Make Lonely Your Friend

I think yesterday was the first July 4th I've ever spent alone. Seriously. I can't remember being alone ever in my life before on that day. Not that I'm a huge fan of July 4th. Its an odd holiday. When I was young, we were kids, I'm sure we'd gather at my Uncle Will and Aunt Sandy's in their backyard, playing tennis, swimming, grilling burgers, with our cousins. Maybe we'd all be at Rehobeth or Bethany Beach in our adjacent beachhouses. In college, a particularly memorable July 4th sitting within 100 yards of the Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, MA when I was a camp counselor at Camp Wind-In-The-Pines with my sister and a bunch of our fellow counselor/friends. Listening to some pops orchestra, having smuggled in wine coolers.  As a single girl in the East Village, I would go to the river with Sandra, crowding in amongst the thousands to see the Macy's fireworks. Once I was on a 5th Avenue rooftop with a sort-of-boyfriend in someone's penthouse garden. Kal and I would always go backpacking. Once with our dogs and our friend Greg to Mount Marcy in the Adirondaks. Or we'd head to Rob and Dana's to watch the fireworks from their Jersey City rooftop. I felt very disconnected mostly, wanting to feel a part of the gang, but knowing that something kept me apart. 

This year I was alone. Now don't go feeling bad for me. I chose this aloneness. I had a show the night before in Philadelphia, so I didn't get home until late and I had a bit of insomnia so I didn't sleep well. And I had a show in Portland, Maine on the 5th (tonight), so really, where was I going to go. But I woke late and got the blues, alone in my small place with my dog, feeling, well...alone. I didn't just sulk. I spent a few hours in NYC at Battery Park watching Jenny Lewis and part of Conor Oberst's sets for free with a friend. That was nice. Then I had that feeling, you know that one, where you know you're just about to get really anti-social, despite being around great friends, and you don't even want to explain it, you just want to bolt. Quickly. And get home. Even if you know home means alone, you'd rather have the option of being home and alone and putting your pajamas on and crying into a pillow, or drinking an entire bottle of wine, or just doing nothing and feeling nothing and watching crap tv, than explain this growing blob of nothingness in your gut to your friend who will want to convince you to stay out, get a beer, have a laugh, take your mind off it. But you WANT your mind on it. It sounds really self-defeating. But its like walking straight into the fire. Sometimes you just want to fucking take your shoes off and walk on the coals and feel the pain. 

I've been separated for a while now. Everyone knows this. Hell, even strangers know. I'm a songwriter with a new album out that's entirely about my marriage falling apart (well, metaphorically, at least. Its really not "about" my marriage, but the songs were inspired by this period in my life of deciding to stay or go and it was painful, to say the least--still is--and the way I coped was to write about it and when the album was done and the PR folks and I were sitting around, we thought we could either dance around that or just flat out admit what the fuck I was writing about, so there. I admit it. Go forth and extricate what you will.).  And I've been lucky this week, getting really great press. Its what you want. Its what you hope for. Thing is, with me, its a double edged sword. I'm thrilled about the press. But every time I read about my record, I have to read about my marriage "falling apart" or some other phrasing that can make me feel if not awful, at least a twinge of regret and sadness. 

I chose this. I'm not complaining. I'm explaining. And probably because there are others out there who feel as I do, I don't feel like I'm airing dirty laundry here. Maybe I'm oversharing. Sue me.

I miss parts of this relationship. A lot of parts. I still have so much of the good parts and for that, I am blessed. But I do miss the coupling. The knowing that I've got someone to eat dinner with every night. My "person" (as Meredith calls Christine in "Grey's Anatomy"--guilty pleasure) who has my back, will take care of me, will pick me up when I'm down and share the heights with me when I'm flying. I don't have that right now. Again--I chose this. 

