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Guest Posts, Relationships

And Miles To Go Before I Sleep

August 5, 2018
miles

By Matt Jones

The night before the Half Ironman, I can’t sleep. I am nervous about the 70.3-mile race. I am exhausted from traveling from Tuscaloosa, Alabama to Austin, Texas, from months of training and weeks of waiting for something to end that has scarcely even begun.

On the morning of the triathlon, I feel less alive than animated by raw anxiety. My parents, who have driven three hours up from Houston to watch the race, help me change into my wetsuit. It’s a little past 6:00 AM and the sun isn’t up just yet. The first leg of the race, the swimming portion, starts at Decker Lake. The gun sounds, and we enter the water by the dozen, so in the beginning, we are all over each other, kicking and colliding, fighting for space. Every few strokes, I lift my head to make sure I’m still going the right way and not careening off into the horizon—though would that be so bad? In many ways, I am already far off course. Despite the buoys and the red flags bobbing at the lake’s surface, I have entered uncharted territory. Even though I theoretically know what lies ahead, I am struck by a feeling of uncertainty. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Pets, Relationships

A Doghearted Thing

March 23, 2018
dog

By Jenna Clark Embrey

After a year and a half of dating, my boyfriend Steve and I decided to sign our first lease together and adopt a dog. It was the first time either one of us had lived with a significant other, and the idea of a pet went hand-in-hand with cohabitation in both our minds. This step forward felt like a promise, as if taking care of living thing together meant that we could tangle our lives together permanently. We had talked about marriage and children, but always in slightly dreamy, slightly ambivalent terms. I thought Steve’s enthusiasm to get a dog meant that his ambivalence had turned into something more concrete. It didn’t occur to me to ask him.

Steve and I first gravitated toward each other because of our similar natures. We were both relentless in our ambitions yet also deeply indulgent during our rare moments of relaxation. We loved margaritas and vodka sauce pizza and 24-hour news networks. We celebrated birthdays and holidays with day-long extravaganzas. From the earliest days of our relationship, we felt like a unit that was solid and sure.  Steve and I wanted to widen this circle just a bit, just enough to include a creature with four legs.

When we went to an adoption event near our new home in Brooklyn, I saw a large black pitbull who was standing still while people and animals swirled around her. When we came up to pet her, she sat down on Steve’s feet, and the connection between the two of them was immediate. I felt in my gut that this was the right dog for us, and I told him so. Steve had always trusted my instincts. Two weeks later we brought the dog home. I suggested that we name her Roz Doyle, after the character on the 90s sitcom Frasier, which I had been recently binge-watching on Netflix. Our Roz quickly revealed to us that her favorite things were eating, running, and sleeping, which luckily mirrored our own priorities for relaxation. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Relationships

Time’s Up

March 9, 2018
goodbye

By Jennifer Lang

Six years ago this summer, I upended my life and moved halfway across the world from New York to Israel after my French husband announced he couldn’t spend one more year in America. Our son, eighteen, had enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, and neither one of us could imagine sending him off alone, to a country where parents revere and pamper their teenaged soldiers. We never consulted our girls, twelve and fourteen, who cried and complained and came because they had no choice.

My yes included a ten-year clause: from the start of first child’s army service to the end of last child’s service, from my mid-forties to my mid-fifties. Philippe, desperate to return to the country where we’d met and married, accepted my conditions.

After we settled into our house in Raanana in the center of the country, I told anyone who asked that I didn’t intend to stay in Israel if even one of my children left, especially for my birthplace. If I couldn’t carve out a professional niche for myself. If I felt scared of the never-ending cycle of violence. If I couldn’t handle the distance between my aging parents and me. If I reached a stage when the “ifs” keep me up at night. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Mental Health, Relationships

Tub Stories: Sex Ed

November 13, 2017
tub

By Dru Rafkin

I stared at her soaking in the tub.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” I lied to my mother’s face without looking at it. “I just feel really cranky and sad.”

I sat on the edge of the toilet in her tiny bathroom, my knees fist distance from the edge of the tub. I wanted so badly for her to be soft with me, to comfort and advise me. I was 18 and had just lost my virginity the night before to my 23 year old boyfriend, Tom.

Tom worked at the corner gas station near our old apartment. My father was disappointed in my choice of a motorcycle-riding-gas-station-attendant boyfriend; my mom really liked him. Tom was charismatic, kind and protective. After a year of making out I knew he’d waited long enough.

