This past weekend I returned to my favorite place in the world (next to all my other favorite places in the world)–Mokuleia.
I managed to convinced four trusting, lovely ladies to join me, by promising them it would be a day filled with physical agony, indescribable terror, and maybe even a little death. Four ladies who knew me in varying degrees of not-at-all to almost-not-at-all. Ladies who have read me more than they’ve heard me, and still wanted to put their lives in my hands. Literally. Who were willing to go ovs out (that short for OVARIES)–to challenge themselves. To conquer their fears of height, of less-than-flattering harnesses, and of shrimp trucks (me).
And now, introducing… Team Estrogen!
CHRISTY!
ANELA!
SHANNON!
KATHY X!
(They were pretty amazing for first timers.)
Seriously though–they rocked the rock. Licked the crack. Touched the triangle.
They might have been ASTOUNDED by my ability to power up to the top–but hello? I’ve done that exact route 100 times back in my glory days. This was their first time! And they still managed to get to third base on a 5.8 climb with minimal leg quivering, cursing, and yelping involved.
I’ve never rounded third with such grace.
Spending Saturday with new friends has been one of my favorite Hawaii days since Ryan and I moved home one month ago. Saturday was pure kindred awesomeness. It reminded me there are a few places here, on earth, where I am okay. Where the sun is on your back, out of your eyes; where the sky matches the water, and the endlessness matches you. Where the rock is solid and immutable; where I feel grounded when there is no ground, safe where there is no safety except for a rope and some stranger’s old anchors. It’s everything else that’s dangerous.
Waking and living.
Waking and trying.
Waking and waking.
I am back home four summers after I left.
We took the freeway home as far as the freeway could take us. People never know where we are. I never know where we are.
Bulgaria.
Philadelphia.
Seattle.
Hawaii.
Home is where you harness is.
And your dog. In quarantine.
And your boyfriend’s childhood bedroom that you live in for free because you poor.
I love climbing because there are so many routes with goals I can see and touch. And the really hard routes–well. I accept that they are not for me.
Which is my life route?
I am no closer to touching the anchor than I was four years ago.
I think the mountains are growing.
And on that note–enjoy our photos–badass and gorgeous allatonce.
(All photos were taken by Christy Werner.)
What’s more fun than ascending 5,000 feet in 15 minutes?
I’m such a supportive team leader.
View from the site.
Don’t laugh, newbie.
THERE’S NO LAUGHTER IN CLIMBING!
Nice form, newbie.
First timer, my ass.
Notice barefeet. BADASS!
Last words to a first-time belayer–”Don’t let go, bitch.”
Get ready to check out my mad skills, yo.
You can never have enough photos of your butt.
“Go ovs out, or go home!”
For more climbing madness:
My 2003 column on chicks climbing.
Climb Aloha, for all your rock climbing needs. And so much more.
Bye Harmonie. I’ll miss you, slut. (Photo by Steve White)
Good bye Chad, you rugged man-beast. (Photo by Steve White.)
Ciao Veneta! Good luck in NYC! Send my coats my love. (Photo by Steve White)
So long Steve White. Come visit us in the ‘aina anytime. (Photo not by Steve White.)
Bye KIRBY. Maybe we’ll see you MORE often now that we live in Hawaii.
Bye blurry Chris and Pinar! Thank you for distracting us from packing madness!
Bye dear Ellen and Jordan, who I didn’t spend nearly enough time with.
Adeus Ada and Denis!
“New friends kick ass.” -Mother Theresa
Bye Ufucklick.
And I thought I gave Matilda a funny name.
Farewell I-90 bridge. (Photo by Steve White)
Bye bridge over troubled waters.
Bye beautiful couch that I got for free but couldn’t fit through the door.
Couch that sat on our lawn for 7 months.
Couch that we had to pay $50 to have removed.
Fucking couch, you really let me down.
Bye favorite dock on Lake Washington.
So long pink tulips, you bright harbingers of spring.
Bye best free futon EVER.
“Does my neck look fat in this photo?” -Mati
Good-bye roads.
See you later Ryan’s family.
Oh.
Wait.
Bye pallid complexions.
Adios winter clothing.
Fare thee well unemployment hair.