But let me tell you, the Fourth of July is a pretty lonely holiday alone. In the past few years, I've had other holidays alone and you'd think Independence Day would be one that would be a good one alone, at least a minor holiday. What do people do? Drink beer and eat burgers. I can do without both of those. But as I walked June to the water last night in the 9pm dusk to catch a glimpse of the fireworks, and ran smack into large crowds gathered on the gardened piers of the Jersey City side of the Hudson, and I could lean my head to the right and have a partial view of the sparkling sky around the Hoboken buildings, I realized how claustrophobic it was there, alone, with my shivering dog, afraid of the noise. So we walked quickly home. I almost ran. Just wanted to be in bed with June. We crawled into bed together, she curled up tight against me, as the cracks and booms continued in my neighborhood long after the official fireworks ended, and I hugged my dog, realizing that this was perhaps the first night that being alone really sunk in. And maybe that's the impact of Independence Day for me this year. Independence. Finally. Not a celebration though. A melancholy awareness of the loss of something for the gain of the unknown and a blind faith that the leap will make sense on another far away July 4th. 

North Dakota Mile

The New York area, old and cranky with layoffs and bankruptcies, in its envy has stolen the weather system of Seattle.  A blanket of rain since late April. This means something, I think. I see signs everywhere in life. Could be just that its raining. Or you could look for meta-meaning and find the poetry in it. Writing the layer of story over events is like the difference between waking up every day and being glum, sighing and cursing the clouds for the steely sky, or taking it off the shelf like one of those snowglobes you had as a kid, shaking the metal flecks of rain that will obscure the Statue of Liberty until they fall like petals and land at her feet in the fisheye.  

Then again, sometimes rain is just rain.

Today its raining, but I was fooled into thinking it might be a nice day as I woke to birds chirping in my yard, a sure sign of the sun. A few hours later, and its sprinkling but there's sun on my day lilies and the paver stones are drying up.  Everything changes minute by minute. Waiting is a funny thing. It can be effortful, in vain, passive and weak. Or it can be just this stillness of knowing that a thing will change, that a thing is right, and you will root yourself in the bottom landing of the breathing out while you let things pass.  We wait for seasons. We wait for love. We wait for grace and forgiveness. We wait for the rain to pass. Like the long stretch of highway, sometimes there's nothing to do but just drive and hum along to the silence of the gravel.

New Album. No sleep.

2:23am. Two days ago I drove from Grand Rapids straight to Jersey City. Then couldn't sleep for the buzz in my ears from the hum of the road. Yesterday I woke early to move my illegally-parked car then drove to Connecticut to play, or shall I write anticipate playing, an outdoor concert in a park. After a perfectly sunny soundcheck, a rainstorm, hiding in a trailer with cookies and shrimp cocktail and kosher wine and Sam Adams Summer Ale. A break in the rain and 30 people gathered wet and damp in a gazebo and I ran out there with my guitar to give them a few songs, as these were die-hard park-concert goers, waiting the storm out as the air cooled and the night crept in with the boggy mosquitos. The rain abated, a rainbow emerged, and the band took the stage for an abbreviated concert, soggy and sloppy, but fun. I drove home, got in around 3am and couldn't sleep. Woke this morning after only 4 hours of sort-of sleep to move my aforementioned always-illegally parked vehicle and then couldn't ... sleep. Spent the day on the phone, aggravated by things that I won't give weight to now in this quiet, contemplative hour, but that challenged my meditative blissed-out state and threw me into torpor. Then, to counteract the slinking to negativity, I dusted and vacuumed, a good cure for anything. A phone call I was grateful to get to recalibrate my soul's equilibrium, then a bbq with my almost-kind-of-ex-who-is-in-essence-my-ex-but-still-is-family-and-we've-been-lazy-at-making-the-ex-ness-official-so-who-cares-who-he-is-but-to-me-he-matters of buffalo burgers and beans and beer and honest talk and now I sit at this flatscreen when the deadweight of exhaustion covers my shoulders with weight and my knees with ache and I can't see straight.

Its like giving birth and standing over a crib hoping that the infant is still breathing.