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| Wrote this a few weeks ago and am just posting it now. It's not the finest example of my work-- in fact, it's probably my least favorite thing I've ever written, and needed heavy editing. (I'm starting to realize I like my writing more at sixteen than at nineteen. Very upsetting.) Anyway, if you stumble upon this blog, please give me some constructive criticism in the comments. I'd love to hear about how I could improve this. So far it's untitled. Here we go:
Nitin walked me through my first cigarette. He couldn't believe I'd never tried smoking before, and really at age nineteen, I couldn't either. So we sat on a porch swing outside a busy, noisy house party with Raza late on Friday night, and I smoked my first cigarette-- a Camel of some sort, or maybe a Marlboro Light. In between ragged coughing, I held my own. Not quite a pro or a grown-up, but still okay. Actually, honestly, really-- I was awful.
That was November, and now it is May. I am in Nitin's room, my first time in months, since before my fall-out with his best friend Raza and before I swore off all of them--that group of friends, international students, brown people, South Asians, what have you-- for good. But I showed up because I was bored, and because Nitin is graduating soon. Why not be friendly and say goodbye?
Truthfully, I only knocked on Nitin's door because I was looking for Raza. Over finals week we ran into each other at the library, and he suggested we get together one last time before he leaves Ohio Wesleyan. At the time, I resented his invitation, snapping "We don't spend time together anyway, so why should we go through the trouble of saying goodbye now?" Raza did have his moments though, and from the time I first time I met him in this very room-- Nitin's room-- he always struck me as someone to whom I should pay attention. So I agreed. Now his phone keeps going straight to voicemail, and I feel like an idiot.
Nitin wants cigarettes, so we walk to the gas station a block away. It starts to rain, and I feel sad and wistful in the way I sometimes do when people leave in the springtime. Pass or fail (and I fail more often than I'd like), my affection often remains for people with whom I have a history.
"Raza was supposed to call me back," I say during our walk. My voice is flat. I try not to reveal too much to Nitin, no "emotional crap," only facts. I have learned to talk the way they do-- apathetic and disinterested.
"Why did you call him?" Nitin's voice is deep and accented. He is an exotic man, more intimidating than sexy. I've always liked him, but in the way you like a Tolstoy book you only pretend to understand because other, smarter people do.
"I wanted to see him one last time before he graduates." I say. And it's true-- through all the nasty words and painful gestures expressed between us, I do want to see Raza one last time.
"What do you expect?" Nitin says. "He has that girlfriend who is around him twenty-four hours a day." His voice reveals contempt, maybe the only emotion Nitin ever expresses.
"I don't care what she thinks anymore," I answer simply. What a lie.
Raza's new girlfriend is Nitin's old girlfriend, Muslim and pretty and much more detached than me-- which is why Raza likes her. That is the kind of girl he likes, not needy and white and choking on the cigarettes she only tried to fit in. Also, Raza's new girlfriend was one of my closest friends. I thought I deserved at least some loyalty from her. Isn't that some sort of unwritten female code? No ex-boyfriends? Maybe that's just another cultural divide I have to put up with, like their rapid, clanging Urdu and affection for cricket.
When a mutual friend eventually told me about the two of them-- Raza and my friend, I mean, weeks after they first got together, no less-- I called Raza drunk, screaming "You two deserve each other!" like some soap opera diva. My anger died down eventually, but I steer clear of the happy couple now. I only want to see Raza because I never will again. And also because, you know, I never quite got over him.
Nitin and I arrive back outside his dorm, and he presses a cigarette into my hand without a word. We sit down on a bench and light up. I don't mention I quit weeks ago. Smoking never became a real habit for me, it was only, well, it was only something I did around brown people. They all knew how disingenuous I was, how desperately I was trying to ingratiate myself into their social circle, and my childish, phony smoking was proof. Then I became slightly addicted: a cigarette outside the library after studying all night, smoking outside at a party when friends offered up a pack. So I tried quitting for good. Does the way I started even matter now, after so many months have passed? What matters was I hated it so much I had to quit. I contemplate this, try to blow smoke rings outside in the rain, and only end up hacking.
Before long, Raza walks over to the dorm with his girlfriend. It is where he lives, after all, and where she unofficially lives, too. He seems pleased to see me, smiles. The girl curtly nods hello.
"I was just about to call you back," he says.
