The County

There is something first love about you. I am 18 again and it's summer and you're the handsomest, most earnest boy in the County.

There’s no urgency, in fact, you are so free of the primal scales I'm normally drawn to, that your normalcy almost feels out of my league. Something inside me, something young and cautious whispers 'Don't advance too quickly’.

It's Saturday evening and you are the waiter at the winery who serves our table of friends. We are celebrating B, my roommate; he’s crying tears of joy, or perhaps relief, knowing he is loved by many at 40, and especially by one. You approach the table as he weeps and say you're moved. I'm the girl trying not to want a glass of wine to cheers and be part-of. I'm a wearing a long, white, mostly transparent dress with my bathing suit underneath. I'm feeling a bit off. The bathing suit cords are lumpy. Why am I always so exposed? There are dark indigo clouds off in the distance, the sun shears through them cutting halos of light onto glistening wheat and summer grapes.

There hadn't been a kiss yet. You hadn't yet pressed your lips warmly to mine in the steam of the Hay Loft. You hadn't yet draped your muscly arms over your friends' shoulders to brag about kissing the hot girl, I hadn't yet run outside to announce “that HOT, young waiter just kissed me and got my number!" to their cheers, late into the sober night.  

I'm 18 again. Except I'm 36 and coming into a beauty I still don't understand. 

I wait all day Sunday for your message and have to hold my own hand through some discomfort. I don’t tell anyone that my mind's racing a bit, and you don't feel like a jerk, but I wade into the notion that you might be, that my radar could still be off. The whole house is rapt by the possibility of my all-night evening with your bod.

"He feels pure," someone says.

You text late. You later tell me that your day had run away on you, you were a bit hungover, you didn't think I'd still be into hanging out. I am sober. There are awkward moments in the group where I lack the lubricant of drink and I have to leave for a minute, reconnect with myself. But even with all these adult personalities mingling together in one big house, it manages to be a place of incredible grace. We are all safe. 

I contemplate how to tell the guy who knows all about Chardonnay that I don't drink.

You call me to make pickup arrangements (just like the old days on the farm!) and the intention behind your voice is so crisp. You warn me that we'll be taxi-ing around some drunk people. There's a friend from high school you need to see. You feel younger and it's OK, elements of your style and vocab say "small town " but they're familiar and instead of threatening my grownup self, these details are cotton fluff from a young, majestic tree. 

I return home to the prairies a few weeks after we meet. Driving up to my mom's house, a memory from age 13 resurfaces. I've run away from my mother's house to go live with my father and I'm back for Christmas riddled with guilt. Before I left, I rummaged through all her private letters and documents, ripping them up, then tried to hide them in a garbage bag in my abandoned bedroom closet. She found them and called me, yelling into the phone, "I hate you," I yell back. I hate that she wanted other babies. I hate that women divide themselves. I hate that we're wired to give too much and never be enough. I want to punish her for wanting more and I want her to suffer the loss of me. 

And I am so sorry.

I am sorry for being the awful, selfish child, and now grown woman some months after sending her a terrible text of mean things (in an unfurling of the hot fury of my early youth from my bones, in the sober winter when I began to thaw). I let it all drain out so it could leave my body. I didn't want to hurt her. I want her to be happy. I did take the girl out of the small town and it's fine that the small town never left the girl. My life all belongs to me now. 

You, the boy from the County, and I go to a bar and come upon a table of visiting chefs from the winery. You demonstrate your perfect French. You are torn – you want to please your drunk friend and the visiting chefs so we fumble around a bit until you decide to leave. I'm starting to feel you're delaying spending time alone with me. We drive back to the old house where you bunk for the summer. The drunk louche in the back seat comments on a girl, "She's always fucking texting me long texts..."

You squirm, anxious that the drunk might reflect badly on you, that you'll look like a bunch of winery douchebags. 

"I don't mind long texts," you say. 

And yet there we are driving to your house to have a one-night stand, something transactional. Which, frankly, probably occurs pretty regularly for you, a hot, young man in the County—and used to be a regular occurrence for me too. It's strange I'm doing this after so many safe and lonely nights but it's the youth and the heat and your body. You're my next book, my next poem, a work of art. You could be one night, you could be one life.

Hours later you and I agree that one cannot seek inspiration for its own sake, but create the right conditions for it to come along... And weeks later, as it's officially winding down, you say, "We don't even know if we're compatible" after I confess that I'd probably have your babies. I find it completely absurd that I let men into my soft body, right in, take their sex in my mouth, without knowing if we're "compatible". Maybe, just maybe, with thoughts like these I'm finally entering your normie league. 

