The Effects of Danny and Annie

His parents have been divorced for ten years, and before that shouldn’t have been married at all. “They met at a knife fight when she was 17 and he was 20,” he told me. “I’m pretty sure I was conceived in a parking lot.” It is not the sentiment of someone who really believes in marriage. I, on the other hand, grew up with parents who used to stand hugging in the kitchen when they thought no one was looking. I know marriage as a long-lasting, loving commitment. He knows marriage as a situation of convenience that wears off eventually.

“Can I show you something?” I asked. “This might be totally cheese ball, and you might make fun of me, but to me… this is what marriage is.” He pulled up Danny and Annie on his iPhone. I saw his eyes blinking in the glowing light of the little screen as we watched in silence. He let out a barely audible sigh of surprise when Danny says, “I walked in with you, I walk out with you.”

He told me he thinks this situation is so rare, and happens only when two people really settle and feel lucky to be with anyone at all. “I think you’re very wrong,” I said quietly. His face softened. He watched my eyes for a minute and I could almost see the thoughts churning in his head. And then he let his walls down, just a little, for me. “Or maybe that could be us,” he offers. “But I won’t die on you.”

She's Got a Way

When I was 18, I hated her. She was comfortable and familiar, and I got used to her but in the way that you get used to a limp. I wanted to leave her so badly, and when I finally got a break at college, I couldn’t wait to come screaming back. “Remember me?! I’ve changed. I’ve outgrown you.”

I’m twenty-five now, and I miss her. I remember her familiar curves, her radiating warmth and her distancing cold. I don’t want to go back to her. But my heart breaks when we’re forced apart.

On Tuesday morning, I sat at my parents’ breakfast table, far away from my childhood home, but not so far that her hold on me wasn’t achingly apparent. My mom packed up her bag for the day and I spooned cereal between my quivering lips. I started to cry. "I feel like I'm in third grade again," I whimpered. "Don't make me go to school, mom, I want to stay home."

I know that there are great things waiting for me out there. I am destined to be successful, as a chef, as a writer, as an eater, as an editor, or maybe as something I haven’t even considered yet. But part of me wants to slink back home to the predictability and comfort of friends who have known me since I was ten years old and love me whether I am an exacerbated version of myself, or not myself at all. Part of me wants to buy a car and move into a cheap apartment in the middle of streets I could traverse with my eyes closed. I want to sink down into the cushion of home.

I used to tell myself that there was another home out there for me. I’d learn to love a different city with different people, and I’d create a better life of my own, instead of claiming one that had already been created for me.

I’m not sure why I want her back. All I know is that I do.

Next step?

This weekend, A and I plus two friends will go explore Philadelphia, his hometown, and we will be staying with his family.

Funnily enough, this won't be the first time one of us has done so. Ethnic stereotypes be damned, he spent the night at my house over the summer.

I invited him and a couple others to a family barbecue, and given the distance from the city, said invite included a stay at what has been referred to as the (insert my last name) B&B. When I picked him and J, our close mutual friend, from the metro, they came bearing a tupperware of roasted zucchini. We swam, ate, mingled with family friends, ate, helped clean up, ate, and nearly passed out from food coma on my bedroom floor. He shuffled off to the guest bedroom, and J (obviously a girl) and I snuggled.

Then there was the time I met his dad while out and about. He rattled off fun facts about me ("Afghan! Lives in Virginia!") that he remembered hearing from A, and I exclaimed that father and son have the same mannerisms.

All very very different circumstances.

I'm meeting his parents. I'm meeting his parents?

This should be interesting.

Calm during the storm

My dad asked me to fill out the census.

Does this person sometimes live or stay somewhere else?

I let out a short laugh. Oh, the irony of it all.

I found out my mom and a suitcase had left our house during a work trip, specifically in a wine bar in New Orleans. I rejoined the group of Europeans and attempted to make small talk, while the tears welled in my eyes. Politely excusing myself, I made my way to the bathroom and called him (first, again). Stammering, sobbing, incoherent.

She has been with my grandma for a week, and I am now more frustrated than upset. Careless and haphazard are the two words I use to describe the situation. Still, my mind reels with questions ... what is my role in this mess? will she ever come back? what of my future? will we ever be "the same"? Yet, in spite of this black hole of uncertainty, one aspect of my life is stable.

