Sneering All Day

It smells like Christmas on Perry Street and I want to grab 14-year-old me by the shoulders, blindfold her, spin her around five times, then release her with a light push. She will stumble a few steps then look to her right at her woolly reflection in a lingerie store’s window and I know she will understand.

When it smells like Christmas on Perry Street, it is easy to enter a mourning period for time felt lost. Mourning is easy to do. Humans do it very well. We lose weight and focus our line of sight on things very, very far away and sit with our hands in our hair and cry when a child loses their balloon to the wind.

I will blow my hair out of my face and wonder if the crusty, cloudy-eyed Maltese walking toward me ever has stress dreams about its teeth falling out. I will make eye contact with a stranger who smiles with the right side of his mouth. I will wonder if the smile was actually a misidentified grimace. I will wonder what the stranger thinks of me although I think nothing of him. This is, unfortunately, what occurs when men are not interested in you during your adolescence; their opinions feel heavier when you grow older. This also means you feel you must outsmart them in some way because you didn’t spend years being undesirable to turn out to be an idiot with no comedic timing. All of a sudden you are very cruel.

Is someone playing the trumpet a few blocks away?

Caitlin texts me:

“Should we go to Paris

should I just flee

and work at a cafe sneering all day”

I walk to a bookstore deemed local and relatively independent to buy a thank you card for my Godfather and two books whose contents make love feel stale to me.

“Dear Peter,” I write. “I am so sorry for how late this is. I have been busy doing lots of sitting…”

I run out of room on the right side of the card and have to bleed onto the left. I imagine my Godfather opening it and beginning to read on the left before realizing what has occurred. I want to start over but I have no more cards. Suddenly I feel the need to cry because it smells like Christmas on Perry Street and I have just written a backward note and I can’t remember the last time I heard my name said out loud. I draw a dumb arrow on the bottom right corner of the card as if the man couldn’t have figured it out.

“How is London? I think the weather carried over to New York…everyone is dressed like a detective today.”

I wonder if I can work on being more patient before I have children.

“Let’s go to Paris,” I text Caitlin.

I have no stamps.

“Can you please bring me some stamps to dinner?” I text my father. He forgets them. “You don’t have stamps?” my brother says.

Curbing Our Sentimentality

When you fear living an ordinary life, everything within your touch becomes an opportunity to shapeshift into something larger than it was perhaps meant to be. These moments are timely. They must be jumped on immediately, held dear to the heart, locked into long-term memory so they may be returned to over and over again until they have settled into the perspective of your choosing. When you comb back through your tired, rumbling, brain, you convince yourself there was something more there.

When you fear living an ordinary life but also suffer from sporadically crippling anxiety, you enter a frustrating stalemate. You want to live wildly. You want to have lots of casual sex. You want to travel the world but mostly just want to adopt rollerskating as your predominant mode of transportation. You want to cut your hair and wear thong bikinis everywhere. You want to go back to school, just because (oh but the joys of learning of course!). You want to reach out to people from your past, just to see what will happen. You want to believe you are that person, and you convince yourself that if it weren’t for your hyperactive orbitofrontal cortex and genetic dispositions and environmental triggers and all of the factors that eventually shoot your brain beyond its threshold of dormancy, you are that person. Instead, you only wear thongs under your jeans and go braless under sheer shirts, and lay naked on your bed with the blinds open for all to see to remind yourself of her. Instead of learning how to scuba dive, you take the indistinct moments you do have and place a significance upon them that perhaps would not be there if you hadn’t forced it to the surface. Every passing moment must be something. You are too anxious to do anything more than that. But still, you must find a way to not lead a boring life.

I cry when my friends tell me they’re in love. I can’t help it. I watch their faces quietly and carefully, and I see it. It’s true, you know, that look of love. It’s there in the form of a sharp secret cast upon their faces, a small but not stifled smile. I’ve realized that when people are in love there rests little to no embarrassment in the matter. They will openly admit it as if it is something that has always been ingrained in their identity from birth. It is as easy as telling someone what country you were born in. Because it simply is. There’s no reason to dispute it. And that makes me cry.

