A few minutes later, I found myself standing next to Sandra again as the attendees gathered to learn the winner of Tribeca’s inaugural $25,000 Nora Ephron Prize for a woman filmmaker of distinction. Suddenly, Meera’s name echoed around the room. While Meera struggled to keep her jaw off the floor, I burst into happy tears, and Sandra put her arms around me, squeezed me, and whispered in my ear, “Guess I picked exactly the right moment to kiss your ass.”

I’ve been fortunate enough to continue a conversation with Sandra, and in it, have been endeared by the coexistence of her fearless, provocative public persona and the warm, generous woman who emerged to me. She’s the kind of woman who makes you want to ask her just tell me how. After our interview, I wrote to her, “I thought of one follow-up question that won’t leave me alone. Your days as a manicurist in L.A. were mine as a bartender in N.Y.C., and I find that part of me still identifies as that girl behind the bar in a way that’s hard to shake. I guess my question is—where is manicurist Sandy now? Do you ever still feel like that girl painting nails?”

She wrote back in a typically poetic, immediate flourish:

“good question

it comes to me in my dreams

where i am back manicuring at 351 n canon at Cia hair salon

with the macrame hanging baskets and a dark woodsy vibe

when i wake up i think that i might have actually never left

and am so relieved to know i have.

i don’t miss it, and although i get my nails done

i don’t like going it doesn’t feel like a luxury to me at all.

but i am a very good tipper.”

***

I. On San Francisco

The Rumpus: So you have these shows coming up in San Francisco that I want to talk about. But first, I want to hear about the first time you ever visited San Francisco, what are your best memories of San Francisco—what is San Francisco, as a city, to you?

Sandra Bernhard: It’s like this amazing, iconic city that I actually first visited in 1965 or 1966—my mom and one of my brothers and I drove up the coast from Arizona and stopped in Carmel to visit my mom’s friends, who were very, very talented artists. My mom was an artist, a very eclectic artist. So we spent the night there and then moved up to San Francisco. It was like, wow, it was like a revelation—going to Ghirardelli Square, down to Fisherman’s Wharf for a shrimp cocktail, it was like, that was living.  For me, all my dreams and fantasies about leaving home all took place in San Francisco. It was the city that you wanted to be in—I mean, who didn’t want to be there in the ’60s?

Rumpus: So this is a bit more of a personal question, but I wanted to ask you what the best thing that happened to you when you came out, or what was your favorite reaction, or rather, what advice or words of support would you offer to a newly outed adorable baby queer?

Bernhard: You know something funny? I never came out. I feel like who I am spoke for itself, and I never wanted my sexuality to be my defining moment, and it isn’t, so I feel like to me, the most important thing is that you’re comfortable in your own skin. I mean, yes, everyone knows that I’m with a woman, but…

Rumpus: But “coming out” wasn’t an important thing for you.

Bernhard: I think coming out as a fully-formed human being for me was more important than coming out as a sexual human being. It’s definitely part of who I am, but so often I feel like I’m much more on my own and a singular person no matter who I’m involved with.

Rumpus: Sure, yet you have such a loyal and largely San Francisco-based gay following, so how do you—I don’t know if this is something to “negotiate”—I was going to ask how you negotiate being someone who doesn’t place a particular premium on coming out when a large swath of your audience are people who’ve gone through that process.

Bernhard: They’re mutually exclusive. What I do and how I embrace my audience are two different things. I feel like my arms are wide around all the people who come to see me, and they’re usually people who have that element of being off-kilter, whether they’re gay, or straight, or whatever they are—that little part of them that needs the extra love. I embrace my gay audience, they’re great, I embrace my straight audience, because I feel like they can all coexist. I demand that people who are my fans coexist, because it’s essential to having a peaceful and evolving culture.

Rumpus: Right, and what greater unifier is there than laughter, too?

Bernhard: Yeah, exactly, and what greater place to be whatever you want to be in the world than San Francisco, because that’s what it’s always been about.

Rumpus: So tell me about the material you’re working on for your San Francisco trip. Are you working on new material, are you working on old material? What’s cycling through your head right now that we’re going to hear in San Francisco?

Bernhard: Well, my show is new. I don’t think anything I’m doing in San Francisco is old or from my last show, which was two years ago. It’s all new, and I’m sure that being on the road, and the road experience, will bring something new to it between now and next week. A plane trip out to San Francisco, and a walk around the Embarcadero, and I’m sure I’ll have something new to talk about.

***

II. On Her Twenties

Bernhard: I just came from a screening of The King of Comedy—it was kind of emotional for me!

Rumpus: Can you tell me a little about any of the memories that flooded back as you were watching?  How old were you when you made The King of Comedy?

Bernhard: I actually turned twenty-six [during that shoot]. It was great. There really wasn’t a moment of that experience that wasn’t close to perfection. People still identify me with that film. It was something that doesn’t really grow old because it was so ahead of its time. It’s not something I look back at and say, oh, that’s so embarrassing, because it’s not embarrassing—it was really a great film.

Rumpus: I think of it as a very male comedy, and you are a very female person, so I was just curious what the gender-based aspects of that experience were—what you remember of that side of things.

Bernhard: Since I was the strongest character in the whole movie, I never really worried about it. I seemed to be the only one who had the mendacity to just, like, tear into Jerry, and at the same time seduce him, so it was a very crazy, wacky combo that I think really struck fear into his heart.

Rumpus: So you’re twenty-six. At that point you’ve been in L.A. for what, like two years?

Bernhard: No, no, I moved to L.A. when I was eighteen—it was actually Cinco de Mayo, 1974.

Rumpus: Okay, yeah, I wanted to ask you about this particular moment. You write on your Facebook feed, “we drove through a desert storm on #cincodemayo 1974 arriving in l a with a pitted windshield a big dream listening to benny & the jets.” Which I love, just the poetry of that image. It’s a very kind of American Dream positing of going West that you’re writing in that moment, so I’m just curious—what was that moment to you, how did it feel to you, what did that represent to you?

Bernhard: Well, I graduated high school a half-year early, so I had already left, but it was nice to go someplace West where there was an ocean. It was just a matter of fact—that just happened to be the place I was at, where I was ready to start my manicuring course that following week, because I was a manicurist to support myself. So it was just a matter of fact, something I had known since I was five years old that I was going to do, and that was it. I had arrived to start my education, like it was my first day of college. Of course, it was exciting and nervewracking to be there, but never was it weird, or like, Am I ever gonna make it? I don’t know if I thought about it in those terms, but in my mind I was already successful. So for me it was just like, Okay, I’m going to go do this professionally.

