"Life Update"

My next door neighbor from childhood has just Direct Messaged me on Instagram.

My next door neighbor from childhood has just Direct Messaged me on Instagram. Her name is Lizzy. Do Elizabeths get called that anymore? Lizzy grew up two doors down from me. This is how we ALWAYS said it – “Oh, Lizzy? She lives two doors down.” I have never delineated neighborship in this way, before, otherwise, or since. 

I’ve not actually opened the message yet. I just saw that it started with “And YOU are living your dream in NYC…”

As a kid, I was obsessed. I had pictures of New York City all over my bedroom. Different kinds. A black and white one my uncle took, a hideous diorama-type foamboard thing of Times Square, little stickers crawling up the molding around my windows of pretzels and the Statue of Liberty and that fat, red heart in its perfect spot next to “I” and above “NY.” 

This is, I suppose, because I dreamt of being a Broadway actor. If I really try to figure out why I wanted this so bad the best I can do is that I loved the feeling of getting attention without having to feel like it was me, myself, getting attention. Don’t worry, this caught up with me. It turns out being an actor is not a good way to hide.

But that’s why I loved New York. I collected Playbills, wrote my college essay about the sparkly sidewalks, and cried alone in my room to the entire soundtrack of RENT while writing poems in a strange square spiral notebook. This notebook had some other NY paraphernalia on the cover, I think, and was full of John Mayer lyrics and ideas I’d written with word magnets. “I whisper that my song is silent,” was, I thought, something only a true genius could piece together. 

There were also several pictures of my High School “boyfriend” (went to PF Changs once) with his face crossed out. The lines of the sharpie are violent, soaked with tears I’m sure, and I think they say somewhere, something like, “you will never love anyone as much as you love yourself.” This was meant to be a total teardown, but little did I know this concept would later become a kind of pop mantra for young women, the thing that all of us should strive to do. So I guess it’s fine that I got back together with that kid, married him, and made our delicious spawn. 

So that’s basically where I was when I got the message from Lizzy.  She sent it because I had actually first messaged her (out of nowhere, as is the right and privilege of the internetted) with a picture of my son looking exactly like her younger brother, Chip. She responded immediately and agreed, which was incredibly vindicating and enjoyable, and then she sent pictures of Chip as a kid as proof, which I swear I remember from her living room. This was all mainly funny to us because my husband and I both have brown-brown hair, brown-brown eyes, and eyebrows for a nation, while Lizzy and all of her siblings have famously flaming red hair. 

But it’s true. My son has a much fairer complexion. He does look like Chip! But I look at him and I see everyone I have ever met in my family, and this I swear by. And my husband swears the same. This is… well, this is science. But when I get this message from Lizzy about living out my dreams in NYC, which I know she has probably written from her cozy den in her house in Wisconsin where three adorable kids crawl over her once always dance-ready body, I’m a bit knocked out by the poetry of it all. 

You may see this coming, but this was not my dream at all. I am sitting on a playmat whose top layer is peeling off, the design of which I believe is called, “terrazzo,” talking to a two-year old about the sensibilities of a lego train, which he calls, “cars.” I am sitting in front of a mirrored closet that we got from Ikea, because our apartment actually only has one (1) closet. There are no closets in the two small bedrooms, which face out to the street and thusly house the only windows in the place. The living room sits behind them and is big and nice and the ceilings are high. We have central AC! We have LAUNDRY. It’s the same exact washer and dryer that Tony Soprano has in his basement and I’m not kidding, but it gets the job done. The living room is also the kitchen, the family room, and the dining room. Happily, the bathroom is the bathroom. 

So I see myself in this mirror. I see that I am about 30 pounds heavier than I was when I got pregnant almost three years ago. I am not sitting, shall we say, in a way that my years and years of acting teachers would have liked to see me sitting. I’m slumpin’. I’m tired. I am getting over Covid for the second time. The first time I got Covid, just over two years ago and in the sweet spot of my third trimester, I woke up in the middle of the night to find the whole room spinning. I could only hear a ringing in my right ear and I could not open my eyes without vomiting. My hearing never came back. It turns out this – and the weight gain and the gestational diabetes and the and and and – was [probably, though doctors will never confirm or deny] because I had a benign tumor that was over-producing Cortisol, the stress hormone that controls, like, everything. But I’m getting over Covid now just as I got over it then. Only now I am here, in front of this mirror, with the baby that was in me, out of me. 

The other night I called my best friend because I re-diagnosed myself with re-depression. The reason was I began to harbor the thought that my husband should leave me so he can finally have a life without problems (not a rational thought, not the point). She talked to me perfectly and told me to revisit David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, This is Water. We both do this occasionally, even though DFW was a terrible misogynist who eventually, tragically, could not bear to live. I’m sorry, but we trust him. 

This is Water reminds you to go against your default mode of thinking. To, instead of falling prey to the frustrations of the everyday, bring yourself back to a bearable mode of being by simply looking around and noticing the world you are in as if you are not the center of it. This is impossible because we have to generate our thoughts from ourselves, it’s the only way to have them, but this is the goal. And we love a goal. 

The next day I went to my PCP (Dr. Liz… Lizzy incognito? An eternal presence wrapping past and future? Who knows!) for my annual physical. She cried, though I think it could have been more of a progressive doctor in Brooklyn go-to move, but she did cry and that made me feel great. That made me feel like, wow, this is not all in my imagination, I really do have some terrible problems. Validation, I’m telling you, is a mighty tool. I also asked Dr. Liz to look in my ears since they were hurting during this recent Covid. She thought she saw a hematoma tucked behind my right (deaf) ear drum. I had one of these in my other (hearing) ear when I had the flu (I’m chill, hang out with me) a little while ago, and that was very scary because I basically could not hear at all. So I called off all of my other obligations - by which I mean I went to my office and frantically worked at hyper speed for 90 minutes - and then whisked myself to my ENT, who thankfully agreed to squeeze me in, both of us knowing this meant I would spend three hours in her waiting room, which would be fine. 

She told me… SHE TOLD ME!!! It was just. EAR WAX! Just wax! Of the ear. 

The Olympics are about to start. I have gone ahead and decided that Simone Biles and I are the same. She reverses her curse in returning to the Olympics and I reverse my curse in returning to Covid. It has begun. The hematoma is only wax. The twisties are only a memory. You might think it’s insane to equate absolutely anything about myself with thee Simone Biles, and to you, I say: No. I have always been obsessed with women’s gymnastics, way before Simone’s reign, probably because it’s the absolute encapsulation of all things girl-ish and beastly, in one. And the curse reversal is not to put pressure on Simone, or to say that her performance in Paris is a marker for my future. It is simply a way to say to the Universe, which is my best stand-in for God: I believe that you, holder of The Way All Things Go and Will Go, are not only science. I believe you are poetry, I believe you are art, I believe you give reason to make meaning.

And so I do. The meaning tonight of course being that while I am decidedly not living my dream in NYC, of course I am. Deteriorating playmat and all. And for the first time in forever I left the kitchen dirty after bedtime to sit down and write. I asked Alexa to play John Mayer, whose music regrettably still makes me feel amazingly clear-minded, and I set up a perfect view of the baby monitor even though it’s now technically TMI, and I let myself map out the mystery of the dream that I am, I suppose, living.