Common Roots

My hands are still shaking as I write this. When I lift my fingers off of the keys they tremble like a Parkinson patient’s or a former alcoholic’s. It’s because I just ran into my ex, ex-addict, ex-heartbreak.

 

I was not at my best.

 

I started the day knowing I needed to use the Internet to get my schoolwork done. After a half an hour of debating little details about which coffee shop to go to in my neighborhood, wi-fi connection, proximity, ambience, I finally decided on the usual one I visit on Saturday and Sunday mornings and set out, hair tied into a scruffy side pony-tail, blond bangs crimped from a bobby pin the night before and pushed to the side. Still in the stages of cold-recovery, I felt like my skin was blotchy and breaking out, my eyes were puffy, and my lungs wheezy and phlegmmy. I had homework to do; I wasn’t thinking about how I looked.

 

To add further to the back-story, I have been worried over finding a new place to live and searching frantically for a place to call home. Earlier in the morning I had looked at two apartments—one, sort of dingy and not that appealing, and the other cute, and friendly. Lots of windows. Top level. Details from the early 1900’s. Beautiful kitchen. Patio. Storage space. Free internet from the coffee shop across the street. A writer’s apartment. And of course, about $300 more than I felt I should be paying each month for rent considering my goal of operation-speedy-loan-payoff.

 

I was ruminating on my budget. Floundering over the details of rent and groceries. Trying to talk myself out of wanting the apartment. I was scolding myself for going out to dinner with friends and buying new pants and shoes for the school year. Time to buckle down, I thought. Time to be serious. Practical.

 

So of course, on this mucus-filled, watery-eyed day, this day of self-discipline and restraint, I step out of my car and see my ex and his new girlfriend sitting at a table on the patio right by the entrance of the coffee shop.

 

He doesn’t look up as I pass by his elbow, his ear, his backwards baseball cap, my leg six inches from their space. I feel my heart drown into the past, lost suddenly below the surface of the earth and trapped instead in a colder, darker space where ex-husbands brush by like the filmy white legs of jellyfish. I crossed the threshold of the coffee shop. I stopped. I can’t do this. I can’t walk past my ex-husband as if he is someone I’ve never met.

 

I went back outside.

 

“Hi, Shawn.”

 

He jumped in his chair and his eyes flashed blue and lit up like he was about to swallow me in his relief. “Kate!” he said. “How are you?”

 

“Good,” I said, as if I were running into someone from class, someone safe, someone I had not spent the last year and a half writing about in my essays. “I saw you and I was just going to walk past but then I thought that would be awkward. How are you?”

 

He said he was fine and smiled at me and then there was an awkward pause during which I nodded at the new girl before saying I had homework to do and heading into the coffee shop.

 

My fingers have stopped shaking but what stays with me is that right after we said hello, while my body was trembling and my heart jumping in alarm, I still felt stable, steady. I felt like me. I felt like I was light years beyond where I had been. Like I had no desire to be with him and like there was very little anger in our meeting. It was almost like he was becoming someone I might just casually say hi to, someone I might even hug, someone safe, someone comfortably located only in my writing and not in my life.

 

And because I am human, I could not help but note the new girlfriend. She was clearly not getting over a cold and throwing her hair into a ponytail. She was done up and darling, pushed up and pretty. I couldn’t help but think that she also looked like she was trying really hard. It looked tiring. It was like looking at myself five years ago.

 

Instead of feeling like the vaguely nervous, overly anxious, unassuming, unaware, and unsure girl I was in my past, I felt like the cool, cognizant, world-traveling writer that I am now. I felt like a woman who is living her own life pursuing her dreams. A woman not afraid to be herself.

 

I’m getting that apartment, I thought, after walking into the coffee shop.

 

I decided not to do the homework first. I decided to write, even though I had other work to do, even when he walked past me to deposit his coffee mug in a dish pan while I wrote about our encounter, and even with shaky fingers, smiling at the white flower ring I sometimes wear on my fourth finger, the one that no longer breaks out in a rash from my wedding ring.

 

It is only just now that I am noticing the irony of where we encountered each other—the coffee shop called Common Roots. Shawn and I have common roots. We shared our past, a trunk where two lives were encased in one. But now we don’t.

 

And I just love these branches that keep taking me towards the sky, so very far away from where I was. 

A Change in Season

You have to be kidding me, I thought, leaving my apartment the other day and noticing a shockingly “autumn” orange-leaved wreath on the apartment door kiddy-corner from my own. It is the only adornment on any of the doors in my modern and trendy apartment building. My building is the kind of place where marketing directors would decorate their advertisements for the community with phrases like “East meets West in simple harmony and clean lines” and “Life with Style at VillageGreen”. We have a community room. The leasing company hosts happy hours for the young and upwardly-mobile professionals who live here. There’s a Zen garden, for the love of God (or Buddha, I suppose).

 

This is no place for wreaths.

 

And what makes this particular orange wreath even more shocking is that it is the third in a series of wreaths to appear on the door. First there was a white-flowered wreath that made me assume the occupants of the apartment were either gay or grandmas. Second there was a green wreath of plastic pine needles, which I did not necessarily associate with summer, but now, with the orange-leaved wreath I clearly see that there is a seasonal pattern in the door decorations.

 

Of course since then I have learned that the occupants of the apartment are neither gay nor grandmothers. They are a ridiculously happy couple. The kind of couple that holds hands in the hallway. That goes to watch television together in the community room. The kind of couple that doesn’t reach out to neighbors because they are so happily involved in themselves. And their wreaths.

 

I hate that wreath.

