It was that little secret cove for the smokers that I found salvage in, oddly enough. I leaned against that red brick wall and slowly slid down it onto dirty butts.

My chest heaved. About a hundred years passed and I started to drown in cigarette butts. There were millions of them and they were smothering me with ash and nicotine and lipstick stains and sticky bird shit that also had been on the ground. There might have been bubble gum too, but when you are drowning you don’t pay attention to anything except oxygen and that is what I couldn’t find anywhere. Somebody help me my brain told my mouth to say but my mouth was drowning and closed.

Nothing came out except the word Enough.

Enough waitressing. Enough guilt. Enough anorexia. Enough pretending I don’t have a hearing problem. Enough numbing myself. Enough sleeping to numb myself. Enough eating to numb myself. Enough starving to numb myself. Enough drinking to numb myself. Enough saying what I don’t want instead of what I do want. Enough sex with people I don’t love or even like very much. Enough living in the past. Enough worrying about the future. Enough wearing 6 inch platform shoes because I feel being short means I am inadequate.

Enough self-hatred.

Enough. That one word slipped out and traveled down Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, past all the shops and the traffic, and I saw just for one brief second where it was headed before I lost sight of it behind the roller skating homeless man.

And then it was gone and I was pumping my heart back to life.

Table 32 needed me for Cholula sauce and a chicken quesadilla was ready for table 30. I crawled out of the ruins of old cigarettes and stood for a moment looking into the restaurant where I had spent my entire 20’s with such a hatred I almost passed out from its power and stench.

Did you know hatred smells? It smells like dead animal.

It smells like nothing could ever beat inside it anymore, although it once might have, but had long since rotted.

So I stood there and almost passed out from the smell before I gathered my apron and tried to inhale.

Nothing entered my lungs.

I was slowly dying.

I walked back into the restaurant and up to my table.

I would have thought you would have made something of yourself by now, the woman who stared at me like I was a ghost muttered as she half-looked at the menu and half at me, her ghost waitress.

How can you still be here? What’s it been? Ten years? Twelve? How is that even possible? This is L.A. She was eyeing the chicken pot pie on the menu like there was a possibility she wouldn’t get it. She always got the pot pie. I remembered everything everyone ordered.

To her I was a ghost. I couldn’t possibly still be there.

I represented all of her lost dreams and fuck-ups, because that’s what we do to people. Isn’t it? We size them up in direct relation to our own lives. When they are doing well we use it as a gage, our own small lives falling away and when they are failing we either feel like we are failing too or else we feel like we’ve won.

We’ve won the competition of life.

I’ll have a red wine. What do you have by the glass? She said looking at the menu and not at me.

I wanted to scream: You are looking at the menu, woman! Look and see what we have.

Instead I said: We have a nice Pinot. I love our Pinot. You had it last time.

I haven’t been here in a year! I can’t believe you remember. Honey, did you hear that? She remembers what I drank, she said to either her husband or her boyfriend or her gay husband. He looked gay. She was a gossip columnist. I remembered that and her penchant for potpies.

I am sure he was gay.

You had the chicken pot pie last time.

Maybe you are a career waitress, after all! She said it like it was funny or ironic as she pushed her glasses up her nose to look at me like she was just seeing me for the first time.

I wonder what I looked like to her, this failed ghost?

A career waitress. A ghost.

People don’t change my gay friend who worked with me at the restaurant used to tell me. I believed, up until then, that gay men knew everything. How to dress, what to eat, what women want, what was funny and what wasn’t.

I’d felt scared when he said it.

My heart fell out of my body and as soon as the busboy came by he swept it up, and, just like that, it was gone. No more heart. Just a hollow cave where everyone could see my insides. They could all see that I dropped out of college. That I was a failure.

That I was going to be here at this restaurant forever.

Do you think Rodney will ever change? I asked about the guy I had been sleeping with for almost two years and whom I loved or thought I loved but who wouldn’t let me say I was his girlfriend. My gay friend, T, was African-American like Rodney, so aside from already knowing how relationships work because he was a gay man, he would tell me how black men worked because he was a black man. 

Never, T said as he did his sidework of refilling hot sauce bottles.