When I come over for coffee before work, he has a latte and pain au chocolat waiting for me; when I wear long white socks under my boots, he teases me; and when he asks if I want to talk about it and I say no, he leaves me be. We discuss health care legislation, hang out with mutual friends, and make love. Ours is an island of peace.

One day not too long ago, I apologized for the black cloud over our very new relationship, for dragging him into my misery. Without hesitation he responded: "It's part of the deal, no?"

Punch Drunk Love

She sat at the bar with another single friend, glancing around the dingy place with annoyance. She was almost twenty-six years old and so over the bar scene, but Suzanne had begged her and so she went. Two men approached them, one flirted with Suzanne and the wing man entertained her friend. But he was drunk. He was too drunk to be focused, interested, attentive. He asked her out for lunch the next day and she said yes, even though she assumed he was just another jerk from a bar. She’d met them all before.

She sat at a table by herself the next day, waiting patiently for him to arrive for lunch. He walked into the restaurant, looked around. Looked around again. Looked right at her, and then scanned the room once more. She glared daggers at him and in her iciest tone asked, “Looking for someone?” He’d been too intoxicated at the bar to remember what she looked like.

Lunch progressed and against all odds, they got along. He was the opposite of the typical guy she dated; he was all straight and narrow, neckties with perfect knots, a well-spoken History major who arrived in a VW Beetle instead of on a motorcycle. He told her he had tickets to the ballet, even though he didn’t, and asked if she’d like to go. She hated the ballet but agreed to go anyway. There was something about him that she liked.

A year and three months later they were married, and thirty-one years later they are my parents; all because of a drunken encounter at a bar.

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

When I was fifteen years old my dad lost his job. Tried as he could to find a job in Rochester, the only positions he could land were located in Kansas City, San Francisco, or New York City. He took the year long commitment in California, hoping that after that time something would open up closer to home.

But it never did. And for five years my parents endured their own long distance relationship. As far as I knew, there was no mention of divorce or separation. They simply made it work. I went through my formative dating years under the bizarre and misinformed assumption that a happily married couple could remain just that way, at first cross country and later cross state. “We’ve never really had to work at our marriage,” my dad once told me. He looked at my mother. “Right? Have we?”

“Well, it was really tough when you got cancer and you had to go through the radiation.”
“Were you going to divorce me when I got cancer?!”
“Well, no! I just mean that it strained our marriage.”
“But that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean we’ve never talked about getting divorced.”

But I knew that was a lie. After the fourth year of my father’s weekly six-hour commute from New York City to Rochester (every Friday there, every Sunday back), my mother sold the house in Rochester and moved to New York so they could finally live together. She was miserable away from her friends and family in Rochester and suddenly the word divorce hovered around that house like a ghost. But it came with melancholy, not malice. “Sometimes I think your father would be better off without me holding him back,” my mom would say. And my father would say quietly, just to me, “If it wasn’t for me, your mother could still be in Rochester. And happy.” But divorce was just a far away, simple solution that no one would ever capitalize on. They could never be without each other, for better or for worse.

I never realized how this affected me or my views on relationships until I started to examine what I have with the LDC. What’s so wrong with long distance? With the way I grew up, I may never know.

"Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here." --M.W.

One of my parents’ favorite stories to tell about me is from when I was five years old. We were at Disney World and while I wasn’t tall enough to ride anything but the Dumbo ride and the teacups, I was big enough to go into the Haunted House. Timid at first, I waited in line holding my mother’s hand, and admiring the size of what was sure to be a castle. Tall, pointed spires, flags waving… castle, right?

When we finally arrived at the giant black door, the guard greeted us with a simple, but ghoulish, hello. I froze, screamed in terror, and burst into tears. The actor playing the guard apparently knelt down to try and comfort me and convince me he wasn’t that scary after all, but I was scarred. No amount of prodding after that moment could convince me to go into that haunted house. My mother was forced to wait on the bench outside the ride with me until my brother and father were through. It was the moment I became afraid of everything.

A few months later I had to drop out of gymnastics because I was afraid to flip over the uneven bars. One night the babysitter had to run upstairs to check on me because I let out a shriek of terror in the middle of the night: I had used a flashlight to guide my way to the bathroom, and when the globular, human-head-shaped shadow of the banister projected onto the wall, I thought I was a goner. I was terrified of waves in the ocean, and famous in my pediatrician’s office for earth-shattering screams when approached with the finger prick blood test. I couldn’t catch even a glimpse of a scary movie without being traumatized for weeks with nightmares. I fainted at the slightest hint of my own blood and once passed out cold in summer camp because I thought I had cut my finger on a piano, but in fact had not.

