The Program

Here's what's happened.

I ran a lot, and stuck to a program--I felt taller and very proud, all my smiles were genuine.

Then I drank a lot, and the program fell to the curb and lay there with a broken spine.

I waited for a phone call from someone I'm not even crazy about, because I'm conditioned to wait. And maybe because I'm not done acting out disappointment in relationship, or because I'm not quite done not knowing that I am the one with all the magic.

In the end, I got a text. And I took it. Then I got a couple dozen more, and I took those too.

Meanwhile, the program continued to lie there in the curb as it rained without stopping for five solid days, and the program glared at me and said, please, please, put down the bottle and pick me up. So I poured some vodka into its mouth and the program was soothed back into silence.

In the interim, I started learning to play the guitar. I fell in love with it, got blisters on my fingers, and thought the guitar would be my new husband.

But the weather turned cold, and the guitar proved a chilly and unyielding bedfellow.

I called my ex, and he came. Then I called him again, and this time he came with chocolate. The speed and consistency of his coming, and his tendency to bring snacks, measured up stunningly against the shallow, half-hearted, and slow-in-coming responses of the Text-er (who recently took two entire days to shoot me a Facebook email regarding a clearly time-sensitive request I had made in a needy moment), and I began to wonder what was the point in keeping one's options open?

I mean, if one's options consist of a handful of perpetually hung-over hipsters with overly-cultivated facial hair and an inability to engage in actual voice-to-voice telephone contact, anyway? Right?

No point at all.

Then my ex came over one too many days in a week and I caught him unawares, face down on the bed in a classic self-deprecation spiral, moaning about the nameless ennui that had suddenly over-taken his limbs, and made it impossible for him to make a decision or even, in fact, to move at all. And I remembered what had out-weighed the chocolate, the cuddling, and the promptness of phone-call returning in the first place.

(Sigh.)

So I picked up the program. I held it in my arms and begged it to come back. I donned my sweats and pulled up my hair and went for a wheezing run. I promised my guitar I'd be back to make out later, and I will.

Poem

When I open myself up again to being touched,
I want to write poems again, and only then.
They never show up for me in the cool, closed spaces
of rest, or hiking alone up a mountain day after day.

Perhaps there is something that links poetry and touch,
skin on skin, two people breathing in and out of
each other, that feral and unfocused grasping. The strange
weight of some new arrangement of bone and flesh
pressing itself against your own frame, also suddenly
unknown to you. Something in it like words,
slippery, unfamiliar.

But no songbird or sunrise in either, no mention
now of loving anyone. Just hands and faces pushing,
pushing against the dark.

MJB

Yesterday was a phenomenal day. I listened to my morning affirmations and dutifully repeated them to myself--primarily because of a tarot card reading the night before which was clearly, inarguably, letting me know that the secret to my happiness (brilliant, sparkly, star and princess of cups-type unbelievable happiness) is to re-program the evil robot who habitually chants a litany of negative thought loops into my brain. Actually, he's not really a robot, per se, I'm thinking of someone else's evil mind-monster. No, mine is this horrible abs-of-steel Armani-suit wearing guy who works on Wall Street, that stands like he has a metal rod for a spine, just behind my right shoulder, and never seems to run out of criticisms. You're not a real writer, you're not taking care of yourself, you're irresponsible (that extension you filed for your taxes is about to run out and you still haven't found an accountant), you're wasting the last vestiges of your youth on a series of meaningless activities that are leading you nowhere, the bar is no place to find love, do you really think that at your age you can get away with wearing skirts that short? That kind of thing.

So he needs to be re-programmed. And I think this is possible. I think that my brain is just the site of a million chemical reactions per minute, and by breaking the usual patterns of chemical reactions that send me spiralling into self-deprecating and unproductive darkness, I can get rid of Armani-suit guy and replace him with someone more benign--a voluptuous, encouraging, maternal type of figure, perhaps, a woman who shakes her voluminous bottom on the dance floor without shame, say, and reminds me that, as amusing as all this self-deprecation is, I should never under any circumstances let it dictate the length of my skirts.

With this in mind, I pulled out the affirmations disk and threw in some Mary J Blige. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that what followed was a bit on the stereotypical side--me, in my underwear, dancing with abandon over the shiny surface of my hardwood floor, and singing along at the top of my lungs--to the dismay, I'm sure, of my bar-tending neighbor who usually sleeps until three--with the self-named soul hip-hop queen, about how whatever I do, it's gonna be hot, and how I got my head on straight, I got my vibe right, I ain't gonna let you kill it. I directly addressed this message to the Wall Street robot that lives in my brain, now gazing at me in surprise and vague horror at my vocal stylings and spastic dance moves, until he became nothing more than a crumpled, pin-striped, stayed-out-too-late doing blow heap of expensive couture in the far corner of my room. He really looked rough. I kicked him out the window.

And everything that followed that day was sheer delight.

Five-thirty in the morning you wake from an achingly repetitive dream in which you are telling an ex-boyfriend: "this is it, we're finished, you are looking at the last moment of this relationship," as you count out twelve pairs of socks from a basket, over and over again, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven...and so on, back to one, two, three, four, five...And again. And again. You just keep counting and breaking up, and counting, and breaking up.

