I know this is a little heavy. Thank you for reading.

I miss you today. Not the you that used to get drunk and embarrass me, or the you that expected everything to always be taken care of for you (by me, whether you knew it or not), but the other part...maybe a part that isn't even exclusive to you. What I miss is having a lap to snuggle into, and a chest to spill tears on, and arms to hold me, and a mouth to kiss me and tell me things will be okay. I used to believe it with all my heart when you said that.

I saw a man get hurt on the subway stairs a few days ago. I thought I was okay, but today the image flashed back into my mind. There was so much blood everywhere, and he was moaning and convulsing...the sound was horrible, like nothing I have ever seen before, like a cow, maybe. I imagine it would be the noise made by the cow in Apocalypse now, when the natives try to sever its head, but the machete only cuts halfway. I kept thinking I should do something, and all I could remember from your stupid EMT flash cards was "jazzy hands."

My God, there was so much blood. It was spilling out of his crushed skull like a drain pipe. It pooled up around his face and started dripping down the stairs. The sight of the blood paralyzed me--I'm still not sure how I managed to call the station manager on the intercom. I wanted to scream. All those people were just walking over him and I wanted to scream at them. But the blood...I couldn't. My mouth wouldn't open.

Finally, a police officer descended the stairs. I was watching this all through a metal gate, and it was like watching, I don't know, a scene from Twelve Monkeys or something, where the lighting is all dismal and weird and the depth of field is really small. The police officer shouted at the man: "Police! Sir! Police!" like he was accusing him of vagrancy. How dare he lie face down on the pavement like that, with crumpled one dollar bills littered around his limp hand, with a river of blood gushing from around his brain?

I couldn't help thinking about my dad. When he shot himself, did he do it in the face? Did the bullet go through the side of his head? The back? Or was it front and center, like he was executing himself? Did the blood flow like that? Was there a puddle in the car? When they found him, was the blood still wet? Did it drip off his hands like at the end of Gorillas in the Mist? Did he die right away, or did he have time to think about it while it happened? If he thought about it, did he regret it? Did he ever imagine that I would sit in Bryant Park someday sobbing violently and asking these questions to my ex-boyfriend through a notebook? Didn't he ever wonder what would happen to me because of him and his stupid gun? Why didn't he think about that? Why didn't he love us enough to stay? Why did he have to be so selfish and why am I so selfish all the time with my anger and my fear and my time and my money and my things and my love? Why am I always so afraid? Why is it so hard for me to believe that I'm not going to end up just like him? Why is it so hard for me to understand that the world isn't forcing me to be like him? Why is it so hard for me to understand that it's okay to be happy?

In a flash I was back on the landing by the 2 train, watching the cop and the man, who was no longer convulsing. I think maybe he was dead. The paramedics were on their way, the cop said. Did anybody see what happened?

Truthfully, I hadn't. I had just heard the noise and then turned around to see him lying there. "I think he fell," I said. My voice was not my own. It was so loud, so sure. How was that voice coming out of me?

"Do you want to wait with him?"

I tried to speak again. I tried to say something that would make the poor man, if he was alive, if he could hear, understand why I was about to do what I was about to do. I opened my mouth, but I just shook my head and walked away. What does that say about me? What does it say that feeling so helpless and alone and vulnerable makes me wish that you were here, even though I know I'd hate it?

I feel selfish. I feel like a person who walks away from things and then seeks validation. I walked away from you and I knew you didn't even understand that I was doing it. I walked away from this man, and I couldn't even say I was doing it. I know it's different; with you the process took six months of planning and you could have talked me out of it, and with this the process took a split second and I didn't really have total control of my motor skills.
Even so, somehow there seems to be a connection.

It seems fitting that I no longer have the option of crawling into your lap and getting a kiss on my hair. It seems fair that nobody is going to tell me it will all be alright. In fact, I think that's why I walked away from the man. I know that if he was dead, I didn't want to know.

The Legend of Miss A, Part 2 - The Empire Strikes Back

When my mom was a little girl, she lived in a cute little white bungalow on Empire Road.

As I referenced in Part 1, we moved away from the Little Red House on Tioga Trail when I was four years old. The reason we moved was that my Grandparents had built a big house out in the country, but they wanted to keep their suburban house around too, knowing that as they grew older they might want to return there. So, instead of my Mom and Dad renting the Little Red House, we rented out Grandma and Grandpa's house instead. It wasn't until later, when I was seven or eight that I realized how neat it was that my Mom and I spent our childhoods in the same house.

Life on Empire Road was a lot different than life at the Little Red House. We had moved away our close family friends, the O's: My "friend-mom," her husband, and their four kids that were of appropriate age to play with my sister and I. No more pancakes at the O house. No more Lake Erie in our back yard. No chance of going to school with my friends. I would have to make new friends. I didn't like that idea very much...which has become a running theme in my life.