But tonight it's hot and I'm willing to take the risk, enjoy the crispness of your kiss, painfully peel myself from one night, a night vibrating with aliveness, you say, pointing to the bugs, listening to the sleepy croak of frogs. I ask you to kiss me again. You press your lips with careful purpose, sweetly you press.

"I came back to my hometown to be a grownup..."

This is something you express in a variety of ways: the pull to care for yourself (you'd been on a 3-day birthday bender) and yet continuously finding yourself doing what the boys wanna do while catching up to the man growing inside. "Feels right when I'm taking care, working out," you say. 

And, for once, everything about you had nothing to do with me. Even your inspired beauty had nothing to do with me. It wasn't a reflection of me. I was separate. Neither of us could be possessed or consumed. 

We talk aliveness. Math. How the heart and the head can talk to each other if enough space is permitted. "I don't trust my gut...it usually picks the wrong people," you say.

"Yeah that takes time," I reply, puffing on a cigarette.

We make love. It is slow and close and sweet. Feeling. So country. After you say, "Hey, I like you with no clothes on," which makes me giggle. I tell you you're beautiful and "...obviously physically, but more in spirit...you're 'good'..."

"I don't know if I believe you..." you say back as we drift into half sleep.

This is where we are now. You're exploring your goodness, unpeeling, following, fraught, racing along, loving your parents, teaching in French, wishing, afraid of feelings 'cause you've been burned.

But there are your brown eyes staring into mine, fearful and clear.

I lay there after you've come, after we've moved to the couch from the squeaky futon, after you've turned the light off but then back on again to look at me, and think about how I could marry you and walk the path from boy to man by your side, on the border between charging headlong forward and sometimes falling back. I could just walk near you for the next few years, maybe next summer we travel to Indonesia, you come to Montreal, I come to your small town and meet your parents, you come to my book launch...but, but that's not me anymore.

The mind spins but the mind does not possess me. 

It gets chilly and I shift around. We put on underwear and t-shirts and snuggle in closer under blankets. The windows are open and sounds of night grasses and snakes and arachnids drift in. Earlier you said, "I tell the truth in my journal; I'd be so embarrassed if someone read it..." I don't tell you that my whole book is a live journal, and laying beside you, that soft skin, I must hold my hand through the pain of longing to keep you, even if just to imbue you with the premise of "One Hot Night in the County": the last chapter of my first book. One long, hot, cold night; sex slow, bodies, birds, bees, let it go; this is how I give you up, tear my naked from yours and let you be like water in a crystal glass, still, clear, pretty, alone.

Perfect. You are a perfect stranger: unfettered, untouched, unsure. Un.

I tried to pull the perfection out a little longer, stretch it all the way to city. God keeps saying "Ssshhh" and "Do Nothing". So I give it back, the whole thing, all of it, over and over, the pain of too much beauty.

I Want You To Hate Me

One summer when I was around 6, my dad drove my two younger brothers and I across British Columbia in a tangerine Ford Capri. It had a black interior and burned my bare skin when I sat in the front seat in shorts. It smelled of hot greasy dust, chip bags, and melting plastic, wires stuck out from the dashboard where the old radio had been ripped out. Dad loved that car. He'd been "souping it up" for months before we belted ourselves in and burned westward to visit Grandma. 

He was in a vindictive mood. He and my mom were split up, maybe it was after their first separation, and I remember feeling his indignant air, a special malice held for those he believed had wronged him. He liked to be really righteous when the mood stuck him, you know, state rules about how people should behave or whatever, but mostly he just wanted do whatever the fuck he wanted. There was always a wild, unhinged feeling around him, like anything could be said, or done. We swore loudly, ate licorices and gas station treats for dinner, on long stretches he’d get me to drive or steer while he took a nap, and sometimes a wave of rage swept the car and gritting his teeth, he'd say things like, "That fat old bitch has NO business...what a STUPID fucking hag!" about someone he didn't like. He also liked to drop "secrets", adult stuff I wasn't supposed to know about, retaliative little bombs about my mom, or aunts, or grandparents or my two older half-sisters. Really mean, personal shit. Speeding down the snaky B.C. highway, he told me a big secret that shook my body and caused me to burst into tears. 