I smile back, close-mouthed. I don't believe him. We were supposed to get ice cream, and now I don't even want it. It's raining and he made me upset.
"I didn't think you smoked," he says.
"I'm trying to quit," I tell him. The cigarette is disgusting. It tastes awful and makes my throat want to explode. That doesn't stop me, though.
"Still," I say, exhaling for dramatic emphasis, "I always tell myself this time is the last time."
Raza nods towards the street, where the frozen custard place is located. "Shall we?" he says. Without even thinking, I stub out the Camel, avoid eye contact with the girlfriend, and he and I make our way down North Liberty. Anything for Raza. That's just the way things are. Upon our arrival, we pay separately and lick up medium vanilla cones in the downpour. The entire time, I'm dying trying not to kiss him on the mouth. Afterwards, I want another cigarette.
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| I doubt many people who are unfamiliar with Xanga know this, but users have a feature called "Footprints" on their dashboard, which allows them to track who is viewing their page by location. I didn't notice this feature until I started writing on my site again in November, and have taken a sort of strange pleasure in checking who reads this blog. Someone from New Jersey has me on RSS feed, I have a regular reader in New York, a user from Virginia stumbled upon my page the other day, and there is someone from California who regularly checks this site-- and its RSS component-- at least once a week. No one else concerns me, but I sometimes wonder about the nameless Californian. Except for my ex-boyfriend Matt, I have no idea who else it could be. This explains my prolonged absence on Xanga. If any of you are wondering why I no longer update this blog, that's why. Allow me to explain.
Knowing that Matt is reading over my shoulder limits my ability to be honest and frank on this site. I remember once he came home from a funeral-- A FUNERAL-- and reported on an interaction with his ex-girlfriend, who also attended. "We said hi, but she just looked awful, like she's been sick," he recalled. A few months later, he ran into her at the bar, where she drunkenly vented, "You ruined me, Matt! You ruined me!" My ex-boyfriend took pleasure in reporting those things. He gladly told me his ex hadn't been in a serious relationship with anyone but him, and he sometimes spoke of another girl who had never quite recovered from their brief high school tryst, either. Here was a guy who gleefully reveled in the ways in which he could change women for the worse. Posting anything honest about my disappointments and frustrations--which EVERYONE has from time to time-- would just give Matt a license to put me on his list of girls whose lives he wrecked. And honestly? I never want to give him that much credit.
Matt did not ruin my life by breaking up with me. To the contrary, he improved it immensely. Thankfully, I am not the same person that he left. Rejection and loneliness forced me to become resilient and independent. I learned to be alone, to stand up for myself, to communicate more effectively, and to seriously rethink what I want from my relationships and in a partner. I moved on and got better. That said, my life is still not perfect. I don't always earn the grades I would like, my dates usually don't end perfectly, and sometimes I let my friends down. I'm nineteen, and realistically, it will be a while before I get to where I want to be as a person, daughter, sister, friend, girlfriend, writer, and student-- if I EVER get there. This page should be the place where I can explore all of what that means to me-- not only the regrets and aggravations, but the great stuff too. The stuff that makes me want to celebrate and tell everyone. So here's my solution:
I like writing, and I'm going to keep writing on this site. I prefer Xanga as far as blogging platforms go, and have had this name for five years and see no point in giving it up. I'm going to start posting longer, more in-depth text entries that are not appropriate for my tumblr and I am going to be more confessional on this site than I ever have in the past. I am doing this because I owe it to myself as a writer to start being more honest, and I want to do that in front of an audience.
Oh, and Matt? Since you may be reading this (and I suspect you are), I've thought for a long time about asking you to remove this site from your RSS feeds. And you know what? I just don't care. Do whatever you want. Your insistence on keeping tabs on me simply doesn't matter to me anymore. | | |
| I miss you, Xanga. Tumblr is great, but I like a lot of your features better (like that you are better at long text entries). We will catch up soon. Be sure of this.
P.S. I should probably stop referring to you as a person.
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| Hey Xanga.
Let me just start out by saying: I am sorry. I am SO sorry. I found someone else-- a tumblr. I said I would never do it, but I thought I should come clean eventually. I will still try to write in you sometimes when I am feeling particularly wistful or contemplative, but I am sorry. You can find me at emilyrose.tumblr.com from now on.
XOXOXO,
Rose | | |
| A year ago on Friday I learned my dad had cancer. I've been thinking a lot about it, and since this blog is really just an outlet for my burning nostalgia I am posting an essay I wrote about that day. It's not the best thing I've ever written, but it probably is the most confessional.
