Claire Forrest"THE BUSINESS OF BEING IN LOVE" - Part 1300 days until deadline Everything in this apartment was as sterile as the words coming out of this woman's mouth. I felt like this was a woman who had never accidently touched anything while wearing fresh nail polish. Her walls, her furniture, her floors, were all a stark white. No room for smudges. She made me take off my shoes. There was paper towel involved. It was like she couldn't help herself. "There were signs, I suppose," she said. "There are always things you wish you could have done differently. I think any cancer survivor would tell you that things might've been different had you let them be." She paused, "Sorry, that's poorly worded." I flipped the page of my notebook. "You mean you would have corrected your ways had you known what you know now?" I asked with my pen poised. "Exactly!" She answered with the most enthusiasm yet. I took my pen and wrote: But isn't that just the way life goes? "My piece," I said, "I think I want it to focus on the unknown of an ailment. What is something that you wish you could tell others, something they don't know about?" "Those self-check exams…they're important. My ex-husband put one of those exam cards in the shower…you know, the ones you can get in the clinic? He worked at a clinic at the time. I think he still might. Anyway, I, well, I just didn't do the exam. So I guess I should say that you should probably do it before you…" She trailed off. On the next line of my notebook I wrote: Check yourself before you wreck yourself. "Is there anything you wish people would know about how they treat people when they're ill?" I asked. "It's sad, really. I mean, I was really ill and it was one of the hardest times of my life, but I still wanted to enjoy and live my life. People treated me like I was crippled or some—Oh, my God." She stopped and sat straight up in the chair. I shrugged. "Thanks so much for sharing your story, Ms…" I took a quick glance at my assignment sheet, "Jennings. You've really impacted the shape of what I'll be writing." Hey, all in all, that wasn't a total lie. "I just don't know why I said—I'm sorry. I hope it's all right that I made you take off your shoes." But it didn't matter if it was all right with me; because she already stood at the door, roll of paper towels in hand to wipe up any spare dirt she missed when I first came inside. As I waited for the elevator back down to the lobby of the apartment complex, I crossed Ms. Jennings off the list. It wasn't like I didn't know that she wasn't what I was looking for to write on. Still, with no other leads to go on, I thought interviewing her might be worth a shot. My New York Magazine piece was supposed to focus on the humanity of an ailment, any aspect of humanity, any ailment. I spent a great deal of time scouring databases for members of grief support groups, rheumatoid arthritis patients, and many like today's potential subject, Ms. Jennings, cancer survivor. Raindrops hit the sidewalks of the Upper West Side in a nonsense pattern. For September, it was the type of weather that reminded you that rain was annoying, but at least it wasn't snow. The people on the street dodged the drops like they were fireballs or like their feet were too blistered that they couldn't put their whole foot on the ground, hopping left and right. Seven taxis drove past me without ramps. I dug out the phone number I scribbled on to the back of a gum wrapper of the mobility service should this be the case. Waiting for my ride, I tried to remember my friend's new cell phone number and quickly texted her: 4:47 PM: Hey—sorry! Going to be late…interview was a bust, and now I can't get into a cab. Grievers, sufferers, and survivors all felt a great deal of humanity, but that wasn't the degree of which I was looking for. I wasn't going to write a Ms. Jennings piece, another story about the regrets of disease, love torn apart by disease, and the underlying fact that some people don't appreciate life until their bodies stop working to exact precision. Twenty minutes later, my ride came. The ramp was lowered, and I pushed my wheelchair inside the van to escape the rain. Day 1 of falling in love I ran up the stairs two at a time. There were raindrops outside the size of turkey basters. As in, if you sucked water into a turkey baster until it was full, and then drizzled it onto yourself, that would be the amount each raindrop would get you wet. And so I was soaked. I turned the key to my dorm room until I heard the two clicks and the door opened. On a video chat, my best friend from home once told me that she thought it was weird that my roommate and I locked the door to our dorm. But she doesn't go to school in the middle of Morningside Heights in Manhattan, and her parents own a family business, meaning she never has to worry about being summer job-less and too broke to replace a stolen Macbook. So I lock my doors and never tell her all that other stuff, because she is my best friend. I changed out of my wet clothes and hoped that moisture wouldn't ruin brand new tights. My long brown hair is thin, but when it gets wet, it likes to clump together like dreadlocks. I pulled a sweatshirt over my body and used the sleeve to wipe the rain spots off of my black-rimmed glasses. As I put them back on, the Happy Birthday poster my roommate made for me two weeks ago came into focus on the wall: 'Ruby!! I love you and I can't imagine a better freshman roommate…Happy 19th!' I didn't take it down right