I craved the closeness and warmth of kissing him, being near him and holding his hand, but our frequent make out sessions had always left me feeling dirty, used up and violated; I thought I loved him but felt no connection from my body to his. I wanted to want to have sex but, really, it only seemed like the next necessary step to having a real relationship. When he lay on top of me, kneading my breasts with his rough hands and kissing my neck I felt like a mountain that was being climbed – my body provided the route of handholds to get him to the top.  Afterwards he would climb down, elated and spent. I’d feel remorseful and sick to my stomach, wishing I could set the clock back an hour each time I gave him access to my parts. I had hoped that having sex would provide the missing link to my feeling connected to him and to myself, but now I only felt more alone, vulnerable, disconnected and ashamed. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Relationships, Starting Over

At the End There Might Just be Peace

November 12, 2017
shame

By Sarah Cannon

Remember the mindfulness training you felt cynical about back when Matt was hurt? It was and was not a long time ago. It’s like a lifetime has been squished into less than a decade. Or how about David, do you remember him? He was the counselor you were seeing before the accident, then again afterward. He had perpetual pit stains on his pastel button-ups and always asked you what you were doing with your anger. This was back when your focus was driving Matt to out-patient rehab sessions twice a day then showing up to feed, clothe, educate your children, and also work for money. You gave David a blank look and said something petty with a hanging question-mark sound at the end, like, “I don’t know, probably running around the block makes me feel better?” Then you didn’t pay him and he had to fire you.

Remember before the accident, when you had that dorky ‘wish’ cork board? You spent a whole Sunday gluing inspirational pictures and words and pinned it to the ceiling above your bed. It had a numerical figure written on a physical dollar in the center to symbolize the salary you wanted in five years. Matt poked good-natured fun at you, and you defended it, saying it was your five-year plan. You liked your poster so much that you called up Hannah and the two of you crafted a woman-specific plan you were convinced Oprah would buy the rights to. Want More, was the theme. You tore the poster down and threw notes for the Want More program into the fire after the accident.

“Isn’t it a miracle?” everyone kept saying after Matt nearly died. Then they began saying, “Things will get bet better,” when they saw you weep. And you wanted to say, “Everyone keeps saying that,” but you mostly smiled your gummy grin and hoped they were right. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Delight, Relationships

My People Didn’t Dance

October 31, 2017
dance

By Mathina Calliope

When my father turned 64 a few years ago I gave him a playlist especially for him. I labeled it The Happy Birthday Daddy Salsa Primer. Salsa—the dance and the music—was a fierce passion of mine but unknown to him, and I hoped he would enjoy discovering something both new and important to me. But at the party we threw for him, my mother thought I was giving him instructions for dance rather than an introduction to music—an insensitive gift for a man with a bad back. From across the living room, I saw disappointment pinch her face before she rolled her eyes and looked away. It was subtle, but it rent me.

What passion for dance my mother might have held had died one night in the fifties when her father, turning into the driveway on a darkening Upper Michigan evening, spied her youthful profile in the warm yellow rectangle of her bedroom window. She was dancing in front of the mirror. I imagine her twirling, or lifting her arms over her head and letting them drift down, like silk parachutes, to her sides. Until, that is, my grandfather burst through the door, belt in hand. In his household, dancing was a sin against God.

Dancing was okay by my father, who loves many kinds of music. Alas, his family did not genetically endow him with that crucial dance prerequisite, rhythm. His clapping hands seldom sync with the beat. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Relationships

Depression Music Matrix: Getting Over Him

October 27, 2017

By Amy Turner

Hey. Wondering if you’re over your ex? Feeling crazy and listening to sad songs is as natural as a West Elm jute rug, but sometimes the line between heartbreak and sinkhole gets blurry.

Here’s a depression music matrix to guide the way.

  1. Lucinda Williams, “Essence”

Okay. You’re sad and whiskey soaked. The lyric “I am waiting by your door/ I am waiting on your back steps” seems totally reasonable. Never mind thinking through the idea that if you were in a healthy relationship, said person would just, uh, open the door. I mean, what are you? A cat? Yes. You have become a cat. A sad, drunk cat. Turn this song off. Turn it off now. You, drunk cat, are over nothing. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Relationships, The Body

Giving Birth to Yourself; the inception of Other

October 23, 2017
story

By Charlotte O’Brien

My lover meets me after work with a kind of vibrating tension I recognize as two parts anxiety one part defensiveness. She isn’t late, but I am trying not to be angry that I haven’t heard from her until several minutes before her arrival. She and I work in a university town within a five-block radius of each other and she tends to summon me when it suits her. The nature of our relationship is such that we are seizing whatever moments we can together. And, despite the fact that we see each other as often as possible we are always saying goodbye to each other on street corners, in parked cars, in university bars. Although I understand her summoning as something as simple as desire, often I feel unhinged by it. Both of us are half-waiting for the other to withdraw completely.