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When my sister came to pick me up from her university at Ohio Wesleyan, she was in a hurry. Michelle does not like to be kept waiting, and I could tell that she wasn’t interested in dallying on this particular trip. We were headed north to Cleveland to visit our father, newly diagnosed, with a tumor the size of a loaf of bread in his abdomen. I had found out that morning.
My sister was accompanied by our cousin Susanna-- chatty and pretty, returning home to visit her boyfriend, and eager to regale us with funny stories about her family. Susanna has a mouth on her, and the week before she had walked in on her father and his new girlfriend having sex and of course recounted the situation’s awkwardness and embarrassment in full, wincing detail. My sister and I laughed, even though the story was uncomfortable and sort of gross. It felt good to laugh.
The ride was smooth. Central Ohio stays flat for hundreds of miles, and even though we were promised rain, Mansfield and then Ashland and Akron and Chagrin passed by easily. Then came Cleveland. For all of the flak it gets, Cleveland does have some sparkle, and since my family lives so far outside the city I associate the city with special occasions—plays and birthday dinners and concerts and baseball games. The specter of cancer tends to suck all of the glamour out of a place, and that afternoon the Cleveland skyline just looked grey. I cried for the good last hour of the trip, but I don’t think Susanna or my sister noticed. I didn’t want them to know.
My father is tall and boisterous, has a lot of opinions, and has spent a good portion of his life taking my sister and I (and sometimes a dozen of our closest friends) to high school basketball games and sneaking us twenties behind our mom’s back. He is a very good dad. The month before his hospitalization he’d gone to the doctor complaining of abdominal pains and the doctor prescribed acid-reflux medication. The medicine didn’t work because my father didn’t have acid-reflux. He had a giant tumor attached to one of his lymph nodes. Another visit followed, and the doctors suspected kidney stones, which were, again, just the giant tumor. According to my dad, during an ultrasound the lab technician became visibly flustered and brought several attendings in to look at the screen which finally revealed the giant tumor, and that’s how his cancer was discovered. By the time I heard this story the giant tumor had been nicknamed “Tony” and was already being killed by some of the best drugs ever discovered, all mixed into a lethal chemotherapy cocktail delivered intravenously.
However, I didn’t know about any of this until my journey with my sister to the hospital, until well after his cancer was discovered, diagnosed and labeled: “type large-B cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.” My father didn’t want my sister and I know until then; he didn’t want to burden us with what could have been a benign lump just taking up space in his belly. He had called the night before, asking me to come home because he was hospitalized. It was no big deal though, “just a little bit of lymphoma,” and I had no idea what lymphoma was, so my worries were quelled for the meantime. The line didn’t worry me, and I never thought to look it up.
The day after he phoned and asked me to return home, my mother called and mentioned a biopsy. I was confused and thought that entire idea was incredulous, remarking to her “Why does he need a biopsy? It’s not like he has cancer.” That was when she told me and when I started screaming at my mother and crying. She had been dealing with my father’s diagnosis for a month and, I suspect, had no idea how to react to my response.
I understand that oftentimes parents want to protect their children, want to withhold hurtful information for as long as possible (Santa Claus perhaps being the best example of this), want to shield them from the truth. My mom and I got off the phone and my crying continued. I started to undress to change from my pajamas into regular clothes and then heard a knock at the door. This was how mind-boggling my grief was: I said “Come in!” and didn’t even have a shirt on. I was completely topless and inviting a stranger into my room simply because I couldn’t think about anything but my father’s mortality and how young he was and how young I was and the profound cruelty and unfairness of it all and how my family would never be the same, if we ever recovered. The girl on the other side of my dorm room door was a neighbor who was curious as to why I was crying—she said she could hear me all the way across the hall. I covered myself up, slipped into a t-shirt, embarrassed at my nakedness in front of a stranger, and explained what happened. She tried as best as she could to comfort me, but at that point nothing could really help.
After my sister and I dropped off Susanna, we came back to the hospital where my family was waiting. My father’s prognosis, the drugs that almost killed him and our family to save his life, the months of waiting and miles of paperwork and the hundreds of “I’m praying for yous” would all come later. For now, the only thing my sister and I could do was park the car, walk through the sliding doors, and enter the hospital where our lives would change. | | |
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