Bye sweet knolls of grass.
Bye baby.
Farewell impassioned sunset soliloquies.
Good-bye late-night sunsets.
We’ll miss you SEATTLE!
Waiting in the wings… another profound piece entitled, “Hello Hawaii.”
(Every now and then you have to delete a blog to make sure you wanted to post it in the first place… apologies for the lost comments.)
I. Song - “Origin of Love” - Hedwig and the Angry Inch
May and June were about finding new ways to survive. And writing doesn’t always fit into the survival itinerary, yet when I’m not writing, I’m dying, staring at the computer bawling as if it’s mocking me by falling asleep before I’ve finished a single sentence. I hate writing. I hate that the same brain that gives me these words, simultaneously shovels dirt over the smallest seeds of my dreams, burying them too deep for water to ever reach. I feel desiccated and drowned all at once. I’m tired.
Of waking up and convincing Ryan in as many ways I can fiction that life–life is worth it. Of going to work terrified that when I come home, Ryan will be gone, because my words weren’t good enough, because my love wasn’t love enough, because it is true—death is the only painless state. When you choose life, you choose the ebb and flow of chemical joy, of an environment that either nurtures or destroys you, of people that either get or don’t get you. We are all isolated. We just try to use our isolation as common ground. To say, hey, let’s be alone together.
We call this friendship.
So we’re coming home, beaten in a way we might only know to each other, but closer. Closer, as will happen when you almost lose someone, and you make desperate moves to keep this person alive, hoping for a morning-after softening, a neck-to-ankle embrace. Acceptance.
I am not suicidal. But my signals are crossed, like a fundamentalist Christian wearing a “Jesus Loves Abortion” T-shirt. I understand why someone should want to die. I often want to die. But my brain stops at the slightest flicker of self-harm. (But if I just disappeared. That would be okay.) For people I don’t know, I hope that their suicide freed them from the physical or psychological agony that balled and chained them to life. But for Ryan, my best friend, I still try desperately to debate. Pro-life. And I can only give emotional, circular, selfish reasons in the voice of a mother arguing with her teenager.
Stay because we love you.
Stay because there are things I won’t recover from.
Stay because I said so.
And that’s why.
Back to scaling mountains with bowling shoes, Ryan says.
We climb on. I am his belay; he keeps falling. Even standing on the ground, I can only hold him for so long. He is so far away from me, on ledges I will never myself stand on. I say–“I just want whatever makes you happy.” It’s a lie—I know there is only one thing he wants, his one definitive solution for the second-hand suffering he feels for the whole world. I want whatever makes me happy, and what makes me happy is Ryan. Ryan warm and breathing, snoring, laughing, writing, midnight slow dancing bare feet on bare feet to Feist. With me. I want this to make him happy.
(I know it does, but our happiest moments are midgets playing on the football field of life against black men named Jimbo.)
(With every hit, running fearlessly toward the goal gets a little harder. You’re sorer. Smaller and smaller.)
(More touch, more down. Just not the good kind.)
For months, Ryan takes over my addiction to isolating. He stays inside, days into nights, can’t tolerate the shortest interactions, hates the world for making him feel like they are all on the other side of understanding. I look at him; I am looking at me. I gave him that disease. I made him afraid. All this loud coughing up of fear. Without covering my mouth.
And there are days I am filled with Ryan’s pain. When he floors me against the wall with his machine gun words, shoots his own little hate blanks into my belly, where they grow and grow into rootless trees, branches growing out through my ears and eyes, touching the sky and tipping me over.
Or, another metaphor–we have grown too close together. We are twin trees whose roots have formed tight tangles, and when one of us falls, the other is forced to the ground.
(I stole this photo from a stranger’s Flickr.)
We end up looking at the sky, asking the other in tacit ceasefire—Now what?
We are buildings of blood and bone looking for a foundation. For love, for art, for living. I am up, he is down, I am down, he is up. We used to flirt, throw cabbage. Now it’s WMDs, a swirling galactic mess of instabilities. We are both targets. We are both heat-seeking. We are both dead in these looping bodies. I am not dead and I am. I am worse than dead because I don’t know when this will end, this back and forth, this cat and mouse, this hide and go numb.