away because it reminded me of the fact that roommates can be friends, too, instead of people who just tolerate each other. I walked out into the hallway of my residence hall. I heard the television going in the lounge. It was the local news about protests in Times Square and some stories about air pollution. I looked out the window and watched the raindrops make 'S' shapes down the windowpane. I wondered if it was raining at home in my mom's kitchen in the country, and how their local news was probably about something like cows or fertilizer. I would have felt really alone and far away in that moment, but instead I still felt his arms around me. "Your paper on Ezra Pound was amazing," he whispered in my ear. "You're my T.A." I said, "You're supposed to encourage me." "You don't need it," he countered. "That whole clear, sharp, language thing? You already speak that way. That's you." "No, that's Imagism," I quipped, and he laughed. He was twenty-four, which made my skin crawl. But in a way that it felt like when you're out on a boat at the lake and a cool breeze whips down your shirt and replaces the summer sun and you shiver for a second before realizing you love it. Despite only knowing him fleetingly, I still hoped I'd continue to like him, and vice-versa. Mom would murder me if she knew I went to his apartment right away after only running into him for the first time outside of class in a coffee shop, but I didn't care. I cared that he called me Rubes already. His name, Topher, shortened to Tophs. Ordinarily, I would hate that; except that I liked how that made us Rubes and Tophs. My Resident Assistant said hello to me as she made her way towards the door. I thought about warning her about the turkey baster raindrops, but then I remembered she was a vegan. My phone buzzed in my pocket. Now I really wasn't alone and far away. Except it was from an unknown number: 4:47 PM: Hey—sorry! Going to be late…interview was a bust, and now I can't get into a cab. 299.5 days until deadline I say the same things about my body that you say about your first car. It's not perfect. It's slightly damaged goods. But I love it. Didn't you love your first car, after all? Sure, it wasn't great. Neither is my body. But it gets me from point A to point B, and it's mine, all mine. And so I love it. But the rest of the world looks at my body and thinks, 'God, what a lemon." That's the thing about this New York Magazine assignment. It's a little sour. Humanity becomes an interesting topic when you're forced to think about it for long enough. The very basis of the assignment hinged not on how others see us, but how we see ourselves. Sure, like you, I thought survivor's tales were inspiring. I've never beaten cancer or lost my loved one and moved on after that. But people look at my lemon of a body and think I've beaten a demon. Do I think I did? No. Do all the cancer survivors, abuse sufferers, or anyone else I interviewed for this project think they slew the dragon in their life? Possibly. But suppose they don't think that. Maybe just our society thinks that we are champions. The whole assumption of this assignment is that we have something to say. And that it isn't getting said. Or are people just not listening? I finally entered the bar. "Lucille," my friend called out to me, "what happened?" I realized that even though I was twenty-six years old, I still couldn't successfully send a text message to the right number. My message about the inaccessible cabs was not received. So why did my phone buzz anyway? 4:53 PM: Why can't you get into a cab? I picked my phone up out of my lap and replied: --4:56 PM: Sorry, I texted the wrong number by accident. My friends pulled a chair away from the table at the bar and I wheeled in. I ordered a drink and tried to forget the pressures of humanity for a second. Was the assignment so broad to test my writing ability? Or was it impossible to confine human experience to the simple idea that we all suffer? My phone lit up again. 5:17 PM: Okay, then. From an anonymous standpoint: is it all right to see someone I barely know? 290 days until deadline 4:11 PM: Seriously though, am I making a mistake? --4:13 PM: By texting a complete stranger? Yes, huge mistake. Stop that. 4:14 PM: But you're unbiased…judgment free of me and the guy. --4:16 PM: You don't know that. For all you know, I AM the guy you're dating. 4:18 PM: Negative. I have his phone number! You're unbiased. --4:20 PM: I could be his sister. His best friend. His ex…? 4:22 PM: Just tell me what you think. --4:25 PM: You're unsure. That says something. You're young. They are other guys out there. 4:26: How do you know I'm young? And what if he's 'the guy?' --4:28: You're young because you're naive enough to text a complete stranger. And because you think you've already found 'the guy.' Day 40 of falling in love Topher's apartment was small and smelled like old books and your grandmother's makeup as she kissed your cheek. My phone buzzed in my pocket: --8:37 PM: Are you still dating 'that guy?' He doesn't sound like someone safe. Love isn't supposed to burn a hole in your heart, you know. Topher's long, lanky body sat down on the couch next to me. He said something about the paper due tomorrow. I wrote it on Pablo Neruda's poem 'I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You.' Neruda wrote, "Because I love you, Love in fire in blood." But I disagreed. It was the desire that brought the fire, not the actual obtaining. 