't reveal her name, but then, I never asked. I had already walked away from that situation with as much of my dignity as I could sweep up. I haven't verbalized, even to my closest friends, details she had so freely intimated. Part of me feels vindicated. We end up where we belong.

I cannot speak for her, because hers is a voice I do not know. But it's not a great leap for me to imagine that,  in this situation, you'll never really know where you stand. I know I didn't. Once you have the relevant information-- once you know that there is another girl-- it is no longer the romance you had the smallest hopes it might be. You know that it's not a love story you'll one day tell children. You know, with sad resignation, that it's not a love story.

I suppose she wanted to know the same things that I had initially been curious to know. What's she like? Is she prettier than I am? I suppose it mattered less to me because I didn't see him as territory I was looking to claim. Is there something about her that makes her, somehow, the better choice? This is perhaps the only answer I really have.

The other girl would always be the clear choice.

She had stayed.

champion

Happy May, readers! Today marks a brand new month for www.just-like-a-woman.com! 

The past week has been a dizzying circus. The other evening, I received a phone call from one of my best friends. Truthfully, I received several phone calls followed by frantic texts that read something to the effect, "CALL ME AS SOON AS YOU CAN! URGENT!"

He had always been championing me and my burgeoning writing career, and recently, his nudging had become more insistent. He introduced me to editors. He spoke with just about everyone he knew in the industry on my behalf. A few promising leads trickled in: I received emails, and phone numbers with instructions on the best time to call. I received guidance from people who had once been in my position, who now worked in the field of their dreams. On Monday evening, he called me with a proposed assignment.

Due to the inherent time constraints of a one-day deadline, I had no business taking it. I had worked late, and was prepping for another 13-hour workday on Tuesday. It left me with very little time to conduct interviews, secure photos, and write a first article that would impress an editor enough to want to work with me again. However, we do not have the luxury of choosing when an opportunity will arise. When it does, you take it. No matter what it takes, you take it.

I stayed up on the phone with him as a largely silent cheerleader, typing as I listened to him laugh at the television in the background. We'd been friends for more than half of our lives, and there was a certain comfort in just having him on the other end of the phone. I wrote the body of my 500-word article in just a few short minutes, and then spent hours second-guessing trivial differences in word choice and sentence structure. There came a point in the evening when I looked at what I had written on the screen, and decided that it was ready, even if I wasn't. I sent my article to the editor of the paper with a cross of my fingers.

Early the following morning, I received an email from the editor, applauding my story, and saying that she would definitely use me again in the future. It still was not a guarantee, I realized, that the story would run. Yesterday morning, while working my job in EMS, I happened upon a newsstand. Serendipity. I rifled through the paper to see if my article had made the cut. It was on page 10.

I rushed to send the photo of my byline to several people. He was first, of course, because it was chiefly his doing. He had made it happen.

"I wish there was a BIG way I could thank you for this," I said. "Maybe someday, when I make it."

"I prefer to be behind-the-scenes anyway. That's why I went into PR."

"That's so 'Wind Beneath My Wings' of you. Are we living the movie Beaches now? Don't be so Barbara Hershey!" We laughed.

They say opportunity knocks softly, but opportunity does not always knock. Sometimes, you have to chase it. Usually, you have to run after it like a fat kid chasing the distant song of the ice cream man. But, occasionally, you're fortunate enough to have someone in your corner who creates it for you-- who hunts it down, who places it neatly in your lap. He has been many things to me in our time together-- we've gone through many incarnations-- but more than anything, he has been my champion. If you're ever lucky enough to find a champion in life, never let them go.

just outside of everywhere

I was born the product of a rationalist and a dreamer: one with lofty aspirations that we never quite knew how to reach, or even see-- the other with hands that ceaselessly toiled in the earth. They were polar opposites, and we knew that very early on. Although it lasted for over two decades, like so many fruitful relationships, it was simply not meant to be forever. Maybe their union was just a trick of nature-- trying to create cosmic balance by bringing together two disparate beings-- generating new, recombinant life that, at the very least, had a shot at the best of both worlds.

My brother and I lived most of our lives in an awkward realm between today and tomorrow, never really knowing which to hold more stock in. We didn't belong to the sky or the earth. We didn't grow roots, and we were too affected by the gravity of pragmatism to ever quite reach the stars. We hovered somewhere in between-- just over the land, where we couldn't quite touch anything, and nothing could touch us.

We occupied that lonely space together, just outside of everywhere.

As adults, we are growing to have the distance that perspective requires. Opportunities have begun to surround me this year-- some of them rational and well-established, with the security of benefits, pension plans, and the comfort of reasonably knowing what to expect of tomorrow.