I knew he wouldn’t change. And everytime I let him have sex with me I cried when he left because I knew he would never change.

And that I wouldn’t either.

*

After my father died we fled New Jersey.  We left the house in Pennsauken to my aunt and her two daughters much to my chagrin. My youngest cousin and I didn’t get along and the thought of her having our house made me lose sleep at night.

That same cousin bit me in the leg in the laundry room and used to masturbate on the den floor of the house in New Jersey where my father had died. Curled in front of the television in her flimsy nightgown and Care Bear sleeping bag she would rock back and forth, rubbing herself. As I traced the purple outline of her teeth on my thigh, I watched her roll around on the ground, a mummy wrapped in polyester, pressing her privates. She would grind until she fell asleep.

I never understood what it was she was trying to achieve, what it was she was trying to feel. At the time, I couldn’t feel a thing.

I tried the rubbing, the rollicking, the undulating, and still, I could not feel a thing.

I hated that cousin.

She overdosed on heroin 3 years ago at age 34.

I tried to remember a time where we loved each other, where we got along or played as kids. I couldn’t.

She left behind four beautiful children whom I love dearly.  I did not love their mother however, except maybe as an idea, and not until after she had died. She was the same from childhood until she overdosed at age 34.

My aunt says that she died the first day she did heroin at age 17.

People change, people change, people change.

Do they?

What if we are stuck? What if who we once were is who we always are? 

I think we change people. In our own minds. After they die or leave us, we glorify them, or, we worship them, but they are still who they were. Our memories simply slip into wine or nostalgia or sentimentality.

Had my father, or my cousin, actually wanted to change badly enough, could they be sitting in my living room right now watching tv? Could he have not choked on his own vomit? Who’s to say? Maybe she would have stayed on the methadone and not gone back to heroin just one last time.

One minute you are in your bed watching an episode of M*A*S*H  and the next, you are drowning in your own bodily fluids.

That is someone who did not want to change. Who simply decided that they had had enough, that life was too much to bear and I think I will take some more amphetamines.

How can death be that easy when life isn’t?

To dislodge means to leave a place previously occupied. This is what happens with death.  (I imagine.) You dislodge yourself from your body.

And that’s that.

If it weren’t for the things that stuck, things like your smell, or rather the smell of an old leather wallet and how it has become your smell, and your sheep’s laugh, that high cackle and how it would run around the room before it landed back in your throat. If it weren’t for things like the four kids left behind, it would be like you never existed. And if you never existed then you would never have to change.

Maybe that is what it’s all about. I won’t exist. I will be a ghost and therefore incapable of change. I will not be accountable.

I will be undone.

The moments just before my father died: He feels like nothing now. Like he does not even exist in the world as anyone’s father or husband or son, that he is just a head on a pillow that is yellow with green leaves and a body on a bed and that they aren’t even attached anymore.He can feel everything now and at the same time nothing.

What he said as he was dying: Is this what it feels like? My mother. The nursing home in Philadelphia. Can people really hold you accountable for every Godamn thing you say? Where is my mother? My arm is a bell. That fucking ringing. Please forgive me for the despicable. My God, I have made mistakes. I need to sleep. I don’t even need a cigarette. I would like a doughnut. Where is my bell? I don’t need the cigarettes and the Almond Joy. Come back. 

You don’t have to kill yourself to change. You have to want it. My cousin didn’t want it. My father didn’t want it.

The will to grow but must outweigh the need to feel safe.

I can’t promise that you, or me, or anyone, will change. Promise. The word itself sleazy. Hard at first, then sizzling out at the end like something that can’t last. A snake. A word that can’t get up off the ground. You. You promised. I promise you. We promise. I promise. 

You have to stop being a ghost though. You have to get up from that brick wall and wipe the bird-shit gum and dirty cigarettes from your feet and you have to walk back into that restaurant and say I am here.

Elizabeth Bishop knew how the world worked:

The roaring alongside he takes for granted,

and that every so often the world is bound to shake. 

You’ve been told the world is bound to shake but until it did you didn’t believe it. You simply strolled along as if you were unscathed.

You were never unscathed.

How can you defend yourself against this shaking? you might wonder.