Rumpus: I think there’s a special arrogance that one is capable of feeling at age eighteen that you almost can never feel again—you almost know more at age eighteen, because what you think you know is so disproportionate to what you actually know, that that never happens again.

Bernhard: Exactly. It does not ever happen again, it’s like wow, you’re indomitable. It’s the best feeling in the world. To just pursue your dream and not even think about it. Of course, looking back at the very late nights I would come home from a comedy club by myself, in my apartment—if I thought my daughter was doing that, I would freak out. It was a different time, it was a different world back then.

Rumpus: You mentioned that performing was something you’d wanted to do since you were five. Was that the point at which you were like, Okay, this is something I’m going to have to do or it’s going to kill me? I always say that I write because I have no other choice—what was the point at which you knew you had no other choice?

Bernhard: I had traveled for six or eight months after high school, I worked on a kibbutz in Israel, then I came back and lived at home for a few months, and I was like, Okay, I’ve just got to go do this. I can’t postpone it any longer. I’m ready to go do it. And then I just went and did it.

Rumpus: This is a sidebar, but this is the thing that drives me nuts about the mythology surrounding Hollywood and the entertainment industry—this kind of myth of “making it.” Nobody makes it. You just make it fucking happen.

Bernhard: Exactly.

Rumpus: Like, implicit within the idea of “making it” is this sort of passivity of just waiting to be discovered at the ice cream counter, and nobody who’s actually successful does that, right? You just decide to do it.

Bernhard: Exactly. If that ever did happen, I’m sure that it was always a fluke. And you can be sure that there was somebody sitting next to them—it’s as you said, it’s never been a passive thing. Everybody sitting at that counter was there for a reason.

Rumpus: There’s this columnist for The Rumpus who’s become quite famous—her name on The Rumpus is Dear Sugar, and her name in life is Cheryl Strayed. One of my favorite columns of hers, that was eventually turned into a book, is called “Tiny Beautiful Things,” and in it, a reader writes to her and says, “What advice would you go back and give your twentysomething self?” So I would pose that question to you: if there was something you wish you had known in your twenties, what would it be?

Bernhard: Hire a good publicist.

Rumpus: Seriously, though. Right?! No fucking shit.

Bernhard: But other than that, I wouldn’t say anything, because I don’t think you can go back and give somebody a look into the future—it would sort of intimidate them out of doing what they do. I think in your twenties, you’ve got to make those mistakes and you’ve got to fall. Fortunately, I never fell. I stumbled a couple times, but because I was really on my path and knew what I was doing and what I wanted to do, I was able to forge ahead. I had good, strong Russian genes.

***

III. On Mothers

Rumpus: You brought up your mother, who you have often described as an abstract artist. I’m curious to know more about her art in particular, but also what the designation “abstract artist” means to you—what is an abstract versus, let’s say, a mainstream artist to you, and how do you consider yourself?

Bernhard: She was a painter, she worked in kind of all the mediums—sketches, she worked in charcoal and oil and watercolors, and she did sculpture, and she just did what she did. It wasn’t like, now I see a flower and now I see a person—they were abstract pieces. My mother always thought in a very abstract way, so to me, that was someone who was a little bit out there and kind of kooky and not very grounded. Even though my work is still very out there, it’s coming from a grounded place. It comes from a place of some emotion—I’m not saying her work wasn’t emotional, but hers was a little more detached emotionally. Mine is very, very grounded in emotion. So I think that’s where we kind of differ in our approaches.

Rumpus: What would you say her art has contributed to yours? How are you influenced by her?

Bernhard: I think the most important thing was that my mother, she pursued her impulses.

Rumpus: She was an artist.

Bernhard: She was an artist! And she did it her whole life. I mean, she never really made a living at it, and she didn’t have to, but my father never stood in her way—he didn’t demand that she give anything up for him, although she did in many other ways. Her work was something she did throughout her life, and that was, of course, very inspiring to me. Being a young woman, to hear Mom doing her thing, it was kind of amazing.

Rumpus: Especially in that era, too.

Bernhard: Exactly! Absolutely. From the Depression, World War II era, and she got married when she was twenty-four—I mean, she just kept doing it, and that was incredibly liberating for me as a kid.

Rumpus: I was recently watching a Gloria Steinem documentary on HBO called Gloria: In Her Own Words, which is totally fabulous. And in it, she’s talking about her mother’s mental illness—I guess her mother had a complete nervous collapse when she was, like, five, and so Gloria spent most of her childhood caring for her sort of mentally ailing mother…

Bernhard: Wow.

Rumpus: Yeah, which is really powerful, and she has this really poignant quote about feminism, and about herself, and she says, “So many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers.”

Bernhard: Uh-huh.

Rumpus: Right?!  How do you feel about that statement?

Bernhard: Well, I think left to her own devices, my mother never would have married or had kids. I think she would have just pursued her art and gone off and traveled—she had friends in South America and places like that. She was always very vague about it. But it was not her first choice to get married—my grandmother sort of coerced her into it. I don’t know—I don’t think my mother was a particularly happy person in her life, until my father divorced her when she was like sixty-two or sixty-three, and I think it was the first time in her life that she really had a good time and traveled and hung out with her friends. It was all on her terms, and it was nice to see her get to experience that.

Rumpus: Wow. So she had a divorce later in life, later in her marriage.

Bernhard: Yeah, I mean, [she and my dad] were totally mismatched, ill-suited, so it wasn’t like any big surprise, yet when you stay in a marriage for thirty-eight years, and suddenly you decide—I mean, it was my dad’s choice, but it was the best thing that ever happened to my mother.  It was much better for her than it even was for him, ultimately. So I’m happy about that.

***

IV. On Genre, Music, and The One-Woman Show

Rumpus: So there are two things I want to talk about that are in the origins of your career, and still very present. One is music, and one is the specific form of the one-woman show. I’m obsessed with the one-woman show, I think it’s a fascinating genre, and I love yours. You might be considered as a pioneer of the one-woman show, and I want to know what’s particular about that genre to you. Because it’s similar to stand-up, obviously, it’s the same format of a comedian standing alone with a microphone on a stage, but what’s different, or singular, or important about a one-woman show to you? What’s compelling about it to you?

Bernhard: For me, I was never in stand-up comedy, per se. I find it very, very dry and redundant and sort of oppressive, because you’re desperately trying to get laughs. And that’s not something that was foremost in my desire; my desire was to engage the audience, to get their rapt attention, and to also pose ideas and concepts about feminism, about sexuality, about pop culture, about music, that forced them to remain engaged for up to two hours and not fade away. And I just think there’s no way to stand on stage for two hours telling one-dimensional jokes and keep people interested.