 

What kind of a guy lives in an apartment with a wreath on the door?! I thought as I walked past. I’m sure I scowled as I thought it. All sorts of non-politically correct thoughts jumped into my brain, including, I am sad to say, “What a pussy!”

 

But, in my surprise at my own vehemently angry and ignorantly condescending inner monologue, I started to realize that I was really getting way too worked up about my neighbor’s apartment door. Katie, I said to myself, in order to address the unfounded amount of rage swelling in small waves in my inner ocean, why does that wreath piss you off? It’s just a wreath. Let it go. He probably loves her very much and knows it makes her happy to put the wreath on the door.

 

And with that I started to picture the life inside the door with the wreath. The life I hear only small pieces of when she, and I imagine it must be she, starts to play the piano they must have inside. Careful notes fill the hall as I walk past. I picture them holding hands in the hallway. They are quiet and polite when we meet in the elevator.

 

As these images flood my mind I realize that what I hate about that wreath is that five or six or seven years ago I would have been the one hanging it on the door. I would have been delighted in my new domesticity with my new husband in our new place. I would have hung the wreath on the door as if it were my hopes and heart that I was placing very high and in a special place. There. Love, Life, come visit us and be generous. We are just so happy. We are so in love. WE. WE. Whee!

 

 

 

 

 

I do not hate the wreath.

 

I do not hate the girl who hangs the wreath.

 

I might hate that I wasted energy on such a wee endeavor when there were more exciting avenues in life that I needed to explore. I might hate the girl I was, the one fixated on wreaths and scrapbooks and pasting memories carefully into frames. There. This is us as the perfect couple. There. That’s a picture of my happy family. There. Welcome to my perfect life.

 

Life isn’t perfect. It is so much more beautiful to me now that I see it for the wreck that it is. I am so infatuated with the mess that is life that I haven’t time to hang orange-leaved wreaths upon my door.

 

But…

 

 maybe someday I will.

The End of August

I reached up to put away my Aerobed after a wedding weekend full of bonding with women I love and as I stretched on my toes to put the mattress on the top shelf of one of the four closets in my studio apartment, four Fridley High School yearbooks came crashing at my face, nearly gouging my eye out with pointy corners. Luckily I deflected the fast-advancing yearbooks, but there was a lesson in the occurrence. Sometimes your past not only catches up with you, but it is plain gunning for your vulnerable spots, sharp angles and all.

 

This weekend, after a few months of joy in singledom, a genuine excitement over my independent life, giggling, even, as I walked my dog alone past couples and families, the past seemed to be gunning for me, taking aim as I walked in front of one of my dearest friends as she stepped up to an altar to say “I do”. And it seemed bent on shattering my newly celebrated independence. 

 

I smiled for my friend during the ceremony because I honestly believe she and her man are made for each other, but as I listened to the readings- Corinthians, Ephesians—and heard the rhetoric about love being kind, and patient, and how through loving and helping your spouse you find real joy, I couldn’t help but think “Bullshit!”

 

It was really a low moment. The soundtrack playing was the Beach Boys singing “Wouldn’t it be nice” and all I was thinking of was the soundtrack to the Wedding Singer where Adam Sandler belts out a nice edition of “Love Stinks!”

 

And that, I realize, is what I am mourning two years into the end of my marriage. That blissful Beach Boys optimism. That belief in a kind love.

 

As I heard tales of the ex, his new life, new girl, from my old friends, I plunged from my single-gal high to a broken-hearted low.

 

“But that was two years ago,” said my dear friend as she listened to me lament the losses in my life. “Look at all the good things you have going on.”

 

“It was yesterday!” I said to her—and now, I realize I wasn’t talking about the lanky, basketball-playing man I married so much as I was talking about me. I was mourning me. I was mourning the loss of that girl who believed in an easy love, a romantic-movie love, an infatuation lasting forever.

 

I wouldn’t trade spots with the romantic girl I was in my 20’s, but I miss her. I miss feeling nothing but confidence and happiness at weddings. I miss thinking chance meetings might lead to real love.

 

I know the woman I am now is more cynical about relationships. I know she flinches when a man seems too excited, too eager in a relationship. I know even when nice men, really good guys, take her on nice dates and do nice things, like placing sunflowers where she will see them and smile, part of her cringes. There is fear, disbelief, in this woman.

 

“You’re like a girl I could marry,” said the lanky ball-player to the blond girl on their second date.

“This will be a long relationship,” the girl said to herself. “Just let yourself like him.”

 

The woman remembers this heady love, this twilight romance, this mutual desire for affection. And she knows it was ultimately, deceptively, false: empty. And so this woman is skeptical of good things, of fast infatuation.

 

I put the yearbooks back on my shelf without pausing to look at them, but I can’t help but think about how the past still affects me. Sometimes I am frustrated by the fact that I can’t make myself get over my loss, that I still feel sad at weddings, but then again, as I told my mom tonight on the phone, “I think it’s good I felt that way- I think if I didn’t feel upset that would be strange, like I was an alien or a robot, and I would rather be a human.”

 

People who love me sometimes want me to be over my loss. People who date me sometimes question my grief. But I am ok with how I am feeling. I think the sane response for me, after going through the biggest personal tragedy of my life, is to feel a little sad and cynical at weddings, and to be just a bit distrustful of things that seem too good to be true.

 

I lost myself in my marriage and found myself in the divorce, but change is never easy. Change is brave. Change is painful. Even when it is positive. And so I think it is ok that I am still, sometimes, sad.

 

And I also think it is ok that I am, often, joyful.

 

Suddenly I am feeling lucky again. I am back to rejoicing in my independence, in the freedom to accept my own feelings even though others want me to be over the sadness.  The yearbooks are put away and I’ve got my past put back in a comfortable position. Time to return to joy.