"Why are you crying? I thought you already knew that." I didn't know. I held that secret in my chest for years. It made me think there were always secrets being held from me. I was obsessed with secrets. "Guess someone should have told you," he said. Guess so. Guess it was always him who told me horrible things about the ones who loved and protected me."You're my best girl, my princess." 

___

"I’m just sitting here realizing that I want you to hate me. Like, I’d prefer that you hated me and things were clearcut in that terrible way rather than this strange, icky greyness I feel now. Could you block me? Or tell me something more concrete so I wouldn’t be able to communicate with you anymore?" This is what I wrote to a nice man I recently met. About a week previous to writing this message, my dad sent me an email with this inside: “As for me being a combined monster/asshole or either or both. Monsters are those people locked up in jails for serial murder, those who have molested, raped and abused and tortured children.”

I never mentioned any of the above, but he has a point:

How to measure our monsters?  

I recently learned about the term "emotional incest" and it's like my whole inner architecture suddenly made sense. I've had 35 years of being open and porous to a very sick, broken man. I’ve either been the absolute epicentre of his happiness, or the point blank reason of his pain and sorrow. A princess or a piece of shit. He makes others responsible for everything that's wrong with him and his latest wife is the reason he's 'good' again. He's a vampire. He uses whatever open being to either soak up goodness or as a receptacle to spread his poison. I carried his sick for years. Long after my brothers and sisters were exhausted and boundaried, I held his sickness and I tried to cure it.

When you cut off a parent, people in our patriarchal culture love to tell you to suck it up and respect them as they gave you life. Fuck that. What's a child supposed to do when the parent fucks with their head year after year then dumps them? This is what a breakup letter from a pathetic, weak, spineless man reads like: 

“I spent most of boxing day lying in bed, weeping and heartbroken about my children. No more. I have a family here who loves me and respects me, including grandsons who are respectful.

I now need to focus on those good things in my life. I'm busy and happy and productive. I do love you all and miss you all but this is not working, and evidently there is no possibility for reconciliation. You'd all rather prefer to demonize me. So be it. I'll deal with it and the pain will subside eventually....and our lives will go on.

Be well and be happy.

Love, Dad”

Always the fucking weeping: we all got it in person, over the phone, in emails, I even got one of his weeping episodes over Skype. He never sought out help, never thought anything was wrong with him. He was too rational and levelheaded, of course: like so many blind men, he was smarter than his sickness and his sadness. 

I used to like men who really loved me in moments, then cut me out completely. There are plenty of special people like that, sick ones and married ones, they were perfect. My dad has rejected me in so many effective ways. Words, gestures, but mostly words. Poisonous words. I've tried to turn the words inside out -- is that why I'm a writer? Are these little shields against him? Monsters versus Monsters. Booze used to help soften these kinds of truths, all the variations of self-hate I acted out in relationships. I meet a nice guy, we spend some time together and I find myself hoping (demanding) he'll love me forever (before really knowing me) then as I reveal more of my personality, I start wishing he'd quickly hate me and cut me off (before really knowing me).  

I thought I could change him, that he'd finally change and look at himself, get help. I thought it’d be different after my last letter to him. I was so compassionate, clear. I wasn't drunk. I just asked him to please respect me and not speak badly of the people I love. When I need to tell the truth my heart pounds. It pounded as I wrote him that letter asking he please respect my boundaries and not speak ill of my loved ones. It's pounding right now. 

I Believe In Love

“Thing is, I hadn’t learned,” I’d say to you if you were listening, “I’m just learning, right now this second, how I used you like a mirror to see myself.” The harder and more crystalline the person, the better, because if you’re too soft, I have nothing to reflect on. I mean, isn’t it why you liked me too? I always reflected your desires, sometimes really basic ones like cuddling and talking about books, but sometimes looking into my eyes was seeing your own spirit wound tightly and lovingly to mine like ancient tree roots. 

That’s probably not how you’d express it, you don’t say it in words, you just hold me like you’re about to fall off a very steep embankment. You tried to make space for me by clearing off a table and buying new sheets, but that’s not the kind of space I’m yearning for; everything you do is a closely controlled surface sweep. I want to go deep. I had a hard time asking you for what I needed because performing the minimum seemed to be so difficult for you, I didn’t want to ask for, or be, “too much”. You thought kissing passionately meant I was counting each and every kiss! That’s an absurd idea — like, duh, I just wanted to tumble headlong into ecstasy because although I do believe in the searching, fearless work one does for oneself before truly loving another, loving another is the only true means to restoring a state of oneness. It’s the immaculate will, life’s longing for itself. 