Still, there were lots of kids on the block and I did actually make friends with them. I went to kindergarten, where I found out I was really smart and creative. My teachers couldn't get enough of me and lavished attention on my precocious little freckled face. I loved school! It was around this time that my weight problem began. I was constantly rewarded for my scholastic accomplishments with food; ice cream, cookies, chips, and all kinds of goodies.

Then it happened. The bomb dropped, and nothing was normal anymore. I felt isolated from other kids, and stopped hanging out with the kids on my block. Soon, the food rewards became food to replace my grief. I started getting fatter and fatter, and the kids on the block started making fun of me for being fat (although it probably had more than a little to do with me not playing with them as much anymore).

Every time I showed signs of sadness, I was met by my mom with some kind of treat, and soon I learned that I could use what had happened to my advantage. Within two years my grades were slipping, I was ditching school (in fourth grade!), and I was hanging out with other kids who had marginalized themselves for various reasons. This included a girl who asked me to steal my mom's cigarettes for her, a girl whose dad got drunk and beat her up for being too nerdy, two boys who are now openly gay (god knows what was happening to them at home), among others.

It's not that nobody was around...plenty of people were there. Mom, Salty, my mom's parents, my teachers, aunts and uncles... they were all there... Like Salty keeps telling me, not all things are good or bad; some things just are. And it just was that nobody knew how to help a little kid grieve. Grandma and Grandpa came to stay with us for a while after it happened (I don't remember any of this; I remember the night we found out about it, and the next thing I remember isn't until seven months later), and then suddenly I was supposed to be all better, like it never happened. Like he was never there. Like it was normal.

And now I sob every time I think about his absence during the last twenty years. Thinking about him...Salty was right when she said it's like finally calling an old friend that you accidentally stood up. Now I'm finally alone, and nobody can tell me to shut off my tears because it makes them uncomfortable. And with Salty's help, I've figured out where the tears are coming from, so I let them flow. Nearly every night. Sure, some of that is self-pity for the whole no-job no-money no-love thing, but it always, always comes back to being sorry that I missed out on having a dad and being sorry that it took me so long to tell him how very much I missed it.

I always knew I identified with Peppermint Patty for a reason.

Continuing to read some other blogs about New York twentysomething life, I have realized that I am disappointed with my own experience so far. It seems like I keep sabotaging myself somehow and setting myself up for that disappointment. Like every time I try to hit one of my goals I miss by a quarter inch. And then I get surly. And then it makes things even worse.

I am disappointed that I live in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. It takes me about 40 minutes to get to midtown from where I live. Late nights on the subway it has taken me over two hours to get home, with crazy transfers and a Q train that recently decided not to go through at Atlantic (instead they make you transfer from the D line, which is one of the most obnoxious transfers I have had to make). The annoying building I live in wouldn't be nearly so bad if it were, say, the first stop in Brooklyn or, say, in Manhattan somewhere. I don't feel safe in my neighborhood late at night. I don't feel like I can walk the ten blocks to the closest Duane Reade if I need to. It's not New York. Not really.

I live in PLG because I was desperate for an apartment. I took the first thing I could get--300 square feet with lots of closet space, a full-but-small kitchen, and a full bath for $900 a month. For $900 a month I should have looked in Washington Heights more.

I was desperate for an apartment because I didn't make an acceptable long term living arrangement that would allow me to sleep on someone's couch for three months...everyone seemed to need their couch for something else once every couple of weeks. My best friend Alecia lives three hours upstate, an hour north of the last stop on the Hudson line of the Metro North Railroad. Her house was the closest place I had to park my boxes and rest my head until I found that apartment I so desperately wanted. I hit a deer with my car during my three hour commute that first month.

I didn't make an acceptable long term living arrangement because I couldn't ask for one from PDF, who I had barely spoken to in years before my visit last July. I couldn't ask for one from cousin Jeannie because she has so much going on all the time that I just feel in her way when I'm around her. The big one though, is that I couldn't ask for one from Aunt J. I can't ask her for anything. I can barely talk to her without getting nervous and frustrated...

When I actually spend time with her it's so nice! She's really funny and relatively easygoing...relatively because everyone on that side of my family, including me and my sister, is typically very high strung and hard to please. So she's relatively easy gong (for one of my relatives), and it's obvious that she cares about me. Her girlfriend R, as is typical of people who marry into that side of my family, is very warm and sweet and incredibly approachable.

I love hanging out with them. I want to do nothing else! I want to tag along with their entire life! When I rented my apartment, a block and a half away from Prospect Park, I imagined their house, a half a block away from Prospect Park on the other side, in trendy and safe Park Slope. I imagined waking up on a Saturday or Sunday morning and putting on my goofy neon green shorts and my ipod and running out through the park, and all of a sudden I see Aunties J and R throwing the frisbee to their sweet little dog. They wave me over and we all have a nice time running around and frisbeeing. And then we go have brunch in Park Slope. What happens to my running shorts in this particular fantasy, I do not know, because I definitely do not wear them to brunch.

