Speak.

In the weeks following my abusive relationship and the eradication of it, I’m regaining my sense of home. I only moved into this house at the end of May, but I worked so hard in the first weeks to make it feel like it had my thumbprint on it that friends of mine marveled at the transformation during my early July housewarming. “It looks like you’ve been living here for three years,” a friend remarked, and I beamed with pride at the observation.

I have wanted this space since I was 12 years old. I used to sit in my seventh grade homeroom class, and in English, next to my friend Tony Cocco. We talked together about how we both wanted our own homes, and drew out elaborate floor plans in the backs of our notebooks, discussing how we’d have a catwalk across the second floor, how we’d be housemates and have so many pets and it would be the perfect space for both of us. It’s ironic that I’m coming off of the disillusionment of a flawed relationship in my new home, considering how Tony Cocco and I ended our friendship in middle school — or rather, how he ended it. The popular girls in class had an issue with him being my friend — he was cool, I so clearly wasn’t — and picked on him until he was forced to distance himself from me in a very public way. I walked into class one day, before first period had started, and approached him to start a conversation, and I don’t even remember what was said, just that he was cold and rude. I might have asked him why he was acting strange. The next thing I knew, he slapped me across the face, hard, in front of everyone. I burst into tears. I don’t even remember, firsthand, the sensation of sobbing, I just remember the sound of it. If I close my eyes, to this day, at 29, I can hear the sound of my crying as though it had been someone else all along.

He tried to friend me on Facebook a few years ago. Might have been three years, might have been seven. There was a moment there, staring at his name on the screen, wherein I thought of messaging him and cutting him down verbally — I’m well-spoken and I can see everyone’s flaws, I am certainly capable of breaking someone’s spirit if I really want to — but in the end, I simply clicked decline and abandoned the matter forever. It isn’t in my nature to be so cruel. Maybe once upon a time, when I was more insecure, more angry, I was better at lashing out, but nowadays, I think back on the violence perpetrated against me by fragile, ego-driven, deeply sad people, and I remind myself that I am not like them. Not anymore.

 

My mom and her friends, who are basically like aunts to me, came over for dinner tonight. I went full Martha Stewart and made a pumpkin spice latte cake (even though I couldn’t get my whipped cream to, well, whip) and a slow cooker chicken breast recipe, lit scented candles in the bathroom, and made a Cesaria Evora Pandora station. On the back porch for a post-dessert cigarette, I told them about D.O. and what he did to me, the whole thing, how I’m going to court on Monday to attempt to extend the temporary PFA so he can’t come anywhere near me. Natasha said, Please be careful in your future dating, and my mom shrugged and said, How can she? There’s no way to tell anymore.

Regardless, I am adjusting slowly back to who I was before my trust was shattered. Yesterday, the universe sent me a gift. I’ve spent the last however many days needing Kevin and Meredith and the rest of my friends to carry me, since I was a foggy, emotional mess. Yesterday, all of that was turned on its ear. From the beginning of the day, up until the last few hours, I was granted the ability to be in service to everyone else. My coworker, my housemate, my mom and her friend visiting from Russia, even Rocky Votolato, who was performing at Club Cafe, all were in crisis in one form or another, and I was actually able to deliver and come through for everyone who needed me.

The highlight of my night was truly the Rocky Votolato situation — I came into the club early, like I always do, and began setting up the bar, when I overheard Rocky talking to Geno about how their only amp on tour was on the fritz and that he needed to make it into Lawrenceville before the start of the show to have it repaired. I dropped everything behind the bar and drove him across town to take care of it. In the middle of his performance that night, Rocky told the audience how I had helped him out, and that he had bought me a red rose, and could they pass it back to the bar. He dedicated the next song to me. I had to fight to hold back tears in front of the packed room.

The universe always provides, I am convinced: as soon as you learn to read the signs, it’s like watching the pieces of a puzzle fall into place. All of the anxiety and fear of the unknown drops away and you can take a breath again, because you see that every jumbled string will untangle at the end of the sequence, that God/the universe/fate provides. You aren’t alone. I know I’m not alone. And that’s why D failed. He worked so hard to manipulate me, to isolate me, he gas-lighted me in little ways for two months. But I never forgot that I wasn’t alone, and my truest friends never left me, not for a minute. I opened my mouth and I told them what was happening and they banded around me. My voice saved my life. The confidence to speak was a gift from the universe. Every step of the way, I was given someone’s hand to hold. Court on Monday will be nerve-wracking and heartrending, but I am less afraid knowing that I am only alone in the world if I choose to be. I am truly blessed.