So yes, to answer my own question: I believe in love. 

It’s a revolution to see myself and hear my own voice, to love myself. She says ‘yes’ to difficult conversations, she asks for what she needs, she also says ‘no’ when enough is enough. She looks in the mirror and says, “You are enough.” 

We have to look into ourselves to understand what plagues us, what follows us, what has made us, and why we may be stuck performing Sisyphean feats that fatigue us. You once told me you have a very active internal dialogue — what’s it saying? Does it spin in eddies or flow forward? Open the door on the past and honour it by looking closely. There will be many, many stories contained there. Read them. That makes me think of all the little roadside shrines in Japan where people light incense to their ancestors saying “thank you for bringing me here, I will try to honour you”. I hope you use your exceptional will and power to unearth whatever’s gripping you —dislodge that sludge and move into it. Don't be afraid to change. I love you, I do, but I need a year. 365 days without you. Can we see where we've grown then? 

What follows is the rest of the story. This is how I got here.

Lizard Brain

In my previous life I would have gone out last night and got really fucked up. I laid down around 3:30pm with that impending wave of destruction coming on and slept through it, then slept more, and more. When you texted I had been hiding in my room for several hours and debauchery had moved into depression. I don't reach for substance anymore but I still really want to disappear. I was afraid we would get on the phone and I'd just cry selfishly and dump out all my feelings and wouldn't be able to give you the space you need, be sweet and listen and give. That's how I feel all the time with you lately, like that raw nerve who's going to spark against your raw nerve and injure us both. I sent you all that crazy stuff in email and immediately after sending it, felt revolted with myself for unleashing. 

I wish I had cigarettes and a like a couple bottles of wine but I've locked myself into my room where there's no chance. I’ve been reading a nice book that says the reason we seek romantic love is because we're striving for the relaxed joy of pre-existence, of the warm womb, of the universal pulse and it's through love that we return to it, heal the perceived threats that our basic primordial brains have sealed in to “protect” us. Feeling "rejected" we hide, retreat, defend, run. Such raw primordial nerve endings sometimes, you and I. 

To soothe this lizard brain, I might think of us on the couch coiled into warmth, at the movie holding hands, eating too much food, and sometimes I return to that place where I'm snuggled into your body and you're holding me so tight that everything disappears, every fear, every break, every thought, every shame, even the room, and we reach a state of stillness where I feel like I could stop breathing and still be alive. 

I keep hearing myself apologizing to you "I'm sorry" but then I witness how I'm giving myself what I need to survive right now without burning the whole world down, unleashing a pent up rage which feels like my own plus the inheritance of entire blood lines, all these stoics and alcoholics who fought their monsters and lost. 

I've figured out how to lock the monster up for a few days before it does some damage. It's come down to basic survival and I'm learning to slow it down, not go on a bender, emotional or alcoholic.

Underground is where I live now. I'm in the blood and dirt, the roots and strength. I use you like shelter from the storm, like a cave in winter. I curl up to sleep beside you with barely a heartbeat knowing our warmth will keep us alive until thaw and new pathways appear under all that ice and snow.  

Straight-Shooting Connector

This chapter dedicated to Ziggy Stardust who inspired me to see my persona as magical, mutable, and mouldable like clay. 

Harold and I learned some good things at the “Change Your Life” seminar — primarily what self-sabotaging assholes we were. I take issue with these “fix your whole life BUT only if you do all the things we tell you, plus keep buying books, coaching sessions, and attending seminars!” weekends. These programs, and the people who run and profit from them, acquire a list of your deepest fears, blocks, and secrets then reassure you that the tools to resolve and clear them away are in their hands — Scientology does this ingeniously — and with your fragility in their clutches, you’re locked in. In the dispersed fray that has become our modern spiritual lives, they’re essentially doing what religious and philosophical doctrines (and their institutions) have done in some form or another for thousands of years, now just throw in new age brainwashing, some convincing psychobabble, a bit of Zen philosophy, mention the soul, and voila! in just one weekend you can turn your life around! If only, right? But then, maybe. 