There’s so many things that interest me—acting, writing, singing, being dramatic, being all these characters, being funny, being thoughtful, being introspective, being operatic, being rock and roll. All these things are interesting to me. So I thought, Where else could you do that but a one-person show? Why not just take advantage of all those talents and abilities and blend them in and just do a real mash-up of all these stylistic things that excited and inspired me?

Rumpus: It’s interesting, because as you’re talking, what I’m hearing from what you’re saying is that the difference between that and stand-up is that a one-woman show is more than a punchline. Right?  It’s not just one-dimensional jokes, like you’re saying—you have to create a much wider, broader arc than that to compel people for two hours.

Bernhard: Yeah, and also, it’s a platform for improvisation, which is something that I love. You can actually take an experience you might have had two hours earlier and transform it into something that’s engaging and fun and transformative. I think that’s so amazing, and it’s something that I get to do, and I’m good at it, so I never get stuck doing the same thing night after night. Although I always have stories that I can fall back on.

I mean, you can talk about anything that’s been talked about a million times, but if it’s your experience and your point of view, you can always bring something new to it, because there’s really not that many new stories to tell, to me, personally. But I think I’ve always thought the key to being successful is telling your story and being committed to it, and also having a point of view and knowing what you need to say to push the world along. Because if you’re not there to also influence culture and make a change, this isn’t important enough for you to be doing.

Rumpus: What do you think the change that you personally—you, Sandra—are here to make, is?

Bernhard: I think the change that I’ve been making—of course, when you’re really young, you’re not completely sure of it, because [you're drawing from] so many different influences: I drew from Carole King, I drew from Laura Nyro. So when you first start off, you’re a little bit of a sponge—you’re also emulating. And then you start to know yourself as a woman, and you become clearer about who you are and your context in which your femininity and your womanliness matters in the world. And so you become more of a full person.

I think for me, over the years, I’ve just gotten better at shedding my skin and getting closer and closer to my essence. And I think because of that, you become a much better performer. I’m still in it, and solid, and I know what I want to do and say, and I haven’t lost interest in it because every day is kind of an evolution, emotionally, for me.

Rumpus: It’s also very clear to me in the way that you tell your stories, in the way that you speak, and even in the vocabulary you use, choosing words like “operatic,” that music is a huge influence for you. So I’m interested in that, because I think that, as you’re saying, in the sort of composite form of the one-woman show, there’s a lot of different subgenera. And I think, particularly, the boundary between music and comedy for you seems to be very permeable. I’m thinking of that famous scene from Without You I’m Nothing, With You I’m Not Much Better, where you’re singing that you’re in the mood for a little bit of Burt, and it transitions very seamlessly between telling jokes, and this sort of lounge singer shtick, and then actually singing. Talk to me about that—what’s musical about your comedy? What is the musicality of your comedy? How does your education as a musician inform the way you speak and the way you construct those performances?

Bernhard: For me, music is kind of everything. I think that, you know, nothing has the impact and the memory of music. It just permeates everyday life, and you can go back to a song that you heard thirty years ago, and it just takes you back to that moment. I think that no matter how hokey or corny the song may be, there’s just something so visceral about it. That’s my favorite thing to do: take a seemingly-banal rock and roll ballad and transform it into some bittersweet, beautiful, heartbreaking moment—one that we’ve all been there.

***

V. On Gender and Feminism

Rumpus: My next question comes from the oracle, Beyoncé. Agree or disagree: a diva is the female version of a hustler.

Bernhard: A diva is the female version of a hustler?

Rumpus: Yes. This is what Beyoncé tells us.

Bernhard: I don’t even know what that means. I saw Beyoncé’s special, and I was like, Honey, you know what, you can’t force interesting.

Rumpus: So, like, all I ever really want to talk about in the world, especially with you, is feminism and women and gender politics.

Bernhard: Yes!

Rumpus: I’d love to hear the ways in which you think that things have changed for women in comedy since the beginning of your career, and the things that haven’t changed. So what change have you observed, and what do you think still needs to change?

Bernhard: I don’t think anything needs to change. I think it’s always been a struggle to do original work, no matter who you are. It’s always harder for women—it’s brutal. You’ve got to have a certain inner-strength and physical strength to get up and do this every night, so I think if you’re just not mentally or physically prepared, you can’t do it.

Rumpus: A friend who saw my film Farah Goes Bang recently sent me this article from The American Reader called “The Lack of Female Road Narratives And Why It Matters“. There was this one quote from this article that I wanted to hear your thoughts on:

Whereas a man on the road might be seen as potentially dangerous, potentially adventurous, or potentially hapless, in all cases the discourse is one of potential. When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.

Bernhard: Oh, wow.

Rumpus: As a woman who’s about to be on tour, so on the proverbial road, how do you feel about that statement, and what do you think happens when women go on the road?

Bernhard: Well, for me personally, the road is kind of endless. I keep loving it more and experiencing more things, and it just opens my mind and my heart to everything that makes life interesting. I love traveling, I love being on the road, and I love what the road means. We’re born on the road. That’s what a performer’s about, that’s what an entertainer’s about.

Rumpus: Last question—I just want to talk about what you have in the works right now. I’ve seen you talk on Twitter with Lizz Winstead, and I’m super psyched about any possible collaboration there, because she, like me, is from Minneapolis. What’s in the works for you? What are you working on, what’s next?

Bernhard: We’re actually trying to do some sort of a talk show, for lack of a better description, and we got together and sat down and wrote out some ideas. Lizz has a paperback coming out, so she’s kind of distracted, though. We want to do something together where it would be like, we have you as a guest, and talk about all the things that you’re doing in your book and your movie.

Rumpus: Sign me up.

Bernhard: So you’re in, of course you’re in.

Rumpus: Hustling all the time, is what you’re doing.

Bernhard: Yeah, I’m hustling all the fucking time.

***

Sandra Bernhard is going on tour and will be in San Francisco this week, on May 16th and 17th. Find tickets here.

***

Photographs of Sandra Bernhard © by Kevin Thomas Garcia.

Photograph of Sandra Bernhard and Laura Goode © by Meera Menon.

Related Posts:

• Women are Bitches
• Notable New York: 5/13-5/19
• The Knife’s new Album Shaking the Habitual
• The Rumpus Interview with Dan Kennedy
• Laughably Good Books

—Carolyn Heilbrun/Amanda Cross, Death in A Tenured Position 

*** 

What I mean to say is I am writing an elegy for my twenties. I want to tell you how it felt to live them.