I cry when I have happy days because I take the phrase “It doesn’t get much better than this!” literally. I hold onto my memories for dear life for this reason. I turn over images of my friends and me singing in the car in Texas, a cracked window pushing the air from the highway so harshly across my face that I attribute my dangling, wimpy tears to the wind rather than my own disability to resolve the pain in my chest. I look around me and will myself to remember the feeling.

On good days, I will look around at my friends, overwhelmed by how wonderful it is that we have chosen to be in each other’s lives after all this time. And then I will go home and stare at myself in the mirror and realize I can no longer identify as a teenager. I will replay the day’s events over in my lethargic head. I will pick it apart from hour to hour and attribute a weight to it. I convince myself that these moments are a rarity. “What a good day that was,” I’ll say to myself. “I wonder if I’ll ever have a day like that again.”

I’m working on curbing my sentimentality.

It’s good to be analytical, I think, with a limit. I like to be generally skeptical, although I’ve been working on curbing that when appropriate, as well.

On my last day in Texas, I got up at 6 am and sat outside for a while before calling my car to the airport. I felt it coming on, the urge to lock the moment in. To force some epiphany, to come up with some lesson, some reason for my time in Austin. The mosquitos began to bite my ankles and I went back inside before I could come to some dramatic conclusion.

Later, when I sat at my gate eating a cemented bagel, I realized that moment may have been a sign from the universe that I am doing too much, and not to my own benefit. Sometimes moments are just moments. My perspective on them does not change the fact that they happened. Their existence in my life should be enough. There is no need to clutch onto them as if they will eventually go extinct because their extinction will only come with my own. I can allow them to pass without wondering what they are teaching me. I can believe I will have many more wonderful moments because I definitely will. They will never be exactly replicated, but of course, they won’t be. That would be dumb and impossible and boring.

A Leaky Tricuspid Valve

I’m one of many to put off yearly doctor appointments. I worry that I’ll enter, in my gynecologist’s case, an exam room so sterile I feel bad for even introducing my molecules to the space, and in my physician’s case, a carpeted waiting area that appears to take on the form of soggy oatmeal, and be told that yes, everything you feared is true: You are dying. Sorry.

So these appointments tend to get pushed, which when you’re a person with a cervix that has an entire vaccine dedicated to it to ward off cancer, is actually an incredibly dumb thing to do. But sometimes we’ll get lucky and I’ll wake up one morning, head freshly screwed on correctly, and declare to no one in particular that it would really be responsible to get the old vessel that is my body checked out. You know, specifically the boobs. And maybe a glance at that clever little IUD to ensure the uterus hasn’t completely sucked it up into its depths, ensnaring the deceivingly small and harmless device into its walls (so much to worry about lately it seems…I wish we could all just default to the fear of dying alone like back in the olden days).

And so, in my usual rushed manner, I will call these offices to find an appointment for as early as the next day before I lose the will to go. I live for these moments; they’re great. I will enter these establishments with their impressionist painting prints randomly strewn about the walls with hardly any anxiety (I suppose these works do have a calming presence after all…I admire the tactics of the interior designers). I can’t wait for my doctor to tell me that everything seems to be in working order, at least from a baseline biological standpoint. I love having that information on hand.

Shortly after one said productive day of scheduling in 2018, I went to see a primary care physician who took it upon herself to overturn every stone that my body had to offer. I think the widespread search was prompted by my telling her that I’d fainted in the shower recently. I’m pretty sure it was dehydration but I appreciated the thoroughness nonetheless. I ended up having my thyroid checked out via ultrasound at one of those Lenox Hill-area testing centers after she ran her fingers down my throat and mumbled under her breath, “Hmm, feels a little nodular.” (Not to worry, turns out my thyroid is just bumpy. If you find that hot please feel free to reach out). She then performed an EKG (that records the electrical activity of your heart) which spat out a visual representation of my anxiety into an unsurprisingly long, sad, graph. She stared at it and seemed unsatisfied to say the least, directing my attention to its peaks and valleys as if I had any idea what anomalies I was remotely looking at. I remember feeling a bit of pity for my heart. I mean, really it was only doing its best.