Open thou my lips and my mouth shall declare thy praise. 

The year is dying.

The first hints of fall are drawing near. Yesterday, I stared out of the window of my back bedroom while talking to my mom on the phone and I noticed little dabs of yellow and orange in the lush foliage of the neighbours’ trees. This morning, coming off of an emotionally wrought night, I hung sheets to dry in the backyard. The winds were high and turned them into billowing sails of deep blue and purple. (Once, a reiki healer told me my aura was the colour of deep blue and amethyst.) I smelled the air: green, damp, humid.

I was ushered back into the memory of living above Mikey Connelly’s home in his mother-in-law suite. I would stand on the rusted metal landing outside of the kitchen door and stare into low forests of shrubs, limestone pavement; further out, ocean and moody grey skies. I was alone then, yet I don’t think I was aware of it. Surrounded by monsters and gods in an ancient land, cooking fresh-caught cod in the archaic kitchen for English friends, I was struck by the beauty in contrast: the banal and the divine.

Having just come out of a short-lived but abusive relationship, I’ve retreated into myself. My selfless, kind friend moved in with me to help me regain my sense of safety. He’s pushed out the toxicity and given me back my cocoon. When I’m not at work, I come home and rest in my sanctuary. This morning, I cleaned the entire house and put all of my ducks neatly into a row. Control in an unpredictable and callous world.

Outside I hear crows calling to each other. Winter will be here sooner than I could anticipate. The Indian summer is a trickster. Even so, I take off my shoes and feel last night’s rain on the grass, and let myself swim in memories.

 

Pittsburgh notebook: heatwave

Pittsburgh is in the midst of a sweltering heatwave. I joke with everyone that it must be 200% humidity in the city, and with every time I repeat it, it becomes less and less of a joke. Mishka is bored out of his skull, because it’s too hot to reasonably spend a large portion of time outside, and I can’t take him on errands with me because even with all the windows down in the car, I am afraid of him getting overheated during the shortest excursion into the bank or a store. That being said, I do take him out once a day at most, testing the sidewalk with the back of my hand so his paw pads don’t burn. We’ve been making excursions into “town;” West End Village roughly a mile down the hill from the house.

There’s a little hardware store on Wabash that I take Mishka into when I need odds and ends for the house. There’s no air conditioning, but the ceilings are high (probably 15-20 feet) and a breeze that blows through the back door and spills out to the sidewalk. I needed two-inch-long screws and the owner, an older white man, went through a shelf of boxes tracking down the right gauge, length, and head for me. As he rang me up I could feel beads of sweat run from the back of my scalp, over my shoulder, and down into the front of my shirt. A few doors down is a little bodega that sells lottery tickets and percolator coffee. I took Mishka into there for an instant cappuccino and ended up buying a $1 lottery ticket, and Mishka got a peanut butter dog bone on the house. That’s the nice thing about living in this neighbourhood — every place I go seems to be fairly dog-friendly. Everyone wants to say hello to Mishka, and with the heat being as oppressive as it is, he’s even more mellow than usual.

One walk like that (45 minutes tops) and the dog is out for the day. I’d like to say I do it to free myself up to get things done, but with no central air in the house and the humidity being what it is, I spend my afternoon lying around on the couch and watching shows I’m only half-committed to on Netflix. I sat with a giant pitcher of lemon water and a big bowl of popcorn yesterday afternoon, when the beau texted me to let me know he was coming over. He found me melted to the couch with popcorn all over my face and lap. “Aren’t you sexy right now,” he said with a grin, plucking popcorn off of my cheek. Maybe if it had been ten degrees cooler I’d care enough to have cleaned up.

The garden is doing well, though. The last few days have brought thunderstorms, and my cucumbers are swelling to gargantuan proportions. I found two hidden away under dinner-plated-sized leaves that were each the size of my face. (I brought them on my lunch date earlier this week with my best friend Alex, and upon his arrival, wordlessly handed him the plastic bag with two giant cukes. He stared at me, his face contorting into a confused and amused expression, and then laughed.) Everything is growing like mad, and the rains do nothing to abate the heat. My back door is made of old wood, and it has swollen in the door frame over the last week to the point where I have to kick it and throw all of my weight into it just to get it to open. I’ve resigned myself to walking round to the front door to let myself in. Just one more thing to add to the list of home improvements: buy a new kitchen door.

Last night when my dear friend and former professor Roger came for dinner, we ate steaks and drank red wine and I achieved an almost-instantaneous headache. It was my first day of alcohol after a week of teetotalling, and the impending storm coupled with dehydration and wine created the perfect recipe for pain. We sat in my living room only half-watching an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and I remembered a brilliant essay by Joan Didion called Los Angeles Notebook. It seemed the perfect thing to read aloud, given the atmosphere of mishaps and strained communication I’ve been experiencing all week amid the heat.

As I type this, I’m sitting on my back porch and the thunder is rolling in the distance. A very light sprinkling of rain is passing through, and I’ve just hung the whites up on the line to dry. A part of me wants to take them down and throw them in the dryer, but another says, Let them soak in the rain. They’ll dry tomorrow either way. The forecast promises 90 degree weather.

Progress in full bloom.

Owning a house and turning it into a home has been one of the most rewarding experiences. Every day I wake up feeling blessed. I have settled neatly into my summertime routine: I let Mishka outside, press reboil on my Zojirushi, grind coffee beans or scoop tea leaves. I head outside to empty the kitchen compost and water my vegetable garden (only after putting Mishka inside, as he goes positively nuts when I turn on the hose, wanting to attack the stream and barking loudly and incessantly until I give in to the game). I do thirty minutes to an hour of reading, deliberately back on my reading game for the last two weeks, and then I carefully plan the rest of my day. I’ve made progress on the house in large and small ways over the past week. I put up new house numbers on the front porch, right above the cheap vinyl stickers placed there before me. I’m having a hell of a time peeling the old stickers on, so for the moment they exist underneath the new ones, a reminder of past tenants and a former incarnation of what “home” meant in this place.

I’m remembering now what my father said when I told him my house number. “1913?” he said, a smile lighting up his face. “That was the height of the Russian Empire!” He said something along those lines, and I couldn’t help laughing because it made me think of the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where the father constantly ties inventions and accomplishments back to the Greeks. That’s my dad, but with Russia and Russians.

The other day, I set a goal to finally set up my office area. I’m tired of paying bills at my kitchen table and walking my outdated and heavy laptop from room to room like an itinerant. I’m also tired of not having a quiet space specifically designated for office work and for writing — as much as I love to sit on my back patio when I update my blog, I won’t be able to do that when it gets cold outside, or when there’s a torrential downpour and the wind that is forever at play on my hill blows all the rain into my lap and onto my keyboard. My dad tracked down an old (read: not made of shitty IKEA particleboard, not built to be taken apart and put back together with ease) office desk and unloaded it in my garage weeks ago, but I’ve been procrastinating on bringing it into the house. Here’s why: the desk is huge. It’s made of heavy wood — at least the desktop itself, which is easily at least fifty pounds, and cumbersome to boot. It’s too wide to fit up my basement or back patio steps, and too wide to even drag through the upstairs hallway. It needed to be completely taken apart before I could even transfer it to the room where it would live — in my guest bedroom, the one I painted a soft lavender from the noxious pink with which the former owners had tortured the poor unsuspecting walls.

In the time that the desk sat in the garage, no less than four hundred and seventy-two spiders took up in the hollows where the drawers, pulled out and standing separately, were to live. I dragged the desk into the basement before realising it would need to be taken apart as much as possible before being carted upstairs. In the basement, at the foot of the stairs, is where I began to discover the burgeoning arachnid civilization. Mishka is already beginning to learn the screams I emit that are associated with spiders, long-legged centipedes, and all other creepy-crawlies I have intuitively designated as undesirable and horrifying, because he didn’t run down the steps once during the half-dozen times I shrieked and shouted “MOTHERFUCKER” as I simultaneously napalmed the desk with Raid spray and took a vacuum nozzle to every corner. I fought a good fight. I probably have several kinds of cancers now, too. Like a good veteran returning from war, I dragged every piece of that desk up two flights of stairs while alternating between hardened stoicism and the kind of rage-strength that comes in bursts during bouts with exhaustion and frustration.

It took me three hours, in total, from The Great Spider War to Lovely Interior Design Photo, but here is my lovely space:

I have hanging files now, for all my new bills accumulated during the brokest month of the year for a bartender who runs a concert venue, and a comfy chair in which to sit while I lament my water bill as I stare ruefully out the window and will my plants to give me a bountiful harvest already, so I don’t have to spend a small fortune every time I wander into the grocery store.

Speaking of which: the garden is doing quite well. The vegetable boxes I built at the back of my sprawling yard are now home to peppers, tomatoes, some kind of squash (my mother sprinkled some seeds in the front yard during my first week here and now she can’t remember what they are, but I guess we’ll see in a few weeks), cucumbers, basil, and even sweet potatoes — an experiment in itself, since I know nothing about growing root vegetables. (How do you know when they’re ready? Has anyone engineered clear soil yet? I’m in the dark here, literally and figuratively.) The front yard is beginning to yield results. Green tomatoes cluster in hiding under branches, and I even plucked two rather large cucumbers from their vine yesterday. My eggplants and zucchinis are producing the largest and most robust leaves, and perhaps talking to my plants on a regular basis is making me imagine things, but they look positively happy growing out of their plot.

Before I officially closed on the house, during a bout of painting the exterior of the house for twelve hours to fulfill an FHA loan requirement, my mom came and planted three rose bushes — not so much bushes as sad little stems jutting from a shy-looking root system. One died in the first week. The second one, after a week of watering and plaintive begging for it not to die, began to give little green leaves at the base of the stems, though it’s quite slow-going. The third one, after weeks of slowly developing leaves and new shoots, and finally, buds, gave its first flower two days ago.

I am convinced it is the most beautiful flower I’ve ever seen. It’s mine. I made this happen. I grew this perfect thing and now every time I walk into my yard I can’t help smiling until my cheeks hurt.

There is just so much to fall in love with lately.

The ones that used to live here, and the ones who live here now.

With every day that passes, the house begins to feel more like a home. The only room that smells like me, that truly smells familiar and safe, is my kitchen. The fact that I can even say “my kitchen” and not “the kitchen,” the simple application of pronoun over article, proves as much. The rest of the rooms are too new, the paint too fresh, and even though my furniture — the dining room table, the rugs, the little coffee table I asked my dad to strip and stain for me — stand in the rooms, it still smells like something that isn’t yet mine.

I struggle with this, so I return home from happy hour with company coworkers and I arm myself by putting on Beatles records; I pour myself a glass of Woodford Double Oaked; I sit at the kitchen table with my feet up on a chair and I write, because those things in combination feel like home. Eventually I’ll begin to feel it. Even now, being able to stroll from room to room while on my nightly phone call with mum (she insists, and out of love, perhaps out of loneliness, I acquiesce easily to this new ritual), I revel in the amount of space I’ve acquired.

Things that do feel like home, besides sitting and writing and drinking whiskey: doing laundry in my basement, carefully ignoring the reality that long-legged centipedes are probably thriving down there in a damp and until recently, six-months-vacant building. Walking out of the side door of the basement into the garden and hanging my wet clothes on the line (subsequently, the feeling of squeezing wooden clothespins between my fingers and positioning them carefully on fabrics prone to indentation — care is equivalent to control, control means order, order means content — and does not content breed joy?). The sound of birds singing as I do this — and the birds here are abundant. My three fir trees that line the yard in ascending order probably house a nest or two. I wonder, did the owners who had this home for 20, 30 years, did they do what my family did and buy living Christmas trees with roots intact? And every few years, would they find a spot in the garden and plant these trees, until the tallest one nearly reached the attic, and the smallest cut halfway up the second floor? This space does not feel like my space, not yet, but it feels like a space where love thrived, where memories were made, where families laughed and fought and held each other and built the relationships that formed their very cores.

I found a sleepy bee on my kitchen floor before I sat down to write, so I scooped it into a paper towel and released it outside. I was on the phone with mum when this happened, prompting me to remind her to destroy the RoundUp I know she still has in the backyard. I made her promise, and even as I said it, I felt hypocritical about killing the centipede in my sink this morning amid the array of Greek-tragedy-level drama invoked by my uninvited guest. I did not, however, feel a bit sorry for the black moths sitting on my ceiling both yesterday afternoon and this evening. Fearing an impending food infestation, I disposed of every grain not contained in a glass mason jar and sucked the vagrants into my vacuum by way of a hose extension.

I live here now, and though it does not yet feel as natural as breathing to wake here, I know the ones who don’t belong. I recognize the squatters and the intruders and can differentiate them from the benign visitors and accidental guests, the gentle passers-through. I look into the mirror hanging in my entryway and I know I will eventually recognize myself as the new inhabitant. It will take time. Then again, the gypsy told me when I was 14 that I would live to 93. Time is all I’ve got. So many lifetimes, and this one is just opening up before me like a morning rose. This is what I’ve always wanted. For once, I will allow myself to be in love without self-judgment.