We walk towards the bar at the far end of campus because this is a place where we can be ourselves together. I am in love with her. I have been since the beginning, when she walked past me on the street five years after I’d kissed her one night in a different city at a grad school party in a university dorm room. She is also in love with me, but our home lives are such that it’s difficult to simply name the thing we want and then act on it. We have made deals, compromises, and promises neither of us are certain we can keep. Both of us are afraid. We each have a lot to lose. But, it seems even strangers can tell that we’re in love. Whenever we’re together in places where we can be ourselves, people we’ve never met before are compelled to approach and tell us that we’re cute together. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Letting Go, Relationships

Lessons for When You Want to Not Want

June 12, 2017

By T.A. Burkholder

  1. Go two hours south to a small college on a hill because a boy you like wants to go there (though the boy won’t go there and the boy won’t like you back).
  2. Before leaving, dig with glee through dusty mounds of dead people’s clothes at the “dollar-a-pound” warehouse. In a sea of jeans and t-shirts, be the one in flowered polyester.
  3. Fall immediately and awkwardly in love with an unattainable, moody artist. Renew this heartbreak regularly with other unattainables.
  4. Stop shaving, stop wearing a bra and repair your glasses with duct tape. Pretend this is because you don’t care what people think.
  5. When you accidentally attract a boy who serenades you, don’t speak. When you show up at his door later, don’t say why. End the year untouched and return home for the summer to watch Jeopardy! with your parents.
  6. Blame everything on your tiny, isolated school and start fresh at a big, city university. As a joke or a social experiment or a cry for attention, tell everyone your name is Bob and stick with it the whole, mostly friendless year. In the fall, return to the gem-green grass of that first small school.
  7. As a joke or a social experiment or a cry for attention, shave your head down to the scalp. Keep it that way even when people call you Sinead. Keep it that way even after your mother worries that people will think she’s a bad mother.
  8. Smoke one cigarette a day while standing in your room singing along to the same Laurie Anderson song. We’re gonna save ourselves. Save ourselves.
  9. Promise yourself, on a regular basis, that today will be the first day of many when you find perfection in silence. No stupid questions. No wrong answers. No conversations that require the treachery of words.
  10. Threaten yourself on a regular basis with the fact that you know where your father keeps his gun.
  11. Instead of kissing the beautiful, complicated, black-haired woman you eat lunch with, pick a fight and never apologize.
  12. Streak frequently in groups both large and small, each time running back towards your clothes a little slower.
  13. Allow a mutual acquaintance to broker a hook up between you and a guy you don’t really like. For a few weeks, let the raw mechanics of your bodies bring you a tight, silent thrill. But remember, he doesn’t need to know your heart is raw and easily bruised. Or that your nerves are mostly burnt-wire black. Or that want – so close to need – winds through you like blood.

Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Relationships, Sex

When It’s Not Love You Want

March 5, 2017
sex

By Kerry Neville

The first time I had sex was with my summer-before-college boyfriend on his gurgly waterbed in his dank, basement bedroom.  His mother winked at us as she left the house, and said, “Be careful, you two.”  She was a dancer, so maybe more open to bodies moving and touching and wrapping around each other than my own Catholic mother who counseled me on the sanctity of my body and warned that when you sleep with someone, you sleep with everyone they slept with before, a forbidding chain of penises-in-vaginas stretching back to the Neolithic Age.  I fell somewhere between Momma as condom dispenser and Momma as abstinence advocate: I was ready for sex but in order to make it happen, I needed to chug Budweisers.  More than one.  So the boy and I sat on the edge of the waterbed which sloshed beneath us like it had gastrointestinal issues, and polished off a few quick cans of beer.

My body was ready.  After all, I’d been studying my father’s old Playboys in the attic since I was eight, taking note of the rounded slopes of butts and boobs, and glossy lips parted mid-sigh. Also, years of self-practice, so just a matter of alignment.  And there was pleasure, sort of.  It wasn’t his first time, so things went where they were supposed to instead of say, misfiring into my armpit.  The problem though, was when we were done and rolled away from each other.  I wiped my eyeliner smudges with the back of my hand, and he shimmied back into his jeans, and I decided to be even braver: “I love you,” I said, with a desperate kind of hope.

He was quiet, and my heart whoosh-thumped in my ears because I knew he wasn’t going to say what I wanted him to say.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “I don’t feel that way.”

My little eighteen year old heart dissolved in shame.  I’d assumed mutual feeling inside that mutualish pleasure.  The three beers not only loosened my jeans but my words, too.  Meaning making where there was no meaning other than two bodies reaching their expected conclusions. Continue Reading…