There are many different kinds of people who attend these seminars —self-help junkies, a lot of women, people who have come on the behest of born-again partners or friends, Pollyanna Midwesterners and bitter New Yorkers, or people who are simply searching, like I was, for a lubricant to move through the sludge of their unhappiness. I believe if you’re looking for answers you’ll find them whether they’re handed to you on a piece of paper at a paid seminar, or at an AA meeting, or in a church sermon, or in a book, or while out walking the dog, because if you’re brave enough to travel into your pain, or even your joy, and figure out how you picked 'em up, and you’re wiling to trace the origins of your life with open eyes like a marvelling traveler, then you’ll inevitably arrive at the sticky points, and if you’re willing to be loving, you may unstick those memories, reshape and reform them, and even love them for what they’ve offered you.

Gather them all up like dense clay and smooth into the shape of a seat, like at the beach when you pull wet sand in around your hips, the material no longer an impediment or weight; you stop trying to run across the sand or through it, but rather sink into it and make it your own.   

__

After Harold and I had our conversation at the donut shop about our illicit lovers, he decided to be honest with the seminar group and change his tune about why he's there.

“You know, I initially came here to save my business but I’ve realized that I’m here to get honest about an affair I’ve been having with a younger married woman...” The crowd squirmed in their seats, some looked down at the floor, the women seemed especially perturbed. He looked so vulnerable standing there, his mouth sort of half open, his big, blue eyes searching for validation of his honest confession. I exhaled a long sigh on his behalf. 

A few hours later, Rachel the seminar leader gave us our “good trait” and our “bad trait” in front of the group. Harold got his before me and I kind of laughed: his good trait was “trustworthy leader” and his bad trait was “slimy liar”, the theory being that your essential bad trait was the inverse of your good. The word “slimy” did not sit well with Harold and he stuttered out a response, “Um, well, I mean, I know I gotta change but she’s really such a great girl and this connection we have…” 

Rachel cut him off, “Integrity, Harold! Integrity in your relationships and in your life will bring you integrity in your business — become a trustworthy leader again and you’ll have success!” Boom. Words are so potent, like low-level sorcery, and in these sessions you’re wide open to hear the simple truth. But these hard-hitting one-liners are reductive which is why they follow them up with a longer sales pitch: “This is just the beginning, guys. You’ll all need one-on-one coaching for at least two more years.” 

One of my worst, oft-repeated errors is injuring and/or protecting myself with words, misusing them. What were those rhymes we learned in grade school to ward this off? “I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you”, or “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me”. If only. 

I’d gone into the seminar being super honest about the affair I was having, and all my shitty substance abuse, and it wasn’t because of the man or the obsessions or any specific qualities of the stuff I was engaged in, it was the patterns I felt desperately locked into. I geared up for my bad trait: was it going to be “snaky sex goddess” or “heartless hussy” or “desperate other woman”? Rachel looked over at me, “Carmen, it’s your turn, hon.” 

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I was born right in the middle of two families, after girls and before boys. I’m the oldest, I was briefly the youngest, and I’m also the middle child. If you value the significance of birth order, I’m basically everything. I’ve managed to have relationships, or least some contact with extended family on both sides and that's no easy feat: we grow up, we drop off, we make our own families, and eventually our own worlds. But in this way, I often feel like a visiting family diplomat which is a nice self-appointed position to have, especially as a writer because I love the histories and personalities of both sides, the Capulets and the Montagues, their legacies and downfalls -- that shit is rich learning material. Pride and addiction are certainly woven into my family, but so is talent and adventure, so are flour bombs from Cessnas at events called “fly-ins” (Kings), and my small town’s first family orchestra (Murrants). 

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The Kings

In rural Alberta in the 1950’s and ’60’s, an organization called The Flying Farmers, a group of farmers who owned and flew planes, would pick an airport and host a fly-in. This was basically an excuse to fly their planes and have a big party. In 1959, they coordinated the Rocky Mountain House fly-in with the local rodeo — my Grandpa King being the brazen, fun-loving man that he was, came up with the idea of a flour bombing contest. They poured a giant three-ringed target in the middle of the grounds (also made of flour, this being the golden era of cheap commodities) and with three runs each, planes would fly in with sacks of flour and try to nail the bullseye.

My 10-year old dad rode in a Cessna 140, holding the sack of flour out the little window to launch it. On the first bombing run he got closest to the bullseye, on the 2nd he missed the bullseye and hit the windshield of his uncle’s ’59 Buick and went clean through. As he says, “When we got back they told me ‘You won the prize but you also wrecked your uncle’s car’ — they drove back to the city with a 6-inch hole in the windshield, the interior of the car covered in flour.” Living out loud those Kings: easy targets. Eugene King, an introvert who drank to quell his shyness, became a menacing, boisterous personality who filled a room under the influence. So is the power of the snakeskin. With no filters, and no respect of boundaries, both he and my father became easy men not to like.  