Something is burning a hole in your stomach. You open your eyes to the formless dark of this solitary hour before dawn, run your hands down your body, feeling the softness of your own skin, feeling grateful to occupy this skin. But what is this sick feeling? Oh, yeah, there was that misguided trip to taco bell at one o'clock this morning after drinking three beers at a friend's house and watching Punch Drunk Love. The kind of movie that makes you want to feel love now or never, the kind of movie that makes you want to smash up all your old keepsakes, burn your letters, forget you ever wanted to hold or be held by anyone, curl up into yourself and get good at being alone, because it's a terrifying world this world, this world of feeling, but you will have to crash or crawl your way through it somehow.

And you remember that yesterday that ex-boyfriend, the one from the dream, told you that you are the one--and you've heard this before, you nasty little heartbreaker--that you are the reason for his bitterness. That somehow you failed him. That you ruined him. And you know that this of course is beyond unfair, that you can't ruin someone, that we're all responsible for our own lives, that his life is his own precious and miserable gift just like yours is and he can do what he will with it, that we're all made of blood and bone and have to do what we can to carry it, that you are the one in the dream who is screaming inside, that you are the one in the dream so full of rage and disappointment that you feel like you are being pulled apart, that you are the one in the dream counting, and counting, and counting.

Anecdote:

Making out with a guy I don't really know that well but nonetheless wish to impress with my formidable sex skills, I attempt that maneuver where you, from your reclined position--suddenly, passionately--flip him over onto his back and take charge. However, since I am unfamiliar with the landscape of his bedroom, and have disastrously underestimated the size of the bed we are on, my smooth move ends in a very loud and decidedly un-sexy crash to the floor. And, so much the worse, he cracks his head audibly on the nightstand on the way down. So there we are, in an awkward tangle of half-unfastened clothing and bruised limbs, and I have to make sure my poor abused friend is not bleeding from the knot on the back of his head.

What can I say? I saw that going differently, you know, in my mind.

Implementing the Wine-Bib

Recently enjoying a Lord of the Rings film marathon with my friend Helena, reclined in contacts-out, glasses-on mode before the television, and wielding a very full glass of wine, I found myself so unwilling to sit up in order to bring the wine to my lips that my t-shirt was soon doused in seven-dollar chardonnay. Helena suggested that I drape a paper towel over my chest in order to circumvent the necessity of sitting upright. Tucking the corners of a couple of Bounty squares into my bra straps, I settled in and went back to wondering if there were anyone I knew who might resemble Aragorn in even the most vague way as long as we only made out after I had my glasses off. Helena took a picture of me sporting my new wine-bib on her cell phone and sent it off to another friend with the caption: "this is the face of celibacy."

Of course, it's only one face of celibacy, and certainly not the ugliest. A few less attractive moments I may have been a part of recently:

1. Two and a half hours into a solitary Boston Legal fest, I find myself squinting at the formless paunch that has overcome James Spader's once sleek midriff and chins, thinking maybe I should have gone to law school so that I might be so lucky as to be innappropriately groped by a guy like this.

2. Hanging out too late at a neighborhood bar I have been known to swear off as a sweaty and depressing land of broken dreams, drinking whiskey that tastes like lighter fluid, in order to flirt with the scenester dj, when I suddenly realize that all of these girls ten years younger than me in napkin-sized dresses who are pretending to befriend me are really just trying to figure out if I'm a possible rival for aforementioned dj's attentions, or maybe just his really hip aunt.

3. A friend tells me about a burgeoning psychological study in which a male psychologist plans to select a woman from a number of applicants and see if they can make themselves fall in love with each other by performing a certain series of activities together designed to encourage bonding and intimacy, and I go home later to google "love study--application?" because there's just something about this guy that sounds sweet to me. In a Spock-y kind of way.

But on the subject of this study---of course you can make yourself fall in love with someone. That's what we always do. You know the moment when you have to overcome that panicky nausea in order to kiss someone for the first time? Well, that's just your desire for connection deliberately overcoming your instinctive urge to get the fuck out of there. Then the little series of concessions you make along the way, convincing yourself that, no, really you think it's sexy how he lounges around in your bathrobe all day after you've gone to work, really you do, that its all a part of his boyish charm, that his devil-may-care attitude toward work and financial stability are good for you because you've been taking yourself too seriously all your life and what you have really needed this whole time is someone who can't be bothered to dress himself, you know, in order to remind you about the fleeting and mercurial nature of life itself, and how absolutely healthy and adorable it is that he loves your much-too-small-for-him black polyester kimono so much that it's the only thing he puts on all day, your laptop poised upon his parted knees, as he idly browses the Best of Craig's List and Post Secret, and how great it is that he'll be waiting there for you when you get home, sweaty and irritated, from your waitressing job, to so wholly, so visually, impress upon you the delights of not giving a fuck.

That's how you make yourself fall in love. And it can be with anybody, at any moment--I think all you really have to do is decide. I think this psychologist is full of it, really, and this is just a rather transparent way for him to increase his dating pool. In fact, I may take a page out of his book--not because I want to fall in love (or, to name the process more accurately, find a breathing homo sapien upon whom I can project all of my most tragically unmet needs for approval from my father), but because I live in a town where you cannot throw a PBR cap without hitting someone who you absolutely must not get involved with because he has already been an asshole to one of your friends, or was already an asshole to you a few years ago and it doesn't look like things have changed much, or is actually a nice guy but one of your good friends did or does already like him, or has that sort of carefree yet poetic face upon which it is clearly written "if you take me home once, I will soon be living in your apartment, wearing your kimono, and using your computer all day while you're at work to pursue my artistic endeavors--which I will euphemistically refer to as 'making music' or 'writing a novel'--but which is really just a process that consists of one part typing first sentences out in various experimental fonts, and nine parts internet porn."

And he will expect you to bring him dinner.