8:39 PM: But shouldn't love be about getting what you want? Longing forever is what causes a burnout. --8:41 PM: Well, I guess I'm headed for a burnout, then? 8:43 PM: That's funny…you'd think a red-hot burnout would have my name on it. --8:46 PM: This random stranger's name is Lucille, by the way. What's yours? 8:50 PM: I'm Ruby. 260 days until deadline "It's just that…it's not there." My editor was quick to catch his demeaning critique, "Yet. It's not there yet." I'd submitted ten drafts of the humanity assignment to New York Magazine. Each one rejected. My piece on elderly people graduating from college was "too lighthearted." My account of how more people were beating cancer was "too common." Imagine that. Oh, the humanity. Some days, this assignment made me feel more dejected than anything. An assignment meant to inspire and build up morale and hope in the world left me exasperated. "Can't you go with the rheumatoid arthritis piece?" my editor asked. "It was off to a good start, and with some strong editing, it could really get off the ground. And plus, don't you know an awful lot about that, since, you know…it wouldn't involve a whole lot of researching on your part." He repeatedly clicked the top of his pen in a hyperactive up and down motion, satisfied with his suggestion. "I don't have rheumatoid arthritis," I told him. His pen stopped in mid click. He put it down on top of the binder and it promptly rolled off and hit the floor. It rolled a few feet until it was inches underneath the footplate of my wheelchair. "Here!" my editor bounded into action. "I'll just grab that real quick…" What most of the able-bodied community failed to realize was that people like me often have a more efficient way to accomplish things on our own before they jumped in to help us. "I've got it," I said, and my fingers clasped around the pen in mere seconds. I handed it back to him. "Thanks," he said, his eyes cast down at my feet instead of my face, "and my apologies for my error. You know what they say, ass out of you and me and all that." No, I thought, only out of you. But for the sake of awareness, I smiled politely. "Muscular dystrophy. I've had it since birth. Slow progressing. But it's put me in a chair since age ten. Just so you know." "Interesting," he said, flashing a winning smile. "You learn something new every day. Thanks, Lucille." Some interactions left me craving to just be viewed as normal. I wished someone would look at me and not make a fuss or any other thoughts about you or me. I wished, for once, to make something of myself independently. Listless, I moved a pile of papers and found my phone wedged between a stapler and an empty coffee cup. Unlocking the screen, I opened up my text messages. My fingers idled for a second before I decided to reach out for the sake of common experience. --3:47 PM: Ever felt like you wished you had the pleasure of being someone else, just for a second? Just to escape the things that suck about being you? Day 150 of being in love There is a birthmark on my chest that sits right between my clavicle and the beginning of my rib cage. At home, in my sheltered little town, my mother believed that birthmark had way too much power for an arbitrary marking. To her, it wasn't a random point on an expansive plain. "If anyone sees the birthmark, on a mistake you're about to embark!" Her idea was that if any guy saw the mark, it meant he could see the white of my bra, and once he got that little smidge of a view, he wasn't going to settle for the nosebleed view any longer. He'd want the seats at the fifty-yard line to see the touchdown through to completion, if you will. The truth of the matter was that my high school health teacher, romance novels, and even television shows did a significantly better job than my mother at warning me to save my virginity. I got that Mom didn't want me to chalk up my first time to something that would amount to nothing more than 'this one time,' but her motherly advice lost its potency by being rooted in Mother Goose. All semester in Literature in the World 101, I watched Topher complain about the lack of feedback for his teaching. "Waiting to the end of the semester for course evaluations? It's kind of stupid," he said as he ran his fingers through his thick brown hair. "No, actually, you know what it is? It's counterproductive." "How so?" I asked as I looked over an abandoned Suduko puzzle I found on top of his book bag. My pen hovered for a second before I filled in a missing nine to complete the top row. "You have so many objectives when you're teaching a class." He moved to the refrigerator, opened it and stared. Whatever he desired wasn't there and he closed the door and leaned his back against it. "Especially as a T.A. I'm trying to learn here. I'm trying to see what I did right. And now it's January, and I finally get to know? No, sorry. I don't like that." "Why?" I asked as I filled in a few more missing numbers, and got closer to the final row. "Because!" He said, and thrust his hands up in frustration. "Being a good teacher, it's what I want. And when I don't know if I'm achieving that, I sit and think about it. If you want it, don't you want to stop thinking about it and just, I don't know, do it?" The end of the semester meant a few things. Firstly, Topher was no longer my T.A. In my mind, that took a bit of the pressure off of us. Yet, our relationship still couldn't be brought up at the family dinner table during my trip home over winter break. The reaction from my mother would've been