I came back a week later to receive an echocardiogram (I think) as a double-check (on what, I have no idea). The process, which I learned is essentially yet another ultrasound, was much longer than I expected and glaringly not covered by my insurance. I lay naked from the waist up, pinned to the exam table by a hand-held wand that spread that notorious gel all the way up to my collarbone. I marveled at the progress of modern medicine. Crazy that with just a little lube on the boobs you can find out if you’re dying in a matter of minutes these days. It’s odd to hear all the disturbing noises your heart makes as it begrudgingly goes about its routine to keep you alive. Not odd enough to be that jarring though apparently, because I fell asleep for a few minutes about halfway through the procedure.

My doctor called me a week later to give me the results. “You have a bit of a leaky tricuspid valve,” she said. “That’s the thing that separates the two right chambers of your heart. But not to worry, you can continue on with your normal physical activity. This shouldn’t be an issue at any point but we’ll keep an eye on it.” How disappointing, I thought. Not only do I have a leaky tricuspid valve, which seemed like some kind of flaw at least, but I also don’t have a new weapon to strengthen my avoidance of having to sign up for a goddamn marathon in my mid-twenties? What kind of sick joke is this!

But fair enough. So I have a leaky tricuspid valve. To this day I’m not really sure what that means, but a quick google search to refresh my seventh-grade bio curriculum told me that the thing is responsible for allowing blood flow in and out of these right chambers appropriately. That sounded relatively important to me. I didn’t really understand the implications of its leakiness, but at the time it seemed that if it was significant enough for my doctor to mention, then it was significant enough for me to think about occasionally or inject into some dying conversation with a brunette man who doesn’t know how to ask you questions at a party. And so, I brought it up to my new doctor this year as a bit of an FYI.

I find my new doctor (I switched health insurance) to be hilarious. He’s refreshingly unapologetically cranky. I love people like that. I refuse to correct him when he calls me Elizabeth because I get a real kick out of him saying both my legal and the Queen of England’s name in his snarky tone. I asked him to let me know what my blood type is (B+) and then mentioned my abnormal ticker. “Oh, well nearly everyone’s valves are a little leaky,” he said. “But we can take a look.”

So there I was again, assuming the corpse pose, gel slathered on my topless form, listening to that damn organ grumble along. The results were groundbreaking. “Well, it’s a little leaky,” my doctor said, “but like I said, everyone’s heart is a little leaky. Do I think it’s too leaky? No, I don’t think so. I’m not really seeing anything out of the ordinary here.” I looked at him with a raised brow across his massive desk which was adorned with national sports paraphernalia and stifled a laugh. He laughed back. “You’re funny, Elizabeth. But you’ve got to draw the line somewhere,” he said. “It’s a bit subjective when it comes to these things.”

So there you have it, folks. It’s me, Alden, I mean Elizabeth, the girl with the tricuspid valve that isn’t quite leaky enough to raise a red flag. And I’m thankful for it! I guess I just don’t understand just how leaky one needs to be to start worrying about their checkups every year, and unfortunately this whole thing prevented me from getting the completely squeaky clean bill of health I so desired. I abhor anticipating going to the doctor, so when I do decide to go on these fateful days, I want to be in and out with verbal and written proof that I’m good to go. Not, good to go, but with one leaky tricuspid valve. I don’t want that aberration. I’m talking so good to go that my file doesn’t have a single additional note. But I’m not sure I’ll ever get that if my heart is doing a subjectively mediocre job at pumping my blood, leaving me to judge if it needs to be brought up in any future medical setting that could lead to another sticky exploratory procedure. Regardless, I’m coming to terms with the seemingly lazy thing. And I think it’s ok, because dammnit, your valves are probably leaky, too.