You can’t. You can only decide when you are ready to stop being a ghost.

*

I stopped being a ghost when I finally let myself become undone.

After 13 years, I left the restaurant. I became a yoga teacher. I started writing again.

We have to want it so bad that it overrides the taste or the heroin or whatever else it may be that kills us.

We have to want it so bad that it cleans up the papers on the desk and starts writing every single day no matter what the pile of shit says. And the pile of shit will talk. It will say things like You can’t do this. You don’t finish anything. You will never change. You are always going to be a waitress. You haven’t changed so far so why do you think you can?

Here’s what you do when that pile starts taking. You light a match. Light it all on fire and watch it burn with a combination of sadness and elation.

Unless you want to keep letting all the piles of shit run your life. Then don’t burn it. Let it keep you the same as you have always been. At least you will be a reliable and predictable ghost.

To Hell with predictable.

Burn that pile of shit and say I am as capable as raw bone. I am the bead. I am bone to bead and beyond. 

What I know to be true is that as human beings, we sometimes forget our own humanness. We stop letting our own humanness astound us.

We live as ghosts.

So sometimes, when someone or something reminds us, when they literally shove it in our face like a crumpled up coffee stained map and we have no choice but to pull over in the car and stop on the side of the road to read the map with its coffee stink and fingerprints and out-of-dated-ness, we somehow find our way.

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I was on a boat. I was on a boat leaving Mexico and if I knew that it was the last time I would be seeing my friend Steve Bridges I would’ve asked the boat to turn around and I would have gone back and back and back farther. All the way if I could where nothing was blinding and everything was dark and still in the way things are right before they go bad.

A year ago I sat on a plane, like I am as I write this, and I ordered a glass of wine as I looked through my photos of the retreat and I laughed at the videos of Steve and thought How I love this man. How I love this man.

A year ago I came back from Mexico and laid on my sofa feeling pancake flat and Steve texted me I am laying on my friend’s couch and I can’t stop thinking about our trip. I wish we were back there. Wow. I wrote back me too and in my pancake way I stood up and put on shoes to go teach my yoga class but I knew something had shifted, something was gone, and maybe that was why I felt flat or maybe it was natural after a trip like that to feel so much I want to be back. To feel it so much in your bones that they won’t even carry you. They turn you into a pancake. Pancake yoga teacher. Nothing. Flat. Pancake person.

When he died, I texted him I want to be back. I want to be back even though I knew he was dead.

We made videos the night before we left Mexico. Like little time bombs with messages on them that we planned to watch in a year’s time. When it was Steve’s turn he looked into the camera and said, That was fun. Let’s do it again next year. Hell, let’s do it again next month.

He died within the month.

This morning I got the text that I had been waiting for, the one I knew would come today or tomorrow or yesterday. Ronan died. One of my best friends, the beloved writer Emily Rapp, lost her two year old son this morning as I zipped up my suitcase to head for the airport for my Hawaii yoga retreat. His suffering is over she wrote. His short and remarkable life she wrote. I am numb she texted me privately.

I am numb too. I am on a flight to Maui and I feel nothing. I am hungry. I am not hungry. I am sad. Am I sad? I feel nothing. Where does the pain go? It’s floating up here on the airplane and I am sure will make its way up to my seat if we don’t crash. What happened? How does a mind process this? (I will have the cheese omelette and not the cereal, please.) Ronan died and it’s for the best say the very best intentioned platitudes. My friend Robert held him for an hour yesterday. I asked him what it was like. Everything, he said. It was everything.

What’s it like to hold a dying baby for one hour? One hour in a short life is like ten years in a normal life span. (What is a normal life span?) What’s it like to hold a dying baby for ten years? He got to feel his last little oomphs right there in his arms (imagine that!) and hold his small fingers (maybe he intertwined them in his own?). He got to brush a few hairs from his eyes and pass him back to his grandparents or his mom and he got to feel a life right there in his arms which would disappear in less than 24 hours into That’s it and It’s over but he got to hold that and stop time for ten years because in a dying baby’s life one hour is equal to ten years. He got to do that and I am glad for that. I love him for that. For being there for Emily and Ronan when I couldn’t.