I guess I'm afraid of Aunt J because someday I want to grow up and be just like her, a successful filmmaker, a former Manhattanite who abandoned the noise and the grit for the sunny side of Propsect Park, living in a homey 4th floor brownstone apartment with my pets and my girlfriend or whoever, turning 40 and looking back and feeling like I accomplished something.

There's more than that though. My sister and I often wonder if that side of the family sometimes doesn't want us around because we remind them of him, of my dad. For a long time, particularly during my teenaged years after Mom got remarried, we felt like the Aunties were the only people we could talk to about him...so every chance I had, every time I saw one of them, I would press for more information like a squirrel frantically collecting nuts before winter sets in and all the nuts are gone. It may have made me a little one-dimensional in their eyes.

I guess a little of that goes both ways, like when I see Aunt J it's hard not to think of her in terms of her relationship to my father (his youngest sibling). She was thirteen when I was born, and by the time I could really remember stuff she had gone to college, so I don't remember her much from my childhood. From what I do remember of her, she used to tease me, but in the nice way that grownups tease little kids they love. Like in the same way that my dad was funny, but in a way I didn't understand when I was a little kid. I guess in a lot of ways it feels like every time we look at each other or talk to each other my dad is sitting right there in the middle, and a little bit in the way.

And like a Phoenix, I will rise out of the ashes...

Okay, so when I started this blog a month ago, my intent was to create a funny and introspective documentation of one person's mildly frustrating efforts in relocating to New York City. Funny and introspective, kind of like me. As I go back over all the posts from the last month, I see a little bit of funny and introspective, but I see a lot of pain under the surface too. While the average blog consumer may not see the pain, I can see it conspicuously poking out from behind.

Personally, I don't want to read about someone else's angst, and I don't imagine that anyone else wants to read about mine, so I feel a little guilty and disappointed that my blog is coming dangerously close to turning out to be less funny and introspective and more thrashy and outlet-for-painy. My inclination is to say, "It's silly that I feel guilty and disappointed, but nonetheless, I'm sorry for vomiting angst all over you. I'll start over and be funnier and more introspective." But after reading through it all, I didn't even really vomit angst! Well, maybe just a little... But the pain and the thrashing are all happening inside, and I'm trying to hide them by being funny and introspective (which is really kind of like me).

In her last blog entry, my sister, Salty, referred back to an older post of hers about pain. She's afraid of pain so she has anxiety about dealing with pain, which causes more pain, which gives her anxiety about anxiety, blah blah... As I have mentioned over and over, I'm going through a lot of that same stuff, hence the occasional thrashing. It took Salty a long time to drop the bomb in her blog; the bomb that explains the pain. That's not really my style, but neither is dropping the bomb at the end of a post. So hitch up your skirts, ladies. We're going to wade through some shit.

When I was six years old, my father shot and killed himself. There it is. Now you know.

I don't know a lot about him, or about what happened, because I was six. I was brought up in a working-class Catholic family that didn't know how to deal with that kind of tragedy, other than to ignore it. My sister's feelings were stifled. Mine were coddled with unhealthy and unsatisfying solutions like toys, food (a story for another time), and a spiral perm. No kidding--when my mom agreed to get me a spiral perm in fourth grade (heh), she really justified spending $80 on my nine-year-old head by saying it would make me feel good about myself.

I get really frustrated because I can't squeeze the entire story out of anyone...the closest I can get is my sister, who was eleven at the time and although she has a lot more of the story than I do, she doesn't have the whole thing. In fact, I don't think anyone knows it all...from what I understand there was no real explanation, no note, no witness. He was found in his car with a picture of my sister and I. About a year before it happened, his youngest brother had died in an accident, after which amorphously he said to his oldest sister, "now I know what I have to do." That's the best I've got. My Mom, who was probably closer to him and to his illness than anyone else, doesn't talk about it. As a kid, I felt like that was because she thought it shouldn't be talked about, but as I've grown older, now that we're twenty-one years removed from it (Feb. 7, 1987, I think), I think it's because she didn't have anyone to talk to for a very long time...Nobody else was in her position (trying so hard to understand and help only to have it literally blow up, left with two children to support, abandoned emotionally by family and friends who didn't want to talk about it because they were afraid of pain).

One of the main differences in the way my sister and I are coming to terms with all this is that she can afford therapy (and lovingly shares the wisdom) and I may not make rent (more on that later). So right now I have no outlet...this is it. This is my outlet. So I might thrash about. I might need to talk about it. And I'm not going to apologize. I may feel guilty and disappointed about it, but if I do that's okay and not silly, those are just feelings that come with this territory. And ultimately those feelings are the problem behind all my angst: the inability to properly cope with or confront my pain, and the guilt and disappointment that comes with being unable to do so.

The truth is that nobody teaches you how to deal with your pain, you’re just expected to learn by example. It just so happens that my examples weren’t very good at it, so it’s completely okay that I don’t know. In fact, since I had to unlearn before I could begin teaching myself, I think I’m doing a great job so far.