I will confess—yes, that word—them to you quite deliberately, and I will tell you that I have lived them like an endless conversation, like a depth charge, like a rapprochement or discord with the self, like the way you dance alone with your roommate in her bedroom or yours, like one big sensory buffet, like whole-body-shaking laughter and notebooks, notebooks, notebooks.

In my twenties I write a lot and am living all the time and thinking about living.

I want you to know that I was joyful, even when I wasn’t, because I was always in love.

I was in love in New York and in love in San Francisco and in love in Minneapolis and in love in almost every major city in Massachusetts and in love with every year, every age, twenty, twenty-three, twenty-seven, in love with books and films, in love with running away and returning, in love with girlfriends and boyfriends, in love with highways and subways, in love with everyone’s brains and bodies and wild ideas, in love with dancing in bars, with slinging in bars, in love with everything burgeoning, everything carnal, everything meaningful.

Stay gold, Ponyboy. In love with when you’re still too young to know you can’t. In love with a time before you know everything counts. 

Because memory is what we forget. It is possible to forget the facts, and harder the feelings of a particular moment of transformation: arriving in New York. Holding my first book in my hands. Or the smaller miracles: the first bialy from the bakery at dawn. Reading Anna Karenina for the first time, truly not knowing the train was coming. Maybe perspective will make it harder, not easier, to idealize. Who knows. For now, I am writing a mythology of a decade of myself.  

Not to idealize, but to memorialize. Something passing: here I record the Doppler effect of my twenties.

To recognize. I recognize myself in bricolage, in collage. Memory itself is a bricolage.

I mean to say: I lived it. I am here. You cannot erase me. My language no myth. I used everything I had.

I mean to say: I became a writer.

Aristotle, Poetics: Recognition, as in fact the term indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, disclosing either a close relationship or enmity, on the part of people marked out for good or bad fortune.

I want to write to you clearly and directly, because right now I love you in that way I am still capable of loving, arms and legs cast open-heartedly around you, because there is still possibility before us.

I wanted to be the author of my own destiny, of my own chaos: I wanted to self-activate: I did not want to live my life half-asleep.                             

My body was activated in my twenties. How I hurled it through my early adulthood with hedonistic abandon, gorging myself on its various capacities to intoxicate and be intoxicated. How all of its history comes and stands beside me, a ghost-Laura, the patchwork of it indiscriminating of who’s comfortable with it: my family, my friends, my husband, myself.  There is so much that pains, that humiliates, but I have never been one who yearns to forget. I am, if anything, one who works constantly, compulsively, to remember.  

What my body did. How it felt to do it.

My mind was activated in my twenties. How I exercised it in the university, in the barroom beerlight conversations, in letters, in the reaching-out to others. How Rae and I read poetry and drank wine on a Friday night and I thought to myself this is exactly what I hoped college would be like. How I learned that my mind’s hope could be its own wresting. How I read, how I became enormous through reading. How I wrote, how I became conscious through writing. This, too, is the ghost-Laura, the one who stands here beside me. To remember.

Is it too obvious to say I chose to be the subject?

I knew this already, at twenty, that I had to be the subject of my own becoming. That I could make certain concessions to sex but not my authority. In my twenties I learned to be a woman. I carried the objects of being a woman in a green purse, in a black purse, in canvas totes and zebra stripes: two tampons tucked inside in a satchel of pens, a tiny vial of Chanel No. 5, a lipstick or two with a nug in the top, the notebook, the Nalgene, a novel or two, iPod, headphones, extra sweater, postage stamps and bobby pins and credit cards and library cards. I pack the bag every day and check it compulsively—did I forget something? Like a heavy sack of security objects, this freight of being a woman.

I will say I will tell you everything but I will always be lying. There are so many things I will never tell you. I carry them around in a green purse, in a black purse.

I will tell you that I have loved to the point of becoming a wife but I will not, will never be wived. I kept a record so that I would never be the lovely wife of a famous artist. How I have loved them, though, those wives. The romantic terror of their legacies. I chose against it. My legacy my own.

I kept notebooks. Recently I transcribed about six years of them, just to read them, just to see what all those hours of laundromats and subways and park benches and bedtimes accrued into.  My journal entries are largely transitory, my way of thinking about how to get from one place to another. I like the right map.

It’s like a K-hole, sitting there for hours reading yourself like that, reliving it all, realizing that it was better in places than you thought it was and worse in others, knowing in hindsight which friends and lovers you’d take with you and which would be left somewhere along the great highway of memory, marveling that you survived at all.

Memory is what you forget: the journals, as I read, add up to something repetitive and manic and horrifyingly partial. They are angry moments and indulgent wallowing, workings-out and yearnings, mere fragments of living.

8.16.06

Much is made over the way

Chet eats a hamburger.

8.21.06

What a funny summer it’s been. For the record, I have no idea who Chet is or how he eats a hamburger, I must have been drunk. I’ve actually been trying to drink more lately; I don’t really have a good reason why. Oh God—the seasons are changing again.

I write about relationships and I write about destroying myself and I write about wanting to be a writer. My journals are a story I tell myself, the version of the truth I’ve chosen at that automatic moment. When I read them I read a girl trying very hard at everything, exerting a furious kind of longing toward figuring out what sacrifice it will take to Be A Writer, really everything she mulls on in those in-between spaces circling around this ambition, I am willing to eat all the shit it takes to be taken seriously, but seriously, how much shit will it take. 

I write, of course, in medias res of the becoming I excavate in these found texts, these fond texts, of my twenties; I write in anticipation of the departure of this time, in its dying light. I write because I find the sheer fact of growing older baffling in its scope. I am preoccupied with age and with aging, with the power I will exchange with myself and the world to progress from one decade to the next.

You may witness some confusion between how I regard becoming a woman and becoming a writer.  Becoming is textual: I learned to become a woman because I learned to call myself one. To name myself. 

Memory is text’s enzyme: memory catalyzes and is then consumed. Text is both an exercise and an annihilation of memory. Maybe I am killing my twenties in text. The hundreds, thousands of pages I have made in effigy to growing older. This is what I mean to say when I say I mean to write an elegy for my twenties: I kill them in my practice of words.

10.2.07           

Go into the city. Find yourself in the thick of something.

I was in that thickness—still am, diminishingly—and now I can only feel so lucky to have had access to it. You have to know that I know I was lucky.