It makes you want to stop lying.

Why lie when this can happen? When a person can be born and then just like that It’s Over, It’s done. He’s gone.

Why tell untruths as if people care?

I keep having this recurring dream where I am driving and the brakes don’t work. The other night I had it again. I was driving in Philadelphia, over the Benjamin Franklin bridge. The brakes wouldn’t work. I tried pressing my foot into the brake and it only accelerated the car which wasn’t even my car. I swerved in and out of lanes so I wouldn’t hit anyone. It was all my untruths rushing at me. In the dream I somehow made it to safety and pulled out a paper where I had put a big X through a box that said “Brakes.”

I had shut them off myself.

The greatest lie that was ever told was that you are safe. It’s the lie I still want someone to tell me though. (Say it to me?)

Say it to me.

Other lies have been both monumental and petty but with the news of a baby’s death comes a yearning for honesty. There is nothing else. I love you to all the people I love. I don’t care to all the things I don’t care about, and there are as many as the things I do care about. I am happy. I am not happy. All of it. Truths and lies and some half and half.

Once, on a road trip, there was this deer along Route 70, just outside Cody, Wyoming. His eyes the color of headlights. He recognized me immediately. (He was no stranger to regret and he spotted mine immediately ). And with his four-chambered stomach and eyes on the sides of his head, I knew his type too. The cautious, the time-takers, the digesters.

Unlike him: I am impulsive as a flood.

But we knew each other, me and that deer. For the ten years or two seconds he stood there in the road in front of our car.

A basic law of the universe: the implications of what’s been said always mean more than what actually has been said. My deer understood this algebra, this economy of language and therefore didn’t say much. Me: I spit it out as I feel it when and if I feel it. Unlike my deer, I do not contemplate my cud.

I love you!

I love you!

The lies I have told have mainly been to myself but others have been to save face.

There is no more of that. Do you get what I am saying? It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks because once you have held Ronan in your arms for ten years or one hour you see that what is important is the life we make, right here and now. You may not have been the one holding him in your arms for ten years but you get the metaphor, you get the as if. You can almost smell Ronan in his baby and old man smell. The life you make here and now. Not the lies or the I dropped out of college because I was half dead and freezing but I will lie about it so you don’t judge me because no one cares. It does not matter. It’s the life you make here and now because after you get the text that he dies you realize that all you ever had were the moments of holding him, the minutes with Steve in Mexico, the half-seconds with people you love. I don’t know how fast it feels at the end, but my guess is that it feels like ten years. Or maybe 6 months. Maybe less or more. But it won’t feel like much. It will feel like all you had were breaths and moments and a few snapshots with the sun in your eyes like that. You will squint to remember the way the light felt in your eyes, to recreate that and everything else that was blinding and bright and yours.

I love you. The words alive like velvet antlers. Words made of bone. They need a way out! I must speak them. I must tell no more lies. The life that you make here and now. Here and now.

Words: make, here, now, love. Remember them.

The old deer had made it through once more, one more near miss across an ocean of cars, a scuffle of rain, and a sky full of mistakes. He’d found a pair of eyes (mine!) to lock into before going back into the world, alone and foraging.

It makes you want to stop lying, to climb onto the wing of the plane and hang there if you knew you could and sob and swing and fall into clouds like you would if you were a cartoon and could always be safe in a cartoon world. You could sleep on a nimbus cloud and wake up and ten years will be ten years rather than an hour. It makes you want to stop lying and run into the arms of all your beloveds (you’re lucky if you have even a handful) and tell them to keep you there. Hang on to me, tight like this. Tight like this. Keep me here. It makes you want to admit that lying is worthless and dirty and that nothing matters, not really anyway, so might as well buck up and say I love you or I don’t love you or I am so broken or I wish you didn’t die or Yeah, I get that your spirit is with me forever but God damn it I want your body. Forget the spirit! I will trade it for your body and smell and fingers. It makes you want to forget everything and remember everything with equal measure. It makes you want to cry for days and beg the gods or the scientists or luck to leave you alone and leave everyone alone that you love. It makes you want to live like you were meant to all along even in the moments of self-hatred. It makes you all these things.

It makes you.

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