Breaking: up; down; apart. Growing: up; beyond; through.

These are just opinions. 

 

It’s been five weeks since Mishka, my Doberman puppy, broke my nose, and the pain has finally subsided to where I can press on my nose and not be in pain. However, when I run my fingernails along my bridge, I definitely feel ridges where once it was smooth, and my aquiline bump is decidedly lower than where it used to be. It feels strange to have a part of me that I knew so well have been transformed into something different. My nose (and this is the case, I find, with most people) is my single most defining feature. Rhinoplasty is always the most obvious facial plastic surgery, because it changes the look of someone’s face most prominently. You can get a brow lift, stuff your lips full of collagen, even get your chin shaved down, but you are still recognisable until you decide to alter your nose in a major way. 

My friends argue that I look the same. Arguably, I’m not unrecognisable: the break, after the initial swelling went down, did not change my appearance fundamentally. But morning after morning of looking at myself in the mirror, drawing myself in portraits and sketches, and obsessively tending to my skin with glycolic acid peels, retinol, and face creams, I know my face to its minutest detail the way not even a long-term boyfriend can. The change is small, visually speaking, but it’s there, and feels stranger and more uncanny than even the changes puberty brought on me thirteen years ago. 

With this facial alteration I have been feeling myself change inwardly. It, too, is almost imperceptible, not something a close friend would notice without a long and involved conversation over coffee or wine, the kind of conversation where you spend as much time asking questions and listening as you do talking and explaining. My views on love have changed. My views on age, career, goals, and money, too. My ability to heal and move on has been affected. (It has become easier, somehow, to deal with small tragedies in the face of larger ones.) 

Last week, I had a dinner party, in which I invited a man who I had decided to “test” on my friends. The experiment failed miserably. I am only frustrated I did not kick him out when I had the chance, but, like my father, who finds it impossible to say no to a woman’s tears, I am tripped up by my own tender heart in the face of a broken man. In the morning we had breakfast and I told him we could no longer see each other. Despite my emotional hangover from the night before (because I admit, I was angry; furiously I slammed doors, tilting paintings in the process, and walked outside in the November rain in my bare feet), it was a relief to say goodbye. It’s funny how, even when you are not blinded by the cloud of love, per se, you are still blinded by your choices until you take the step to change them. The moment he left, I drove to Michigan to visit my prospective graduate school, and in the car, I thought of all of the things he did that were inconsiderate, and hurtful, and selfish, and prided myself on being able to recover so quickly, with the interest of self-preservation trumping my interest in falling in love.

I should mention that I am aware I could only point out those flaws in his character because they also belong to me. In my “old age” I have begun to learn to contain them, or to at least curb them until I am around people like my beloved friends, who for some reason can find these things charming and not obnoxious — most of the time, anyway. Dating another artist is a masturbatory and fruitless task: you cannot have two stars on a stage meant for one. You cannot have two moody, impetuous children attempting to gain the same thing at the same time from each other. While I know and acknowledge these things belong to my character, because I am a woman living in a patriarchy that demands I possess such self-awareness, a man living in the same society, functioning with the same character flaws, is typically too egotistical to see that these are in fact, harmful traits, and no matter how handsome or charming he is, a significant other with any semblance of a backbone will not put up with it for very long. I know too many grown men, men my father’s age, and a little younger, who have never learned the error of their egotism, and found women who will love them despite it, or women who in their frustration have left completely. 

Four years ago, I had put up with such egotism for nine months. Nowadays, it seems my clock runs out at one and a half, and even before that clock runs out, rejects the notion of being in love, and of having exclusivity with such a person. So I’m growing, and learning, and these are both good things. 

My trip to Michigan was generally fruitful. It felt good to be on the road, learning new things, and talking to people who were in the programme to gain a realistic perception of what it’s really like. My host graduate student was gracious and helpful, and for my second night there I decided to drive to Detroit to see my friend Noah, whom I haven’t seen in five years, at least. After all the mental and emotional exhaustion of meetings and tours and conversation and questions, it was nice to veg out with an old friend who expected nothing of me. My greatest comfort in life, I think, is the feel of an old friend’s presence nearby. I can get very lonely when I’m on my own in a new place, and there is always that moment where sadness overtakes the feeling of adventure and exploration. Traveling, though one of my greatest loves in the world, has always given way to a little bit of melancholy, and I’ve always been sensitive to the passage of time, and the physical sensation of moving through space and very long distances, whether in a car or a plane or the back of an old Jeep in some far-flung country across the world. 

Now, I sit in the comfort of my kitchen with a cup of oolong tea, absently touching my bridge as I think about the experiences of the past few days. It has been nothing less than eventful; growth in leaps and bounds as opposed to the steady, small trickle of day-to-day living. I look forward to more of it. I’m getting fortified. I’m taking it well. I’m ready.