***

Pat and I are packing up our first apartment in San Francisco, in the Castro, to move to our new place in the Mission, the first address with no apartment number we’ve had since our parents’ houses. He’s cleaning out the top of the closet, handing things down to me: the unused winter clothes, the boxes still un-unpacked from our move from New York the year before, the general miscellany of out-of-reach shelves. 

He turns to me with a stack of composition notebooks.  

“Where do these go?” he asks benignly. 

I scream. I jump up. I snatch them from him.

“What is wrong?” he asks, dumbfounded. 

“It’s just—I mean—literally no other hands but mine have ever touched those,” I say, knowing I’m acting insane.  “I’m sorry.  It just really startled me—seeing them in your hands.” 

He shakes his head and keeps packing up the closet.

Later, I try to explain to him why I panicked.

“I don’t really know how to explain it,” I say, “but in that moment, you were just—you were holding my heart in your hands.”

“I know,” he says, “I guess I just don’t really understand what it means to you.”

“I know,” I say. “It’s like—everyone else gets to decide what you mean to them, what you’re going to be to them. And I just have this compulsion to write my own story my own way, to make a record of it, to leave behind some evidence of who I am. Who I was. That feels sacred to me. And my journals—that’s where you get to write the truth of how you lived it. In a way that’s only yours. Only mine. That’s why I freaked out when I saw it in your hands.”

“I know,” he says.

12.13.07 

Niedecker ordered her husband to burn all her journals; Hughes did away with some of Plath’s. Can you imagine how a legacy can be so manipulable by chance? Not chance but arbitrariness. Does it matter who reads them when you’re dead? 

It matters. Whether anyone reads them or never reads them, it matters.

Didion writes, “How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.” It also approaches the truth of comprehending one’s twenties, the decade of voluptuous feeling.

***

How it felt to me: I am coming home from a night badly spent uptown, hungover and sluttish on the 2 train going downtown at 7:30 am, last night’s eyeliner in dark half-moons, surrounded by suits on their way to another desk day of gainful employment, searching for a place to sit down, put my head between my legs. I realize around 14^th St that I am going to vomit and scheme to get off at the next stop. Between 14^th St and Chambers St. the train stops inexplicably, the way trains do on TV, at exactly that moment. 

I realize I am faced with two choices in the imminence of my puke: I can spew all over this dense forest of suits, packed 50 deep in the car so close to Wall St., or I can make an attempt to contain my puke in my empty Nalgene bottle. I opt for the Nalgene. As subtly as possible, I unscrew the top, put my head between my legs, and barf into the Nalgene, miraculously containing the liquid. As subtly as possible, I hold the bottle below my knees. I feel myself being stared at. I try to be invisible. This is not a talent of mine.

Gently, a hand picks up my hand and places a thumb on my wrist. A soothing voice trickles in to my ear, lilting I am a nurse. This is your pressure point. When I press it, you will not feel nauseated. Here is a pencil. Put it behind your ear. It will activate your other pressure point. Close your eyes. The voice carries me home. She lets me keep the pencil. A simple rescue.

How it felt to me: it is the 4^th of July and Vickie and Rae and Meera and me have no plans in particular. We stroll along the promenade in Brooklyn Heights and Vickie recites the Bill of Rights while gazing at the Statue of Liberty. One of us, I think it was Vickie but I can’t remember entirely, reports that there’s some sort of free party happening around the corner from the Jewish Hospital.  We go there and it’s awkward at first, like the first hour of a wedding reception before everybody’s drunk. Vickie tells us she’s going to mingle and darts off to flirt with guys. We get drunk on the roof; everything in New York happens on the roof. The music downstairs gets louder and we join in it, dancing, slowly at first, self-consciously. The music gets louder still. We dance harder and harder until we are in a state of ecstasy, the condition of standing outside oneself, outside our bodies, uninhibited, private and public both, dancing as hard as we’ve ever danced, until we collapse. Happy birthday, America. 

How it felt to me: it’s my last night of bartending. I am surrounded by the patrons of my twenties.  My three best girlfriends appear in the doorframe, candlelit. They present me with a cake. On the top, in red frosting, it reads “CUNT!” My best friends bought me a cunt cake for the cunt I was. How I loved them for it.

How it felt to me: there is a garden, because people have gardens in San Francisco, and I call it The Garden of The Lotus-Eaters, a place where you come to breathe the racket of the camellias and the grass, a place named for somewhere never left but which you know you will eventually leave. A few fellow travelers gather here, burning rice-paper money, rice-paper cars, rice-paper dragons. We are sending them off to our traveler just departed.

How it felt to me: at a reading, a beautiful poet friend reads a poem with I line I wrote in it. As she talks she cites me, calling me “the poet Laura Goode.” I realize, with a start, that she has addressed me. That I am the poet Laura Goode.

What is destiny? Destiny is what awaits us. Destiny is our due, our lot. Destiny is grander than future, more powerful than aspiration, something like fate, but somehow even more fateful.

My twenties: in which I inherited my destiny, without ever fully knowing what it would be.

My twenties: in which I danced until I was beside myself, outside myself.

My twenties: in which I let myself believe that other people could change me, could make me, and in which they did.

My twenties: which I lived like an incantation, like a mantra, like a jewel-box of seeing, living, thinking, feeling.

O, twenties: your shadow and ghost, your legend and myth.

My twenties: in which I became a writer.

Twenties, recede. You, come closer. I will tell you everything.

***

Rumpus original art by Paige Russell.

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Like so many others, Rich was The One to me, America’s greatest living everything I ever wanted to be: a titan of poetry, an icon of feminism. The woman who articulated the fundamental truth of female unity: “The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”

There is little I can say about Rich that has not yet been said: that her activism was uncompromising and a beacon, that her work, more than any other, activated me as a poet, that like the aspiring acolyte I was, I stalked her poems and her career like a detective. In this mode, one Rich poem has integrated itself into my literary DNA more than any other: “Modotti,” Rich’s elegy for the revolutionary photographer and activist Tina Modotti. Diving into The Wreck may indeed be Rich’s masterwork, but it is Midnight Salvage, in which “Modotti” appears, that owns my greatest loyalty in her canon.

Your footprints of light on sensitive paper
that typewriter you made famous
my footsteps following you up stair-
wells of scarred oak and shredded newsprint
these windowpanes smeared with stifled breaths
corridors of tile and jaundiced plaster
if this is where I must look for you
then this is where I’ll find you

I open my copy of Midnight Salvage, purchased from a used bookstore in high school, and pieces of my own history quite literally fall from its pages: three old Polaroids, taken for a photographer friend’s portfolio when I was nineteen or twenty, saucy and red-lipsticked. Myself, holding a birthday cake in gartered stockings. Myself, in black camisole. I remember how I pored over these pages at sixteen, twenty, twenty-five, all with equal awe, how my own sexual becoming has been charted in the varied shades of desire to which Rich allowed me a smoldering access.

I discovered this particular poem after seeing the film Frida, in which Modotti is portrayed by Ashley Judd, and presented as a trophy to Salma Hayek’s Frida Kahlo after Kahlo bests Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The two women dance, and share one of the hotter onscreen Sapphic kisses in cinematic history. All too appropriately, I saw the film with the first woman I ever loved, and sent her “Modotti” in an email afterwards, writing Let’s move to Mexico and wear flowers in our hair and drink provocatively. We’ll share an apartment and radical politics and dark-eyed men. It was the kind of absolutely earnest, self-serious correspondence one can only make at nineteen, and in the end, the poem, and the letter that enclosed it, would be the only lasting evidence of that fantasy.

Yet as a young woman in love, I was bitten by the tone of Rich’s pursuit, its fervor, its unwavering determination. Rich’s panegyric to Modotti is clear, direct, and inevitable: Rich does not ask if she will find Modotti, or even where to look. Like a dogged archaeologist, Rich must look, and she will find. The search is sensual—“smeared with stifled breaths”—tinged with revolution, and marred by scars and sickness: the political body in pain. Rich lurks in the shadows of this recovery with notebook and pen, history’s most eloquent journalist.

From a streetlamp’s wet lozenge bent
on a curb plastered with newsprint
the headlines aiming straight at your eyes
to a room’s dark breath-smeared light
these footsteps I’m following you with

Rich’s lines are an excavation, an attempt to return the matter of women’s lives to the hands who wrought them. Her effort to self-align with Modotti is, of course, a laden one. an Italian-born silent actress, Modotti spent the 1920s photographing the revolutionary intellectuals of Mexico: Rivera, Kahlo, and Julio Antonio Mello, her murdered lover, whose typewriter is the subject of Modotti’s most well-known photographs. The circumstances of Modotti’s own death are murky and unresolved, making Rich’s poem a canonization of sorts: an elegy for one of the martyrs of the cause. In characteristic form, Rich dives into the wreck of Modotti’s history, in all its sex, chaos, and revolution, and recovers the lost art.

down tiles of a red corridor
if this is a way to find you
of course this is how I’ll find you

I found Rich in person only once. During my freshman year in college, my best friend and I attended a reading Rich held at Barnard. We sat in the room, crowded with breathless undergrads like us, waiting for Rich to appear. The clock crept five minutes past the appointed start time; the lights dimmed. All of a sudden, a commanding Black figure, haloed with dreadlocks, swept up the aisle to a seat in front, and the whispers cascaded across the room like a cloud of loose feathers: that’s Toni Morrison. Oh my god, Toni Morrison is here. The event was now fraught with new significance; Morrison’s appearance reminded us that the node of Rich was interlinked, with lifelong deliberation, to a whole network of female and literary greatness.

And then Rich herself appeared, already frail in 2002, requiring assistance to ascend the stairs to her podium. A senior girl named Diana Thow had the honor of introducing Rich, thus garnering an envy in me that has prevented me from ever forgetting her name. The poet’s name, I learned, was not AYD-rienne Rich, but ADD-rienne. I committed this information to my heart as though it brought me closer to Rich herself, though in actuality it only brought me many conversations of looking like the pretentious asshole I was as I corrected another’s pronunciation.

I can’t remember what poems Rich read that evening. I only remember sitting in that hushed room enraptured and on the verge of gobsmacked tears for the entirety of her reading. I remember clutching my copy of Midnight Salvage, the very one that sits beside me now, rehearsing what I would say as she signed it. Your work has meant so much to me. I waited in the long queue after the reading, still rehearsing. When I was there, before her, my heroine of heroines, the words inevitably bungled, and what I blurted was You have meant so much to me. She nodded as placidly as a monk, having heard these nervous blurts so many times before, never knowing what they’d mean to me, and reached for the book.

The bristling hairs of your eyeflash
that typewriter you made famous
your enormous will to arrest and frame
what was, what is, still liquid, flowing
your exposure of manifestos, your
lightbulb in a scarred ceiling
well if this is how I find you
Modotto so I find you

Rich herself, in this elegy to Modotti and so many correspondences like it, was a nexus of those full, transformative connections between women. I think of the contemporary who chose her as rival, Sylvia Plath: Plath was, as the legend goes, wildly jealous of Rich’s 1951 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and proclaimed Rich her “only competition.” The two poets’ work is eminently comparable, though undeniably distinct: both came of age before women’s liberation, both made an early passage into marriage and children, and both placed the drama of the female experience, in all its banality and stigma, as the lodestone of their poems. Plath, of course, ceded the competition with her suicide.

In a sense, I think that Rich lived out what Plath could not: a full and varied life of letters, thirty books, a self-actualized liberation from the constraints of domestic life. Rich identified as a feminist, claimed the title as a mantra; Plath did not. Certainly we cannot fault Plath for the scourges of her mental illness, or the fact that they cost the poet her life. We can only mourn that Plath was not able to give us more, and celebrate that Rich was, and did. I celebrate that Rich stood against the destructive power of female competition, as when she shared the stage of 1974 National Book Award ceremony with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, and accepted the award as sisters-in-arms, on behalf of all women. I venerate Plath’s contribution to literature, and to my own literary becoming. But Rich’s, in so many ways, was simply greater.

In the red wash of your darkroom
from your neighborhood of volcanoes
to the geranium nailed in a can
on the wall of your upstairs hideout
in the rush of breath a window
of revolution allowed you
on this jaundiced stair in this huge lashed eye
these
footsteps I’m following you with

So many of my footsteps have followed Adrienne Rich: those of a teenager, of a college and graduate student, of a woman writer. Rich’s streets were those that I wandered most devoutly, her streetlamps, her newsprint, her darkroom and geranium the talismans I clutched, her huge lashed eye my headlamp. I dreamed of interviewing her, knowing always that the window of time during which we both claimed crossing on this earth would be narrow, but never got the chance.

But I followed her, I followed her, I still follow her: as not just a reader, but as a novitiate, a revenant, a pilgrim. I did not merely read Adrienne Rich’s poems; I followed her poetic ethos and claimed it as my own. I did not merely encounter Rich’s feminism, or her position as a paragon activist for race and class equality; I followed her imperative for “a society without domination.” I viewed her “exposure of manifestos” and developed my own.