I don’t know what’s worse. Watching your best friend tortured and lost in the deafening feedback of his own brilliant head. Or when it’s you. Fucking pissed to be alive, panicking over nothing, seething with a hulking energy you have nowhere to channel. In Amsterdam it sat inside me and punched my guts, took me down to my knees.
Before I sunk too far into the muck, Ryan pulled me out. Over and over. Inexhaustible, his hands and words and promises.
Stay by me.
Okay.
And he did.
For all my superficial empathy, I am not as kind to him as he has been to me in the moments when you can’t breathe and all the lights go out. When all you can see is all you will never be able to see, and all you feel is the clench of your heart—pain, pain, pain. It’s the monster you want to kill. In yourself, in your best friend.
I don’t know what’s worse. And that’s life, isn’t it? Weighing what’s worse and trying to use At Leasts as halfhearted placations. At Least I don’t have breast cancer. At Least I’m not a gypsy in Bulgaria. At Least I’m not paralyzed from the cankle down.
Death is always at our fingertips. Most of us just don’t consider ourselves as the highest power.
Recovery is something we do our whole life. In Life Addicts Anonymous, every day you exist is another day you relapse. But there are only two choices—trying to recover from your addiction to life and everyday failing, or dying.
I thank this world for Ryan.
I thank this world for Ryan who goes to Safeway at 6 am to make sure I have soymilk in the fridge when I wake up at 11.
I thank this world for the music from his guitar, because when he is not playing the same creeping dread sits in the room as when I am not writing.
I thank this world for giving me someone I can spend every day with, and still be thrilled and grateful to wake up and he’s there, chasing Mati around the circle of our apartment, shrieking, “The monster has risen! The monster has risen!” (Apparently my thrill and gratitude takes the form of verbal lashings and grunts before I fully come into consciousness.)
I thank this world for the friends that forgive you when you ignore them for months. Who accept you for your absences.
I thank this world for our families who do everything they can to help us, and who love us even at our most impossible.
I thank this world for Mati, who walks Ryan every morning and afternoon, who makes us a family.
(Independence was so mid-20s.)
We have embraced the failing, accepted that we will never fit in in spaces beyond the curl of each other. But if we can find some way to express this veiny pulse of discontent, then that itself is enough. Just to let it outside ourselves, let it run free, knowing angst will always come home just in time for dinner. Love. Is. Crazy. Love is what I am alive for. No wonder, then, how much we are willing to lose to keep the people we love with all our fierce dreamings by our side. In bed. On walks. In the passenger’s seat. Is it healthy to be obsessed with your partner? Ryan and I met only two years ago this August. Yet. Our Philly relationship was an entirely different relationship, with a different Ryan, a different Jenn. Every state line we crossed brought us closer together, Amsterdam brought us closer together, Seattle brought us so close together our fears jumped bodies, and we watched each other struggle from the outside in.
I thank this world for Ryan, who is still warm and breathing, snoring, laughing, writing, midnight slow dancing bare feet on bare feet to Feist.
With me.
II. Song - “Get Up Offa That Thing” - James Brown
Since we Myspace met, we have always been moving. Never arriving. In Philly we never bought dishware. In Seattle we found everything for free. It was hard to own. We never fully unpacked; we had our collective foot out the door. Even though I love it here, and wanted it to work, wanted to take my big straw and suck up the incredible lit and art scene, the mountains, my friends, the roads that go on forever in nearly every direction—it’s just become harder and harder to survive at all.
In May, I donated 27 of my ovum for some fast cash. It was too easy, and even though I know my family was deeply against it, and Ryan was deeply against it—when it comes down to it, you have to survive on what you can see. There’s no guarantee that anything I write will bring us money the month we need it. And yes, it’s strange to use your body parts to put food on the table, to pay life on time.
But what isn’t strange.
For two weeks I injected myself with hormones. Every other day I went to the hospital and watched the little black dots of my DNA grow into massive globes, crowded into my ovaries. I felt like my own nature channel. Fish eggs. Jellyfish. There was everything in me except me.
The day of the procedure, I was amazed by how incredibly kind all the women in the fertility clinic were. As nervous as I was going under for the first time, the Nurse Anesthetist was like an old friend. One minute we were talking story, and the next minute I was waking up in a recovery room, and Ryan was there, along with a massive gift bag filled mostly with space, and three important, but light things—Vicodin, a check for $4,500, and a candle.