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The Murrants

The most beautiful times of my childhood were spent at my Grandma and Grandpa’s small farm just outside our town. Daring, intelligent, and a dashing man of his idyllic era, my musically gifted Grandpa Murrant, born and raised in the Maritimes, moved his wife and five children across Canada in a train to the West of cowboys and promise. His children were also musically gifted—my mom and her siblings played various instruments and started a little family band which became the very first orchestra in Rocky Mountain House, now an established group who still performs at Christmas concerts and plays.

As soon as I could talk, I sang and danced while Grandpa played the piano, then later my grandparents would take me out to the barn to pet the horses, or gather eggs. A nurse, my Grandma was at the hospital when I was born. Life in their house was a celebration with neighbours, family and friends, laughing and drinking and dancing and music. When I wasn’t joyfully singing or dancing, I was being lovingly passed from adoring relative to adoring relative. Life at the farm was grand and the Murrants were fun-loving, and like most of their post-war contemporaries, they were also stoic and stubborn, the kind of people whose shame was much harder to see. They died with their stubbornness intact. 

__

“Carmen, I’m afraid you’re the only one in this group who’s lucky enough to get TWO bad traits —are you ready?” 

“Bonus! Yeah go for it.” 

“Dramatic brat and disconnected victim...” 

The first one makes sense to me but the second one is bewildering: “Really? Disconnected victim?” 

“Yeah haven’t you noticed how you shrink inside yourself and disconnect?” 

Bullseye. I’m right in the middle. 

"What's my good trait?" 

"Straight-shooting connector." 

Running Away

How do you control? 

I control by running away. I control by shrinking inside and waiting there until I think you’re gone. I control by throwing potent words around, fixing a wall between us, sometimes comprised of overzealous fantasies, sometimes of toxic sludge. I control by making you the enemy and making you stupid. I control by thinking I know best. I control by imagining I can impose my will on you. 

Believing I have control is so quaint, so naïve, so childlike. 

How do you lose control? 

I lose control by dissolving into slushy, spillovers of lust. I lose control in another glass and another, and one more, and just one more and puff, puff, fuzz. I lose control on a street between two bumpers at 5am while you fuck me — were there passersby? I lose control when I focus on you and only you, letting my brain whip around your qualities, dissolve in their salty pools, figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out figure you out. 

Believing I lost control is believing I’ll wake up with it all back, everything intact, all figured out. 

How do you heal? 

I heal by letting myself grow. I heal by focusing on my growth alone. 

And in this I do believe. 

Young Woman

A couple of years ago, when I was grappling with my writing I had a recurring dream. In it, my middle and index fingers pulse painfully with blood at their tips like they’ll burst right through. To reduce the pressure I massage the blood back from the tips, but it surges forward, pulsing, wanting out. I worry about such a serious finger pressure condition and wake panicked I need to get to a hospital. I check my fingers and they’re fine.

The last time I had the dream, I’m in the belly of a cruise ship crouched down half naked in a bathroom stall anticipating a full finger explosion. I hear someone walk in the bathroom; it’s an old colleague and she’s come to see if I’m OK. Just then the blood breaks the skin and sprays out from my nails in all directions like loose garden hoses. It’s gory but doesn’t hurt. I’m humiliated that the blood's now creeping out from beneath the stall in tiny crimson rivers, inching towards strangers peeing next to me. I’m also relieved. Finally, oh god finally they’ve burst. I’m slowly losing consciousness but totally unfazed by possible death. I’m embarrassed that my underwear are pulled down and that I’m about to be fully exposed to strangers. 

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With no language skills and little knowledge of the culture, I have never been as alone as I am in Japan. I live in a small, isolated farming town in middle of the main island of Honshu and the love-lack reproduces inside me like a hungry little monster that grows bigger by the day. I am the monster. Staring back at me in mirrors and in classroom window reflections is a doughy, pink Westerner wearing a blue-eyed mask. I hate myself. I have nowhere to hide. I am so fat, so round, so lazy. Why can’t I be small, compact, and efficient?! In Japan, there’s no escaping the confrontation of self. I stare longingly at female Japanese teachers’ child-like waistlines, willowy wrists, and delicate feet. Junior high school girls poke at my belly and say “soft” -- I wonder what they think of my ass when I walk away.  An old lady at a clothing store touches my stomach and asks, “Baby?”