disastrous. I saw the writing on the wall for that. Or the birthmark on the chest. Secondly, as I stood in the privacy of my bedroom during the holidays, I realized that not everything my mother always told me was true. For example, living on my own taught me some essential life facts, such as the fact that if you happen to sneak your white socks in with your colors in the laundry, you're not going to, say, die or anything. Secondly, I understood that a birthmark is not a marker for how to conduct every single move of your adult life. When road maps first began to be widely popularized and copies were distributed to populations in large numbers, cartographers often slipped in names of fake towns. On the maps, these phantom settlements were just tiny little dots, arbitrary blotches in a well- orchestrated project. The purpose of these phantom settlements was to prove a copyright. Only the creators of the map knew that the fake town was there. If another company's map showed the town, they had stolen the original map. What happened next was, as I saw it, the outcome of applying too much pressure to one meaningless dot. When people searched for Goblu, Ohio, or Argleton, United Kingdom, to see if they were real, they found out what was real behind a random blotch. Always, it was simply fiction behind the phantom, stories of university rivalries or, more recently, computer glitches. Wasn't what it all came down to was that half the fun was in looking and seeing what was actually there? Sure, maybe there wasn't any meaning behind the settlement, but at least those people tried. Instead of just sitting around and thinking about it, they did it. After all, nothing's meaningless until you declare it so. "I just…" Topher's voice was quiet, full of exasperation. "Stop thinking about it." I said it before I could catch myself, set the pen down and walked over to my boyfriend. Our lips met and our hands worked together like the way a highway led you off on to a country road, perfect, planned, and easy. A glance served as confirmation. A 'yes' that made meaningless all of the years I spent following the road map my mother made for me, it was a route that you couldn't take by the seat of your pants. My birthmark was a mark on the wide plain of my body. But that doesn't mean it meant anything. We went off in search of what we thought might be there. His eyes saw my birthmark, dismissed it as phantom, and traveled right past it. We explored unknown territory. We didn't need a map. 142 days until deadline I jumped slightly as his hand hit the intimate space on my lower back. "Sorry," he mumbled, slightly embarrassed. As I tried to stand up from my wheelchair, my legs decided not to stand for the roles that are traditionally assigned to legs, and buckled. The cereal was on the top shelf at the supermarket, a major flaw in both design and compassion. No box of Crunchy-O's was worth losing my balance and falling in aisle five, but somehow, I forgot that every single time. "I didn't mean to…touch you like that," he said. "It just looked like you were going to take a spill there." I cringed. Of all the euphemisms for falling, 'take a spill' was probably my least favorite. It forced me to picture all of my organs spilt and tumbling out of me. My spleen sliding past the spaghetti boxes, my eyeballs getting mistaken for jawbreakers under the candy counter. I shook my head to snap out of it. "No, it's fine." I said, lowering myself into my chair. I pointed up at the top shelf. "It's just, you know, got to have the off-brand. That seems so very worth it, even when it's out of your reach." "Well, yeah," he nodded, reaching up and handing it to me, "saves you a dollar but tastes the same, right?" He paused a second before extending his hand. "I'm Gabe. Just because, well, we're cereal buddies now, right?" Gabe was tall, blonde, and had a smile that wasn't forced. I didn't mind knowing him at all. "Lucille," I answered, returning the handshake. He was about the same age as me, if I had to guess. My spleen may not have been on the floor, but my heart was out of my chest. It pounded as I realized that this was the first time in a long time I'd been touched in that way. Men are afraid of women, in some cases. Sometimes, I feel like wires got crossed in elementary school, and boys grew up thinking that girls' hearts are actually made out of the paper doliy we put in each other's Valentine's Day bags: put too much pressure on them, and they'll rip instantly and irreparably. Men think women's hearts are disabled, they don't tick quite right. But what really ticks me off is that they see my body in that way, too. I can't bend her, they think, I'll break her. Sure, it's crude, but it's true. They think my heart will probably crumble (Can it even hold up that long? Does the girl in the wheelchair have heart problems?) and my body will soon follow after that. It's challenging, because I've missed so much. At twenty-six, it seems like every girl my age—woman, I guess—every woman my age is looking for the next step. They're focusing on who to love instead of how it's done. When you are young, you're interested in the 'how' of love. You start by wanting to love and love all the time. It doesn't matter who it is. That person on the street made you smile, and you love them for it. The guy in line behind you pays for your coffee and all day you fanaticize about reminding him to pick up more coffee filters for your (shared, obviously) apartment by scribbling a note quickly