My fears were crippling. In the bigger picture, I have always been afraid of the unknown and in a way, I still am. I find myself crippled with the fear of getting hurt in a different way. My heart has been broken before. It’s a pain I know well. But somehow I’m afraid that the next time someone breaks it, it’ll be a pain like nothing I could’ve ever anticipated. It’s as if I’m staring down the castle door all over again.

Blind Ambition

The city races, its veins coursing with passionate, driven people. The most renowned fashion editor in the world. The most esteemed real estate mogul. The flawless runway models. The Wall Street tycoons. If you aren’t willing to sacrifice love, health, and happiness for success, better move to Topeka. The pressure to be great is staggering.

My father stares at me with a face so similar to my own, eyes blank. “How are you going to pay for this?”
“What? I don’t know, loans?” He nods, raises his eye brows. Yeah, right, Lauren. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
We get up to leave the lunch table and he mentions a golf event we should attend next August.
“I won’t be here,” I remind him.
“Why not?” I glare. “Oh right, you’ll be in San Francisco.”

I have come to abhor New York City for so many reasons but in the last five years it has taught me well. See something, go after it. Find a way. Get a second job. Take a chance. Risk everything you have because at this point, everything you have isn’t a whole lot.

"Maybe you'll go to Irish Culinary School." It isn't a hopeful suggestion. It's a crack at my previous plans to move to Ireland. Another pipe dream that turned out to be exactly that.

My parents’ support means so much to me, more than I wish it did. And the negativity seeps into every crack in my plan. All I can do is try to force it out.

The Trials of Parenthood

I live two-thousand eight hundred ninety-seven miles away from my childhood home in California. I am five and a half years away from that life I lived. I have grown into the person I am today surrounded by recklessly driven taxis and hovering buildings and the boisterous noise of New York City. I have let my curiosity and my will lead me through new experiences—awkward, ridiculous, creepy at times, but nevertheless my own. I’ve lived the ‘New York experience’ without preconceptions to steer me down a clear cut path and, instead, have floated from one opportunity to the next.

As a sensible vagabond, leading her life in rational ridiculousness and optimism, I have not sought support and even have rejected it. Whether this rejection stems from a lack of need or a more ingrained desire to prove to myself that I can be my own person, I don’t know. But no matter my almost forceful disinterest in this comfort, I know that it is always there, silently enveloping me. Its effects are invisible and unfelt on an everyday, casual basis, but arises full-force at the most uncouth times to remind me that it will always haunt me in the nicest of possible ways.

I do not know what to make of the subject of love, of love on any level and in any semblance of the word. It is a foreign, curious object, a cipher without a key. And perhaps in this city, which we all call home, love and its effects are even more intense, disastrous, welcomed, cherished; love is also a bigger mystery, elusive and uncertain. However, wherever I go, whatever I choose to do with my life, and whatever happens to me, there is one constant upon which I can always rely, and that is the support of my dad.

My dad has only wished one thing for me: my complete and utter happiness. He wants me to fulfill my dreams, whatever they may be, and he demands that I am my own person, inhibiting nothing that I desire to accomplish. He puts no constrains on my life and my choices and refuses to criticize my being, doing perhaps the hardest thing a parent can do; he has let me go to be free and vulnerable to the dangers that plague society. His trust in my sound judgment resonates in every encouraging word and every happy exclamation over my travels and undertakings.

Through his sacrifice, he has given me a better life for which he could never hope or have himself. Constant reassurances that I need only to focus on my studies or to enjoy my time in New York and abroad because he can always work twelve instead of ten hours a day are a fixture in my mind. Unvoiced worries and concerns kept inside to assure that I lead a life of my own chosen are transformed into newspaper article clippings sent through the mail, giving helpful hints about jobs, home maintenance, and finances.

Is he a perfect parent? Far from it. But I don’t demand perfection from my dad. Instead, I will always be thankful for what he has done for me and as it may be more thankful for what he has not done for me. No, I do not need support to be successful nor to determine my own path in life, but I know my dad’s support for me is unconditional, and for that I will always appreciate, respect, and never abuse it. Perhaps, here in New York, I am not so far from California than I had initially thought I was.