“The rules break like a thermometer,” Rich writes in my next-most-cherished poem of hers, XIII of Twenty-One Love Poems, “we’re out in a country that has no language/no laws”. Perhaps it is best to articulate this way what my years of following Adrienne Rich have yielded: Rich gave me the roadmap to that country with no language, no laws, the country where “whatever we do together is pure invention”. With as much tenacity as grace, Rich obeyed no authority but her own, and in doing so, fashioned an unbridled mode of womanhood for all of us who had previously lacked the manifesto we sought. More than that, the crashing swings Rich took through the stubborn brush of white male domination cleared the way for my generation, her literary granddaughters, to write our own.

I’ve withheld the real lump in my throat of poem XIII, the line revealing that it was both the roadmap, and the territory it charted, which Rich’s poems showed me: “the music on the radio comes clear—/neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdammerung/ but a woman’s voice singing old songs/ with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute/ plucked and fingered by women outside the law.”

Rest in power, Adrienne-called-Addrienne. If this is how I must look for you, now, so I find you.

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***

In the fall of 2007, while I was a grad student in New York, I couldn’t stop listening to Back to Black.  My roommate and I played it as we lined our eyes to go out in Brooklyn; I played it behind the bar at the half-student, half-uptown-townie dive where I tended twice a week.  My best friend was Amy for Halloween; she stuffed a T-shirt under her thick chestnut hair to achieve the iconic beehive’s height.

We twisted, we swayed, we drank and smoked to her, like her and along with her.  We listened to Amy while we knocked over candles dancing in dark bars and when we smoked cigarettes in our underwear out the bedroom window in the morning.  A girl once asked me if I wanted to watch her dance to “Fuck Me Pumps.”  I said yes.

Amy was a collision of eras–not so much anachronistic as timeless–a foxy retro minx, a Fast Girl if ever the term applied.  She was our foul-mouthed Brit-Jewish Petula Clark, our own rangy little Diana Ross, the crusty-cute Dusty Springfield you found curled up still passed out in the corner of a couch with her panties showing when you got up to pick up the cans the next morning.  She didn’t write about wanting a boy to ask her to the dance.  She wrote about a boyfriend noticing the rug burns on her knees she’d gotten from blowing someone else on a thick carpet.  She wrote about ex-sex,whiskey dick and smoking weed, asking  “What fuckery is this?”

Finally, said the rest of us twentysomething girls out to get some in the city, in an exhale of relief.  Someone said it. We clapped each other on our backs and traded knowing crows when she sang “little carpet burn.”

Amy wasn’t all swagger and brash, though.  That’s why we loved her.  She wrote about relationships as weaknesses, about the way it feels to know you’re not to be trusted around someone else, about the way it feels when you can’t be trusted even around yourself.

It’s never safe for us, not even in the evening
Cause I’ve been drinking
Not in the morning where your shit works
It’s always dangerous when everybody’s sleeping
And I’ve been thinking
Can we be alone?

Her duende was heartbreak.  She might’ve known nearly as much about heartbreak as Billie Holliday, although no one’s ever known as much about heartbreak as Billie.  Amy’s life was shorter, more privileged and less exploited, but you hear a heartbreak like that when she sings “we never said goodbye in words, I died a hundred times.” Hers was somewhere near that magnitude of sorrow, and we were grateful for that, too.

Soon she outpaced us with the twisting and drinking and smoking. Her tattoos weren’t coy when interlaced with scabs.  It hurt to see her stumble.  It hurt to see the drugs and rats in the videos.  We waited for the next album, and even before Saturday morning we’d probably started to know it wasn’t coming.

What Amy gave us, she gave us whole. Like the Amy disclaimer: she cheated herself, she ain’t got the time, her daddy thinks she’s fine and life is like a pipe.  She told us flat out she wasn’t ever going to change, even though we could see the romance had left her, just like it left Janis Joplin.

Now she’ll always be 27 and the rest of us still have to grow up.  When I woke to the news that she’d died I thought of the poem Frank O’Hara wrote after Lana Turner died:

and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Back to Black is a slim album to match its slim feline author: 10 original songs, two remixes (at least on the iTunes edition I have), 42 minutes.  Approximately the length of a subway ride from central Brooklyn to upper Manhattan.  Approximately the length of just the right amount of foreplay or an unusually furious journal entry.  The irony is tragic but uniquely hers: that Amy, who constructed her artistic identity so cleverly outside of time, who knew so much about the most intense ways to spend it, would end up being known for such a specific and brief amount.

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How lucky that I ran into you
When everything was possible
For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart
And so happy to see any woman—
O woman! O my twentieth year!

You know that feeling, or you remember it: the feeling of endless possibility like an infinite highway on an 80-degree day in April. You know it and seek to harness it, calling it magic or potential and not yet knowing that the simple fact of it, what it’s really called, is youth. Do you remember who you loved when you were twenty? I do, and I remember how much.

It’s only a matter of time, you tell yourself. Before you’ve achieved all you sucked on like a hard candy, mulled over in your mouth and heart and cunt, which is to say dreamt. Have you ever wanted something so badly that it mapped itself out over your body itself, that it stirred you in the night and whoever you reached for within it? Have you ever wanted something so much that it became the world in which you lived? Have you ever wanted something so much enough that it created that world, a new world, your world? This is not delusion. This is the desire of which only people in their twenties are capable.

Basking in you, you
Oasis from both growing and decay
Fantastic unheard of nine- or ten-year oasis
A palm tree, hey!
And then another
And another—and water!
I’m still very impressed by you.

You move to New York. You pledge to die in New York. You fall in love in and with New York. New York is you: the lambency of soft alcoholism, the cigarettes crushed underfoot, the highs you sought before a long subway ride back to Brooklyn, all you keep stuffed in your purse because you don’t know for certain where you’ll be sleeping tonight. New York gives you a pleasant feeling of homelessness; you don’t yet know that to call yourself homeless, leggy white suburban-transplant college girl, is offensive.

One day, a girl you didn’t much like in college appears at the end of a corridor of bodies on 7th Avenue; as soon as you make to avoid her, she calls your name. You can’t fight the uncanny feeling of having been discovered, called out, smoked out, ratted out, and, most of all, found out. You offer little more than two pursed lips for her. Two things about this encounter disturb you: 1) you can no longer go anywhere in America’s most populous city without running into someone you know, and 2) your social poverty is now so dire that you couldn’t afford a smile? A blue-eyed man you love—in fact, a blue-eyed man you love more than you’ve ever loved anyone—suggests a change in your mutual coastal condition. You kiss him like you mean it, because you do mean it, and agree.