They say I look like an angel, that I’m so pretty: kawai. The children chase me around, asking to touch my hair, clinging to me like I’ll sprinkle fairy dust on them. After some time the admiration feels more like infantilization. I see that no matter how long I live here, they’ll always be amazed that I can use chopsticks. 

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After just one month, I decide to use my May holiday time called Golden Week to go on a 10-day silent meditation retreat outside Osaka hosted by mostly Western Buddhist monks. As someone who speaks and thinks and writes incessantly, I look forward to the challenge of learning how to “quiet the mind”. You must be absolutely silent during the ten days, including smiling or making eye contact with other students in order to stay in an interior place at all times. It’s very bizarre for me. I break the code of silence with my bunk mate a few times. She’s a thin, statuesque Australian model from Tokyo whom I’m dying to gossip with. I am so intimate with the fatness of me. I massage the round, doughy roll hidden beneath my yoga pants like it’s possible to massage it right off. I constantly pull on my shirt to hide it and do this over and over while meditating.  

Day after day, hour after hour, I learn how to reign in the expanse of my thoughts which at first seem to shoot out to the furthest star in the universe. Each second I attempt to draw them closer, then even closer until they almost seem to be on Earth! By day seven, they’re practically in the room. Breathing in…breathing out…following the breath…pay attention to your breath...you will never be loved…you’re a failure…you’re ugly…you’re disgusting…you are fat and eat all the bread at breakfast…stop eating all that bread…follow the breath…don’t eat the cheese…watch the amount of cream in your coffee…breathing in…drink more tea…breathing out…I’m so hungry…why didn’t you learn Japanese?...her waist is so tiny…your thighs are huge…you’re stupid…you’re lazy…you’re weak…breathing in…breathing out…follow the breath…

This ticker tape of incessant, self-hating thoughts pounds through my head in the silence; my back and legs ache from sitting so long.  The overall experience is a soft trauma within the greater trauma of total strangeness that I’ve just begun living outside the gates. Twice a day, we sit before the teacher and speak softly about what we’re feeling or experiencing though it should be related to meditation. Sometimes I cry when I sit before him, confessing those incessant thoughts that come to me while meditating. Then at the next sitting, I smile widely and share how wonderful and transcendent I feel. His answer for all is: “It’s only the mind. Focus on the breath.” 

On the last day, for just a few seconds at a time, I meditate for real. The small house is damp from two days of rain, it smells of wet grass, old tatami mingled with musty silk pillows and ancient cedar. I think I’ve reached the deep pool of calm within. I promise myself that I’ll meditate every day after I leave, that I'll choose the right path, and embody impermanence; respect all living creatures and be one with the universe! Easy! 

When I leave the grounds after ten days, it seems every gesture, every look, every flicker of my energy is measured. That it matters. I feel connected to every molecule and so very briefly, like maybe a day or two, my feeling of alienation lessens. We’re all just one, infinite pulse of primordial matter! I can almost erase the physical differences between myself and Japanese people in this fleeting sense of oneness. I’m also a bit tripped out and agoraphobic after days of silence in that tiny house and it’s a pretty weird journey back into the wilds of Osaka to catch my train home. 

I honestly never meditate again. In this bid to be better, calmer and “good”, I fail to return to the deep pool of calm. I feel guilty all the time. I sit on the internet reading women’s magazines and self-help sites with their irritating mix of love-yourself advice, exercise instructions, and images of tiny models lounging in dreamy, distant locales. I can’t escape the prison of my wants: to be good, to be focussed, to be hardworking, and especially to be SKINNY and if I’m SKINNY, then surely I will be loved. Love will come if I change, if I’m better, if my desires are reigned in and managed! I have four journals from that time and not one of them contains an actual fucking story. They are full of exhaustively long, judgy, policing passages detailing the interior world of my struggle to be good in a culture that takes perfection very seriously.

Relief comes when I have a man to obsess over; many of those thoughts quiet and turn to him. They measure the way his qualities will complete me. I am helpless on my own, I write, and he will make me better. His love will save me from myself…if I can just get myself to be loveable!

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REQUIRED READING: "The Young-Girl is her own jailer, prisoner in a body-made-sign inside of a language made of bodies." https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/preliminary-materials-theory-young-girl