Another road glistens before me without any promises or expectations at all: an awe-inspiring though formidable cliff which beckons me to trust in what I had come to believe were vestigial wings.

But they are not. They beg to be tested.

I suppose, ultimately, we were lucky. We may not be able to simultaneously occupy both worlds, as we had once so desperately tried to-- but we have the unique option to move freely between them-- something akin to dual citizenship of the earth and stars.

the things that scare me

My earliest years were spent in quiet, careful introspection. I was a thinker, and I lived almost exclusively in my own head. I read. I wrote. I was afraid to venture out into the world, and I spent a great deal of time just observing life as it went on around me. I had been so afraid to make a mistake, or to potentially hurt something, that I never affected anything, either. My eyes were open, but I was closed off.

It occurred to me that I had approached my life as if it were a watercolor painting-- wanting to see the full picture before committing to the canvas. I needed to know where the white would be, where the spaces would show through, before making a stroke I would regret.

In recent years, I have actively pushed myself to really experience the world, to become a part of it. In essence, I try to do the things that scare me. I have generally found them to be good for me. They push me beyond my comfort zone. They expand the boundaries of the world I belong to. They make life interesting.

Although emergencies once seemed daunting, I became an EMT and I now regularly manage situations that would once have seemed impossible. They can be taxing, but they are routine.

I have taken leaps to explore and share feelings that the girl I once was would have pushed down forever. I have become strong enough to let myself be vulnerable. I tell people how I feel. I write an online diary for the world to see. I have become comfortable enough in myself and my ideas to be, so to speak, an open book.

Where I was once so painfully quiet and shy that a classmate went a full year thinking my name was Bridget, I find myself much more extroverted, befriending diverse personalities with ease.  I am actively engaged in a world where I once sat on the sidelines.

This weekend, I was given the opportunity to become a backstage assistant to a major Broadway star, which was a terrifying prospect, but one that I immediately said yes to. When would I ever get the chance to do something like that again? Although I feared the unknown, I took a necessary step forward into it, and ended up having a lovely day, learning much about major theatrical performances and getting to watch most of the production from the wings. She even cut me a slice of her own birthday cake.

This has been my year of taking necessary risks, of daring to say yes to all of the things that intimidate me just a little.

I now live in a different medium. Watercolors are beautiful, but life is not so neat. If you are actively living-- if you are truly participating in the world-- your canvas will be covered with many false-starts, strewn with nonsensical lines and colors that bleed into one another, sometimes in less-than-appealing ways. You will make missteps, but they are perhaps the most important element of the well-lived life.

ghost

It's been said that spirits-- if you are inclined to believe in them-- sometimes linger long after their physical presence has ceased to exist. Believers claim that it largely occurs in situations that end traumatically, suddenly-- those with the most heightened of emotions swirling around them. They are the ones who leave unfinished business. They leave loose ends.

There are loves like that, too.

It was the most logically illogical thing I've ever wanted, and it had felt so close, once. So lifelike. Too dreamlike to be real, but too real to be make-believe. We would while away sleepy midnight after midnight, talking endlessly, drunk on a new magic we had found together. I never quite figured out the trick.

So I came to believe.

I would nuzzle up against him. I loved his smell. "Those are just the pheromones," he laughed heartily, and I loved that, too. He became something like "base" in a childhood game of tag-- a tangible place where you're safe from everything, and nothing and no one can touch you.

When everything came to a crashing halt-- when we realized that we had to follow divergent paths in order to lead lives that made sense for us, it was sudden, and traumatic, and a loss. It was a loss of lives that could have been. They had glistened before us, full of promise not meant to be realized.

Loose ends. Unfinished business.

He has become a ghost in my life, and perhaps in his own. Every so often, I'll be left with a message from beyond, some evidence that he still exists, in some form, somewhere. I'll catch a glimpse of him too briefly. I'll get a text that rings with the most wonderful, terrible sound in all the world. I never give up the opportunity to tease him.

"How's my favorite phantom?" I'll giggle. "It's been too long. I need a proper haunting."

And I'll get a witty quip back, or all too familiar laments. And I'll sigh, and close my bright, starry eyes for a moment, holding the magic still within them. Deep down, I'll know that he chose the right path, and that someday, it will all make sense for us both.

But when things go wrong, he's where my mind wanders. That's begun to make me wonder if it isn't everything else in the world that makes up wandering for me.

Maybe he is home-- if in my memory only.

I have moved on with my life. I've been through many incarnations since those carefree days. In the process, I have had to make peace with the fact that some ghosts may never stop haunting.

For now, I will just take solace in the fact that the right things always come back around.