on the last remaining coffee filter before you rush off to work. Of course, you're not serious about dating any of these people, oh no. You're trying on the idea of love, simply thinking about what it might feel like when you do decide to act on impulse. There is a reason why parents try to coach 'I love you' out of their babies' mouths as their first words. It takes years of saying it in order to say it right. To give it meaning. So it's good to get a head start. Your parents take a break from spooning cereal in your mouth to whisper, "I love you! I love you. Honey, say 'I love you!' Tell me you love me." Little do they know (or perhaps they're trying to forget) that in your days to come, when you are less young than your infantile state, someone besides them will pressure you to say those same words. But when that time comes, not everything changes after you say them. Like when your parents clapped and cried when you finally obliged them, the face of the one you love might light up with delight when you say it. And the first time you say it is the hardest. You're young, so you'll say it a lot after that. Perhaps, most of the time, you'll even mean it. But I've realized that as time goes on, it becomes less about how often you say it and more about who you say it to. People my age shift from focusing loving with gusto to loving with focus. They're looking for the one, not someone. It's hard not to feel left out when you and your paper heart haven't yet had the chance to say something, much less have someone say it back to you. "Your phone's buzzing." The cereal grabbing, spill-taking savior's voice brought me back to the surface. 7:18 PM: How can I be so in love with someone who clearly doesn't love me? Gabe looked at me funny. "Everything okay? You got this funny look on your face for a second." "Yeah," I said, waving my hand in dismissal, "it's just this teenager I sort of know. Apparently her boyfriend's not in love with her?" He chuckled. "Oh, to be slightly more young and in something kind of like love, right? You couldn't pay me enough money to go back then and suffer like that." I went straight home to my computer to begin writing. Day 268 of falling in love Clear-All Eye Concealing Makeup in Shade #12 was supposed to work wonders, but I still thought that everyone could tell. It was April, and rain hit the windows of Auditorium D as I tried to pay attention to the poetry seminar happening around me. "William Carlos Williams was an obvious modernist." The girl sitting one row down from me was in full attack mode on the guy who always tried to go against the grain of the discussion. I always suspected that he never did the reading, so his tactic was to disagree with whatever anybody else said in order to get his participation grade. Today, he was trying to spin the famous American poet as a postmodernist. I mean, God forbid. "Williams' poems are so short. Heavily fragmented works are a characteristic of postmodernism." He twirled his pen between his index finger and thumb, clearly satisfied. "Another characteristic of postmodernism is that it's difficult to define the characteristics of postmodernism." The class broke out into a light twitter of laughter at the girl's retort. "If Williams was a postmodernist—" a quiet boy from across the room broke into the conversation, but was met with a glare from modernist defense girl "—I'm not saying he was!" Quiet boy threw up his hands in mock surrender. "But I'm saying if you're arguing he is, it'd be hard to do, considering his poems focus on objects. He focuses on tangible, real-life objects. Isn't modernist poetry about drawing distinctly from the poet's imagination? The red wheelbarrow?" The girl smiled smugly. "Exactly. You can just feel that Williams might've been the all-American farm boy, and that wheelbarrow…" Farm boy or not; William Carlos Williams was a doctor. He was known to write poems on the backs of prescription pads. What would he do to remedy my current predicament? I turned the page of my notebook and tried to rewrite 'The Red Wheelbarrow': so much depends It wasn't anything any poet would get excited over, but I liked to think that maybe the doctor side of Williams would be moved by it. Maybe he'd take me aside, lecture me on the importance of…well, contraception wasn't really around in the nineteen fifties. "You?" Topher roared the night before. He rolled his eyes back and laughed out loud. "Jesus, Ruby, you're never late on anything. You wouldn't even take a free paper extension when you were sleeping with the T.A. And now …on the most important thing, now you decide to screw up? You're a child, Ruby! A stupid little child!" Drug store makeup wasn't very good at hiding black eyes. Thankfully, clothes were better at concealing bruises on various points: the thighs, the back, and ribs. "And the plums!" Annoying modernist girl yelled. "You can't say that is not a specific memory! So modernist." I picked up my pen and tried to make my own sense of Williams' poem 'This Is Just To Say': I once kissed you Williams' might have been a doctor, but he could offer me no solace right now. I sympathized with Neruda: "In this part of the story I am the one who/Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you." My heart wasn't longing. But it was so cold. Cold and empty. I loved you. And I was trying so hard not to.
(Part 2 of "The Business of Beingin Love" will appear in the June 2014 issue of Wordgathering.)
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