I could only be so happy to get such a present on every holiday.
In a week, we’ll be home. At Denise’s wedding. At Kyle’s and Haley’s plays, a belated impromptu backyard birthday party for Kyann. Visiting Mati in Halawa quarantine. On the beach trying to get rid of our natural Seattle Asian goth look. At Turbo Kick classes in the same gyms, with the same badass ladies. Excited about GirlFest, unexcited about my 29th birthday, neutral about if I’ll be able to find a job, ready to start over again and again, until I no longer feel the dizzying turning of my own momentum, and I am fixed. Somewhere between my dreams and bills.
When I talk to my friends I am amazed how little happiness we manage to get by on. Maybe it’s our almost thirtyness. We still cling to our adolescent dreams—whether these dreams are dreams of art, or soulmates, or super hot bodies. We haven’t given up. But we thought thirty would be The Age where we’ve figured something out. Where stability is the island that comes into view when you’ve been lost at sea for, oh, I don’t know—YOUR WHOLE LIFE. One of my friends has an enviable “it’s what I always wanted and worked towards” job—he is horrified that I would sell your eggs for what he makes in a few weeks. But he is no happier than my broke ass. His struggle is love, is finding—you know—that ONE person that is neither too this or not enough that. Of feeling the vacancy sign flashing on his heart, dimming with each failed relationship. Another friend has love but can’t afford a family—can’t even fathom when she’ll be able to afford all the children she wants—and that’s her dream, this big family, a life of mothering.
I see all our missing pieces, scattered across the floor of the world. All these mismatched jigsaw puzzle pieces. We could search forever and never find what’s missing to fill our holes in. It’s all just cardboard. Why can’t we cut out a new shape to fit the jagged gaps in our lives? Why can’t we be satisfied without straight edges?
I do feed off other people’s optimism. I love reading friend’s blogs about new love, new writing programs, new travels. Successes. Goals. I love the darker words too. The ranting, the obsessing, the disappointments that add up faster than credit card debt. With worse rates.
Most of my friends are one type of extreme.
I want to be a bringer upper, not a taker downer. I’ve been working towards this since we started blogging. In my words, in my life. It’s a fight I don’t always show up prepared for. Still–not every day can be spent curled up with an existential classic. Sometimes you just have to throw yourself into the sun, dance with friends in the street, drink too much and eat from the same bowl with the people who have been at the periphery of your hardest times, and maybe even you at theirs. Some moments require a violent shrug. A resolute “So fucking what.” Require playing James Brown’s “Get Up Offa That Thing / Dance ‘til you feel better” until–you know–you do.
III. Song - Kum Ba Ya - J. Christ?
Camping weekend was a fantastic way to end our time in Seattle. Friends, fire, a community bottle of Old Crow, and twice-burnt marshmallows. I slept so well outside, in the car, with Mati and Ryan so close, and the morning rain thin panes away. Ryan was blissfully happy. Home was close enough that Seattle became just a two-week vacation, and there were no worries, because we’re leaving worries here, blowing them into the grey.
IV. Song - You Get What You Give - New Radicals
In Seattle, I have seen all sides of morning.
I am not ready to leave, but I want to go home too.
There are two ways I am always traveling. In the morning, the only thrill to waking up pre-dawn is the shock of bursting out from the I-90 tunnel onto the bridge over Lake Washington, and the stunning pink glow lining the flat blue mountains in front of me. Past the bridge, it is all out of view–the sky and its morning colors. But those few minutes are the best few minutes of the day. I’m going somewhere, my eyes still blurry with night dreams, my hands warming with possibility.
Coming home, glancing in my rearview mirror, back over the same bridge, the thin line of traffic neatly halving the blue water and gray sky behind me, what hits me is a sudden chill of knowing no matter which road, in which direction, or how fast I go, it’s all still coming with me.
(Photo by Steve White/Photoshop Action by me)
Here…
We go…
Again.
Currently Read(ing) and Loving:
Pretty good for brainless late-at-night reading (not life changing):
Watched and Adored:
