You best believe I’m fucking tough.  I stood up and took an opportunity that was well and far outside of my comfort zone.  I tried for something new and aimed high.  I answered that goddamned door and threw my entire self at the hallway’s occupant, barely acknowledging that I might need a raincoat.

I went ALL THE FUCK IN and refused to be waylaid, pushing pushING PUSHING until it hurt.  Until I hurt.  Until I BROKE.

I’m not TOUGH ENOUGH?

Say that again, I dare you.  To my face this time, after you’ve taken a moment of pause inside my headspace.  After you’ve pushed as hard as I have only to come up on setback after setback.  Tell me again how I’m not tough enough to do this thing that I HAVE BEEN DOING, all the while hearing secondhand that I don’t fit your image of motherfucking FORTITUDE.

I’m tough, you fucking slack wit.  You gossip.  You harpy.  I am tough as nails and I am coming for your misconceptions.  I will be stronger in my broken places and I will push until you are forced to eat your words, brittle in your mouth.  I will be better than better still and you will not touch the strength I build.

in my living room sunshine

to the new sound in my hips and lips and fingertips.

Let the music flow between us

On whispered kisses softly spoken

and I’ll breathe you in to the bottom of my lungs.

Come dance with me

in my living room sunshine

to notes of a tune far away.

I won’t swear or say a word

If you’ll rock me gently,

hand so soft on the small of my back.

Come dance with me

in my living room sunshine

to the whoosh of silence around us.

Let our eyes meet, and souls,

by that rope woven fast,

turning circles on a round throw rug.

For almost the entirety of my time at college, I drove a white, 1988 Ford Mustang hatchback LX.  She taught me how to drive stick and ferried me safely on my first solo road trip.  I adorned her with bumper stickers that loudly proclaimed me to be a GLYSEN supporting, X-Rated Pleasure Kitten and lost more than one heat shield while bouncing her over rutted dirt roads in search of the perfect place to camp.  She played only mixtapes and radio, and one time, in order to escape my company, a boy climbed out of her while she was still moving (true story).  I’d had other cars before her, but as far as influence, experience and nostalgia are concerned, she was my first.  I took her everywhere.

That car could tell the story of my late teens and early 20s, madly bombing up the Northway in blizzards and carrying carloads of girls around New York State on rugby Saturdays.  She endured hours of Phish bootlegs (only because he was cute), and her carpets were heavy with sand from summer trips to the Hampton Bays and Dune Road K.  I smoked in her and drank in her and made her use every one of her four cylinders as if they were eight.

And so, of course, was I pulled over in her.

On a late October Sunday, I packed my brother into the back seat and a good gentleman friend into the front (in this case, seating determined by size and limb length), and headed out on the 2 hour drive back to the homeland.  Hermanito had been visiting, enjoying what had become my annual birthday present to him; an all-expenses-paid trip to college for a weekend of concerts (Rusted Root! Drop Kick Murphys! De la Soul!!  Bosstones!), corner joint pizza with cold cheese and a lax attitude toward the presence and use of taboo substances.  Friend had a load of stuff to bring home to his parents’ place.  After getting gas, I pointed us south and fired up a joint, accelerating smoothly into the mountains.  The weather was still relatively nice, sun beaming hard through the crisp air and over the last of the changing leaves, outlining everything in a rainbow-y gold glare.

About 15 minutes downroad, we settled in, all pleasantly elevated, and I lit a Parliament, watching the first blue curls of smoke slip out the crack in my window.  I can taste that cigarette as I picture the action, recessed filter clamped between my front teeth as I fumbled with the lighter.  The easy conversation of friends and family slip-slid between us and I’d just found the sweet spot on the radio dial

when I was jolted out of reverie by the flashing lights of a state trooper in my rearview.  And of course, I panicked.  I’d been doing the speed limit.  I could only surmise that we’d been spotted disposing of the pre-ciggy, and so began envisioning the worst case scenarios:

Older sister (should know better) is caught smoking weed (supposed to be setting an example!) in a car and is promptly pulled over and arrested (jailed forever) while her little (not yet capable of caring for his poor, poor self) brother is left at the side of the road with her friend to await the parental minivan.  Sister is allowed to rot in a prison cell, and forced to watch re-runs of her parents in the courtroom, their faces telegraphing that the are So Disappointed in her.

The officer strode up to the window of my car and I handed him my license and registration.  I was petrified to ask what he’d pulled me over for, so I kept my mouth shut as he perused my documents at a speed of negative rotations per minute.  After a length of time, he crouched a little lower, and with hand on gun, asked me a barrage of questions:

“How long have you been driving?”    15 minutes

“Where did you enter the Northway?”    Exit 37

“How fast were you going?”   7-ish

“At any time did you exit the Northway?”    No?

“Who are the people in your car?”    My brother and friend.

“Where are you going?”  Dropping my brother off in our hometown.

“And you’ve been in the car the whole time?”  Yes?

After a second, the questions started to puzzle me.  He asked the same ones about three times a piece in different orders, then he asked them of my brother and friend.  I was shaking.  Was he stalling?  Waiting for back up?  It was only a joint, for Gods’ sake, why the 3^rd degree?  I finally took a breath and looked him in the face:

“Sir, can you tell me what I’ve been pulled over for, please?”

He stopped and looked back at me:

“I’m going to my car to run these” (holding up my papers and license) “Please stop your engine.  At no time, are you to start your vehicle.  At no time are you to exit your vehicle.  Do not open your doors, do not make as if to leave your vehicle.”

He gave each of these commands in a forceful and grave way, and I could hear the metallic clink of a metal door to a jail cell slamming closed.  I was mortified and had no idea what was going to happen to me.  In my tiniest voice, I asked him if was okay to smoke a cigarette while we waited.

“Certainly,” he said, “Just do NOT exit your vehicle.”

And he walked back to the patrol car.  I was sweating.  My brother was silent in the back, thinking who knows what and my friend and I were frantically making up legal facts.

“There is nothing else in the car” I said.  “You weren’t speeding, there was no probable cause” he said.  We must have sounded ridiculous and 3 years old.  As I sucked to the middle of my cigarette, I saw the door to the cruiser open, and out stepped Officer Twilight Zone.  As he leaned in toward my window, there wasn’t a thing written in his face.  With his next words, my heart dropped into my stomach and if we hadn’t so recently been to a gas station, I would have lost control of my bladder:

“Miss, I need you to step out of the car.  Please place your hands in my view and do not attempt to get anything out of your pockets.  I am going to open the door.”

I couldn’t breathe.  I couldn’t believe this was happening.  What was happening?  If I was at all high when he pulled me over, adrenaline took care of the remaining buzz, wiping my brain clear and sending itself WHOOSH! down into my toes.  I stepped from my car and looked up at him with shiny eyes:

“Sir, I don’t understand….”

“Please step to the rear of your vehicle.”  We did so, and he began asking me all the same questions again.  I answered tremorously, seconds away from losing the contents of my stomach.

“Miss, are you driving this vehicle of your own free will?”

Wait, WHAT?!

“Yes?” I said, my question evident in my crinkled brow.  “I don’t under…”

He interrupted me: “Neither of the gentleman in there have a weapon?  You aren’t being forced to drive?”

I almost laughed out loud.  It was the most absurd question I’d ever been asked, and it threw me even further off guard.

“No sir.  That’s my friend.  And my brother.  Really.”

“Well please stand here, I’m going to ask you to open the hatch and allow me to look through the things back there.”

And so I did, and he did, picking up my North Face fleece and my brothers backpack, my ice scraper, my first aid kit, a Chug-A-Mug, placing everything back where he found it.  After a minute or so of rifling through my things, he closed the hatchback and instructed me to get back in my car.

“Please step back into your vehicle.  And again, please do not attempt to exit it, or to start the vehicle.”

I collapsed in my seat, and we began round 2 of a frantic collection of facts and questions.  What was with the questions?  “Can you believe he thought I was being kidnapped?”  What was happening?  I smoked another two cigarettes before the office returned to my window.  I almost startled when he handed me back my papers.

“Thank you very much for being patient, Miss.  You are free to go.”

Huh?  What?  What just happened?

“Bu-but, sir?  Wait?  I can go?  Now?  Really?  Well, then, can I ask you why I was pulled over?”

He paused for a breath and chuckled softly.

“Well” he said, “Your car fits exactly the description of a getway car used in a robbery at a sporting goods store in Keene, which is about 1 minute from the exit you passed back there when I pulled you over.  Same number of occupants in the vehicle, male/male/female with a female driving.  They just caught the guy though, so you are free to go.”

You could have heard a pin drop.  I smiled and shook my head and started my car.  The officer told me to be careful pulling out and walked back to his car while I accelerated the hell out of there.  I lit another cigarette and tried to get my hands to stop shaking.

“Can you believe that shit??  How ridiculous is that??  Who does this happen to?  It’s a good thing we didn’t have anything in the car when he searched….” And a rush of other random thoughts that my brain could no longer keep a reign on.

I looked across at my friend, and he had a greenish, nervous look on his face.

“What’s the matter?  You going to be sick?”

“No” he said, “but I do have something to tell you….”

I looked at him and then back at the road, suddenly nervous again.

“What?  What are you talking about?”

“Well, you just really have no idea.  No idea how close that was.  And I’m so sorry, and I’m such an asshole and, Jesus, Jen.  I was bringing home some weight for my neighbor.  It’s in my bag right now.  The one in the back, that he didn’t even touch.  We were so lucky he didn’t touch it.  I’m so sorry.  Jen, I’m so sorry.”

Over the next five minutes, my friend told me how much he was carrying and it made me laugh in a sick way at the scenarios I’d been going over in my head 40 minutes before then.  Had we been caught, we would have assuredly NOT been allowed to go anywhere save in handcuffs.

The verbal barrage that he received and the subsequent repair that our friendship needed is a story for another time.  My brother made it home safely and we never spoke of it to our parents.  Patting the steering wheel, I shook my head drove back up to school that night still jittery and disbelieving,

Anticipation with no relief. 

Grains of sand swirling under a rip tide. Flecks of paint flaking off old clapboard siding on a house moldering to the ground over the books it houses.  A spiderweb crack opening out over a windshield.  I am barely contained and rapidly losing control. 

In these moments by myself, I cannot stand being alone and every hair stands, stretches, reaches out for touch and scent and VOICE. 

I need to settle. 

To breathe down to the bottom of my pelvis and quiet the thrum and stretched sinew. 

Fill the space and deaden the jangle. 

This aggression will not stand, MAN….my heart might just give out. 

“I call her Firefly….’cause oh how, she ray-diates moonglow, wants none-a that noonglow, she starts to glitter as the sun goes down….”

 The setting sun is in my eyes and touches the ice that glitters off of the naked, reaching trees on the Taconic Parkway.  My world is this moment, this drive to see a friend and everything is perfectly aligned as the blue coils of smoke from my Parliament escape my cracked window into the frigid outer air rushing past at eighty miles an hour.  I am singing at the top of my lungs in my best voice and the moment lasts long enough for me to play the song four times. 

‘Bout 8pm, I pull into her driveway and switch the brights up, turning my one into two and it’s mayhem. 

When I’m moaning low, I go back there, to that drive, that span, that twinkling winterland, when our separation was only hours and not days and there was little to worry about except making it home for a lunch shift two days later.  Perfect.  

I’m a bad liar.  Maybe it’s because I never had to lie to my parents when a well-supported argument would suffice, or perhaps that I’m a Reared-In-New-York Italian girl with the patience and emotional sensitivity of an arthritic tiger.  Either way you cut it, I will just about never choose a lie when the truth will do.  Seriously, there is a long list of people in my world whose lives would be much more comfortable if I were a little less honest.  If I had bad gas, I couldn’t clear a room faster.

As such, I had to really wrack my brain for a story to tell you that would live up to what your expectation might be.  In the end, I recalled a lie I told  in a situation that involves really one of the most despicable things I’ve ever done….

Somewhere, sometime between my high school and college graduations, I was concerned for a minute about the growing number of my sexual partners.  (In those days, I was nowhere close to promiscuous, but neither was I Mother Angelica of the Nunnery Chastendom.)   At VERY SAME MOMENT I was JUST AS CONCERNED with a dry spell that had befallen me.  I mean, MONTHS of NO ASS.

A conundrum.

Sitting around a kitchen table in a decrepit, sloped apartment, I shared my predicament with my best girlfriends and a jug of Carlo Rossi Chablis.  I wanted the nookie, but I didn’t want to PAY for it.  There were four of us there, chain-smoking cloves and Parliaments, each of us of varying experience, discussing my options.  The way we saw it, I had one of two choices:

1. I could just find someone at the bar or an after hours party and to hell with my dwindling maidenhead, or
2. I could roll back over onto the wet spot of the Territory Ex, satisfying both my need for a non-auto orgasm and the desire to keep The Counter stationary at its current number.

It didn’t take much consideration to decide on Door Number Two.  The bar was an unsure bet.  Sure you can guess, but can you really gauge penis size and prowess in a crowd of Jaeger drinking fraternity boys and nappy hippies?  Table consensus said “No” so we began taking roll of Those That Had Known me.  Of the culprits, and for one very good reason or another, there was only one clear option.  (wink wink, nudge nudge).  The trouble was, he was crazy.  Like, Glenn Close, I Want To Have All Your Babies And Love You For Ever And Ever Please Don’t Leave Me Or I’ll Kill Myself CRAZY.

Good thing I was only 21 and Judgement ranked second after Hormones.

I might have called him right then.   The conversation was a little awkward….”Um sorry that I just stopped returning your calls last semester and crossed the street that one time when I saw you coming, but how about we go grab a beer and chat?”  And it was that easy.  I let him pick me up and we went out to dinner and I am pretty sure I actually apologized for disappearing off the face of the earth after he had so earnestly (crazily) told me that even though we’d only known each other for a month, he could see us old together (Yes! See??  You were right to groan right there!  Who says that?!).  During dinner, I played the demure and contrite femme.  I smiled and frowned and shook my head at my own antics and I began to hint-without actually saying the words-that I might be interested in “getting back together.”

I know!  I know!  “Stop!” you’re shouting.  “Don’t do it!” But I did do it,  and it remains one of the most wretched things I’ve ever done.  At the end of the meal, a broad smile on his face, he took my hand and got very serious: “I want you so bad, but I don’t want you to hurt me again….”  You could have heard a pin drop in the silence.  That was my moment to come clean.  To admit that what I wanted took a little less time than forever.  But I didn’t.  Instead, I stared back and said: “I won’t.”

And boy, were my pants on motherfucking fire.

It took very little time to get back to my dorm room, and even less time to realize I’d made a terrible mistake.  Our existence as a ‘couple’ was now split in two very distinct halves:  Pre-Dinner and Post-Dinner.

Pre-dinner, our relationship had maintained a casual appearance, a flip feeling that I’d worked hard to keep.  We fucked.  And that was hot.

Post-Dinner, our relationship had developed a mysterious one-sided intimacy that I wanted no part of.  We ‘made love’.  And that was NOT hot.

When it was over, I made up a paper I had to type, got him the hell out of there, and high-tailed it back over to my girlfriend’s house to finish the jug of Carlo and recount my amorous adventure.

And I never talked to him again.

I ignored his calls and crossed the street.  In fact, I all but forgot about him until the weekend I was moving home after graduation.  On my last night in town, I saw him walking past the window of my bar, and I ran out to say hello.  Years distance had done nothing to fade the damage I’d done.  He looked at me for a moment, and then laughed in my face before walking on with his friends, having said not a single word.

I awoke, with a start, to my mother’s face hovering only millimeters above my own.  The quick and cloudy accounting of the newly risen made clear that I was in my bed and that it was sometime after daybreak.  In that moment, I knew two things for certain:

1. That I had no idea what her deal that morning was and that
2. I felt like shit.  Shit of a kind I’d never felt before. 

Images of the previous evening began flooding back to me as I tried to wipe away the confusion of having her in such close proximity to my face.  She peered hard down into my eyes with her own brown ones, and said, with a quiet vehemence and clarity that I’d never experienced: “You’ve. Been. DRINKING.”

 It was a clear and precise statement, void of anger or question, and I was puzzled.   Context clues and ample experience with the worst of her rages were leading me to believe she wasn’t mad.  It wasn’t computing.  I began to respond, to test the waters, but she’d already gotten up and started to exit.  As she reached my bedroom door, she turned around and said:  “I’m making breakfast.  Take a shower and come downstairs, you’ll need something to eat before work.”  

She disappeared from sight, and with the sound of her receding footsteps, my senses began functioning in earnest.  From downstairs came the unmistakeable aroma of frying bacon.  The light streaming in from both of my two windows accosted my eyes and they narrowed to a pained squint.  The sheets stuck to my perspiring skin and my mind raced.  How did she know?  Why wasn’t she mad?  Wait, BREAKFAST?  She NEVER makes break….And then, there it was, the fifth sense, taste, overwhelming all others as a torrent of bile and tequila began making its escape.  Time went from slow motion to fast-forward as I clambered from my envelope of sheets and ran to the bathroom as quickly as my stumbling feet would carry me. 

That was the first time I’d vomit that morning, and it was a violent assault that would continue for the next two days.  Thankfully, by the time I showered, any solid pieces had left my stomach and all that was left washed quietly and in rivulets down the drain.  Getting dressed was an ordeal, and though I found the $85 I’d won the night before for taking the most tequila shots (the very plurality of that word makes me gag, even from the safety of an almost 20 year span), it gave my head and roiling abdomen no comfort.  I fastened the button on my shorts and perched on the edge of my bed in a moment of pause, an attempt, almost comical in its futility, to quiet my body’s attempts at a self-cleanse. 

But this isn’t a story of an epic hangover or an uproarious retelling of the events preceding. 

It’s a story about my mother.

In the world of my youth, my mother was a volatile and commanding figure.  She had some things going on that made it difficult for her to regulate her temper, and as a result, punishments often took a hard and unfortunate physical turn.  She was a smart woman, which compounded things and served to make her tongue as vicious a weapon as the metal spoons she so deftly wielded.  It wasn’t hard to know when she was angry.  Her emotions read openly on her face and in her flying words and hands.  At sixteen, I’d done much and little to raise her dander, so though too big and fast at that point to beat, I expected to be verbally rendered for coming home drunk. 

But it wasn’t to be. 

The first thing you should know in order to gain the maximum impact of my tale is that Mother Yawps makes the most vile eggs in the history of all eggs ever made.  Runny and gelatinous, they will ooze onto your plate and then jiggle off of your fork as if self-aware and giving you the time to Run, Run And Save Yourself While You Still Can.  It is a heroic act to choke them down.  Even now, it is a family joke.  She would come home after work some nights and announce “Eggs for dinner!” out of a weary need to get SOMETHING on the table and we would plead “NO!  We’ll be good, PLEASE no eggs!!” 

And that is what I came downstairs to that morning.  In horror, I surveyed the scene before me. 

My brother, then 12, sat at the table eating a bowl of Cinnamon Life.  He looked up, and with the slight smirk perfected by younger siblings everywhere, announced:  “Mom made you breakfast.”  And there she was, at the stove.  In front of her, was the cast iron frying pan and inside it was a sizzling pile of bacon.  And next to the bacon, in the grease, was a sizzling pile of eggs, and next to the eggs was a slice of toast, also sizzling.  In the grease.  With barely a word, she transferred all of this to a plate and set it in front of me with a fork and I knew, through the odd silence in the room that I can only describe as bemused, that I was to begin eating.  And I did.

I was hungry.  There was nothing in my stomach.  I was 16, and a cheerleader and as if my diet of Pepsi and Swedish Fish weren’t enough to keep me in a constant state of ravenous desire, I’d just disposed of any and all contents of my stomach down the drain of the upstairs bathtub.  I ate quickly and without regard to the border of butter and fat that circled the mound of eggs and bacon, scooping everything with the toast and shoveling into my mouth. My mother looked on from across the table, her face a placid mask that I couldn’t figure out.  As I finished, she glanced at me and ventured one word:  “Good?” And I told her yes, and thanks, still uneasy at how things were transpiring, but too fuzzy to pay particular attention. 

“Good.”  She said again.  “Now come and tell me about your night.”  My heart sank as I placed my plate in the dishwasher and walked back to the spindled Hitchcock chair.  Here it comes, I thought, the serenity too good to be true.  I popped the top of a Pepsi and slumped into the chair, ready to tell the whole truth. 

It took only a second, for my stomach to turn, but as quickly as my butt hit the chair, it did, and I popped back up and beelined for the downstairs bathroom, just in time to release the lesson my mom had just begun to teach me.  By the time I emerged, stomach empty, I was fully sweating and she was standing there with a flattened gingerale and 3 saltines.  “Maybe bacon and eggs weren’t such a good idea, huh?”  I thought I caught a glimpse of a smile.  “Go clean yourself up, I’ll take you to work.” 

“I’m not going.  I’m going to call in…” I said, as I reached for the receiver on the wall.  She took the phone away from me and, murmuring, said  “Oh, you sure ARE Lady Jane” and placed it back on the hook.  And there it was.  The sharpest thing that was to be said regarding the entire incident.  I looked into those eyes that only an hour before had woken me up, and knew that this was the No Questions moment, and that I didn’t have a choice.  So this was my punishment. 

That afternoon she drove me to work and, with no recourse, I stayed for my entire shift, taking frequent breaks to vomit and wipe the booze seeping from my pores. 

Of course, we laugh about it now, and she will demur on the issue and never really say much, but that morning, my mother (at the time, a heavy closet drinker herself) taught me my first lesson about being a person who drinks:  Do what you do, but what you do IS NOT allowed to get in the way of your commitments. 

My gaffes disappear behind cloudy curtains and no one ever has to tell me to “JUST FUCK OFF” because I never existed in the first place. 

The things I did and said evaporate and vanish and their scars push back up into unblemished flesh.  .

 I, and the harms I’ve done are swallowed by the ether, erased…absorbed.

My face dissolves, and then my concept,

And like a sigh into the wind,

I am gone,

a never was. 

You can keep your advice and your pity and platitudes. 

This is, after all, my own bed. 

It was me who bought the promises cheap and continued to trade in fake currency.  Who ignored the signs and made excuses.  I am the one who stepped back, inch by inch, from the line in the sand and fooled myself about brighter days ahead. 

This isn’t a pity party, no drama here, I readily shoulder the blame. 

But all the same, I don’t want to hear from you, or read about your blessings.  It hurts to see that someone loves you, that people think about you, that you’re shown beauty in your everyday.  I am jealous of your hand-delivered pastries, your beautiful daughters, your surprise trips and your hand-crocheted critters.  I envy the ferocity with which you’re loved and the outward displays of those you’re loved by. 

My skin burns green and the lump in my throat grows bigger every time I ‘like’ your picture, your message, your outpouring of thanks for those who and that which enriches you.  I start to cry and swallow it down because I like, truly like, LOVE, that they are yours and my lust for the same just cheapens them. 

So please, just stay silent, just for a minute. Let me breathe and believe that what you have isn’t so much better than what my eyes see every time they’re open.  Just for today let me feel that I’m part of the same world as you, and don’t make me refute your objections with the cold stone truth that I know.    

The prompt:  8. Health: How did you treat your body this year? You only get this one vessel one time around. In what ways can you cultivate better health for your body next year?

It was a real wench this year, my body; had a rough go of it.  She failed me and held me back and then threw hissy fits every time I pushed.  The amount of money she cost was unsettling, and at the end of it all, still wanted, NEEDED more.  Together, we battled it out (smoke-free, again!!) through the Les Mills certification process, countless plymetrics, depression, constipation, and, not least obnoxiously, two months of crutches. 

But she’s got no quit in her. 

After spending almost half of the year at less than 50%, my body has somehow managed to battle back, sending me throttling toward my mid-thirties in the best, fittest, most athletic shape of my life.   

She swung at every pitch.  So I just kept pitching, kept asking JUST A LITTLE MORE.    

I battered her and broke her.  Belittled her failures and lauded her successes.  I stroked her, caressed her, adored her and despised her.  My body monopolized my mind and time this year, and of any teachers, she’s been the most adept at leading me to a place of patience and acceptance. 

So, how did I treat her this year? 

Like she was meant to be treated. 

Next year will be more of the same.  It’s true, I DO only get one, so I’m gonna open this baby up and see what she can do.