You move to San Francisco. The palm trees are there around every corner, new friends.

Whither,
Midst falling decades, have you gone? Oh in what lucky fellow,
Unsure of himself, upset, and unemployable
For the moment in any case, do you live now?

You take your first full-time office job, one involved with but not directly concerning the act of writing. You cry in the blue-eyed man’s arms in the mornings before you go. You cry online at work during marathon Gchat sessions with your best friends, who are now in different cities that you hate for having them when you can’t, and when a coworker notices, you blame the redness of your eyes on allergies. You come home and write in the evenings, knowing your good hours are limited. You write a 350-page paean to great friendships, wishing you still had any on your block. You feel tired. You feel lonely. You write because you have no other choice.

What the fuck is so fucking beautiful about this city? you wonder. You feel as though you’ve aged ten years just in the plane ride getting here: suddenly the bars close at 2 am and you don’t work in any of them, suddenly you’re no pseudo-pinko faux-boho grad student/bartender skipping the A train from Washington Heights to Prospect Heights in search of French fries and poetry, you’re just another office mope counting the minutes until 5 pm and coming home all blank-faced on the Muni. The recession hits. You begin to think you ought to feel grateful for the job you hate. You try.

You sell your book. You’re at work when you find out. You hold it together until you step outside to call your mother and she says over and over again, “This is your dream, Laura, your dream.”

From my window I drop a nickel
By mistake. With
You I race down to get it
But I find there on
The street instead, a good friend,
X— N—,

It happens slowly at first, such that you don’t totally notice or trust it: you make friends. Not just friends you see once every two months for the well-intentioned cocktail, but friends, homies, real friends, friends who know your middle name and why your mother gave it to you, friends who meet your mother at Thanksgiving. One day you meet a girl with an accent and a curious look about her, like she’s figuring you out as you’re talking. (She is.) You begin to tell her stories you’ve never told anyone. The relief you feel at telling her I don’t know what I did for 27 years without you is immense. Your Friday nights brighten. She reads the book you wrote about the other friends you love.

who says to me
Kenneth do you have a minute?
And I say yes! I am in my twenties!
I have plenty of time!

You’ve never been able to shake the persistent feeling of losing time, and your job feels like taking everything nourishing out of the cupboards and corners of your life and dumping them into a giant drain. You begin to permit yourself this thought: I could leave this job. You know you’ll have to explain this to your parents, who could hardly believe you got a job with health insurance attached to it in the first place. The blue-eyed man, God bless his sweet blue-eyed heart, tells you to do it: leave the job. For the first time in your life, you realize, you’ve fallen in love with someone who actually believes in you more than you believe in yourself. On a Sunday, you call your boss at home. She wishes you well as you finish your book.

In you I marry,
In you I first go to France; I make my best friends
In you, and a few enemies.

On a drive back to San Francisco from a weekend in Los Angeles, you are looking out the window, preoccupied with a fight you had with a friend you still love far more than you are currently willing to admit. Without warning, the blue-eyed man pulls off the highway; you see no gas station, no rest stop, no charming roadside restaurant. Overlooking the Pacific coastline, he reads you the first poem he’s ever written: a poem he wrote for you. He pulls out your grandmother’s ring. He does not get down on one knee; in fact, the whole encounter takes place in a borrowed Toyota Corolla. He does not ask you to say yes. He tells you the poem is meant to convey his acceptance of the proposal you, in fact, offered him two years ago by a bonfire at his mother’s college graduation party, after drinking a bottle of champagne by yourself.

Despite the fact that you are not a girl who has dreamt of this moment the way you imagine other girls might, you are surprised to discover this is the moment of which you have always dreamt. The day is wide and sunny, like an 80-degree day in April, even though it is now September. You say yes even though it is not required of you.

The next night, responding to the announcement of your engagement, the friend you still
love calls.

I
Write a lot and am living all the time
And thinking about living.

You finish your book. You have a drink. You start another. You have two.

I loved to frequent you
After my teens and before my thirties.

You three together in a bar
I always preferred you because you were midmost
Most lustrous apparently strongest

Through sleep early on a Friday morning in January, you hear your phone ring. When you check, you see it is the little sister of a friend who has been scourged by cancer for the better part of two years. It takes everything you have to call her back, knowing what she has to tell you. You hear the tears in her voice as you say, “Tell me.” She does. In this moment like no other before, you realize you don’t have as much time as you think you did.

A few months later, one of your favorite peacock-feather earrings—the ones you wore to the friend’s memorial service, the ones you wore in the video of the poem you wrote for him, the ones that recall his middle name—disappears into a windy night walking through the Castro. You feel like you’ve been punched in the gut, and can’t find the words to explain why, even though you know they’re there, lulling he’s gone.

Although now that I look back on you
What part have you played?
You never, ever, were stingy.
What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how best to use it
You weren’t a genius at that.

Your bank account suffers and dwindles and languishes, bereft of the jobs you hated but that kept you secure. You remember that an older, wiser writer friend who knows you’re a little too responsible for your own debauched literary good once told you I’ve been trying to convince you for years to go broke, and you never do it. At least once a week, you reread the email he wrote you at exactly the moment you needed it, telling you to write, just write, do nothing but write for at least six months. You do. You let go of some of the facts that previously made you comfortable, or complacent. You write one film that will never be made and one that will, the latter ending with a clutch of girls banded in arms on a Brooklyn rooftop, howling at the moon.

Against your own obsessive-compulsive judgment, you spend the last money you have not already consigned to rent or food on a plane ticket to Europe, relying on sheer dumb faith that more money will materialize eventually. You’ll be gone for the month before your book comes out, the last month before everything changes again.

Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back.

Is it strange, over-anticipatory, to reflect on a decade not yet fully departed? You are twenty-seven. In the fall, shortly after you marry the blue-eyed man just five days younger than you are, you will be twenty-eight. Soon you will hold the physical fact of your book in your hands, bound, gravid, and real. Do you have plenty of time, or never enough? Are your twenties still your bedfellow or a comely figure receding from view? Only this do you know for sure: time is an ellipsis until it is not.

There is one moment in which all seems coincident with itself. In a low murmur, on a bittersweet summer night around a campfire in Wisconsin, your best friend since you were both changelings of 18 begins to recite from memory: “How lucky I ran into you when everything was possible.”

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• The Last Poem I Loved: “Seele im Raum” by Randall Jarrell
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Insomnia” by Elizabeth Bishop
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Oh Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie” by Philip Appleman
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Sleeping Lioness” by Larry Levis
• The Last Poem I Loved: “Under the Maud Moon” by Galway Kinnell