Where the Once Broken, Now Mended, Will Find Me

Nearly a decade in Los Angeles altered me.

Taken by me, in Joshua Tree, 2020.

In New York, I’m red-lipped, floss-thin, and cynical. I identify as many things, but mostly I am parts incomplete. An abandoned home in a constant state of disrepair. I whitewash the childhood I never have until it becomes a distant memory and I write a book about it that I never read.

Forget roasting hot dogs in front of a church with the makeshift fire you built. Forget pumping the swings so high you feel as if you might dent the sky. Forget the day-old Bacardi, eight-ball eyes, and nails that rake skin because of the junky itch. Forget the thumping against the walls, the blood stains on the carpet, your clothes. Forget a hand parting those crystal beads, wading his way through the dark room to the smallness that is you.

I bleach all my history white until I feel some semblance of clean. Use the kind of bleach that burrows into the bone. Become so clean no one can find me.

In New York, I sleep to the end of the line. I wake in Coney Island, Ronkonkoma, Huntington, Riverdale, and 206th Street in the Bronx. I wear socks always. Even on the beach, especially on the beach, because there’s always the threat of glass cutting into your feet. Beach is blistering skin, sand in my eyes, and a boardwalk beneath teeming with men and their sour mouths and ocean of wants. Pools were safer with their contained spaces, hot pretzel stands, boomboxes, and chlorine eyes.

You can never escape the men and the spaces they occupy.

I am twelve and touch my chest and the space between my legs, and I chant one word over and over until it becomes a sermon, a song, and that word was small. Whittle down to the size of a negative integer. Become the girl who grows into a woman no one ever sees.

In New York, I’m a body forever moving. I teeter in silver heels adorned with silk butterflies. Straps cutting into my ankle. Blood pooling in my heels, on the street. I’m in an Italian restaurant on York Avenue where a plate of salty orecchiette affords you bottles and bottles of wine.

We cab down to the bowels of Lower Manhattan, passing a pouch between us and then we’re in the street and I pass someone I used to know when I was flanneled and sweet and we slip into a party filled with all the people from college I never liked. In the bathroom, we laugh at the bankers, teachers, women with glinting bands on their fingers, and flush our pouches down the toilet until the bathroom is flooded and we flee into the night and everyone knows that I switched up fifty-cent drafts for uptown cocaine.

My friends are blond and monied and they always seem to leave. And then I’m alone with my earthquake hands in a building in Little Italy where a woman sings Chinese arias in the alleyway and the men below strum The Godfather. My home smells of sausage and bleach. It’s the home where I sit on the floor and watch The Food Network until my hands steady. Until all remnants of powder leave my body.

On my way home one night I walk by a woman lying on the street. Shattered glass from a pipe cut into her face. I stand there and look for signs of life. I take out my phone. But then she sputters and hacks and coughs and I run as fast as I can. I sprint fifteen blocks until I’m at my door and I open my mouth to scream but no sound comes out.

I’m a mouthful of air.

I become a woman who doesn’t leave her house. A woman who bakes cakes, hunts for the perfect whisk. Because you see, I needed to occupy my hands. That’s how I get through it. By moving. By never stopping. By deleting numbers and turning the ringer off. Everyone stops leaving voicemails. I get through by returning to a graduate program after an abrupt leave of absence. I get better by reading four books a week and crying through the butchering that is workshop — all while working full-time in the marketing department at Time Warner.

I didn’t have time for sick, only betterment. I’m in my twenties and I am so, so tired. I fall in love and all it does is make me crave sleep.

In New York, I’m sober for seven years and publish my first book. My pop’s face registers a kind of pride I haven’t seen since. I’m a good girl who eats kale and does ninety minutes of yoga a day. I go to Kirtans and retreats. I stockpile four thousand books in a small Brooklyn apartment. I was as beautiful as I was ever going to get — lambent and baby gold — but it would take me another decade and several breakdowns to see it. To know it. To ache for it. To want to crawl back to that skin. Bury myself in the thicket that was my hair.

Desperate to rewind the clock, shake that girl and tell her she was enough.

In New York, I build a company and leave it. And the year I leave, my cat slowly and violently dies. I drink vodka with the blinds shuttered. I frighten my friends in ways they can and cannot see. I’m fragile, breakable, and open-mouth cry on subway platforms. This woman can clear rooms, I tell you. And then one night there’s another kind of clearing. Flashes of red and white and a man’s hand not letting the door close shut.

I’m grateful for the blackout, the fact there are parts of that night I’ll never remember. After, I take that bucket of paint and cover up the gaping holes so no one can see. And it works for a while. Time passes and it feels as if it never happened. I make $25,000 in one month and my body is muscle and bone.

And then my mother dies and the mess of it, the wreck of it, the lack of closure in it is a curtain coming down around my body. Snuffing out all the light and leaving me groping through the dark. A week later, I board a plane for a trip to Nicaragua I planned months before her death. And during that hot week where I stand over volcanos and their perfume makes me sick and I step over a snake on a footpath in the dark and I meet a couple from Santa Barbara who are tawny and sun-kissed, I decide to move to California.

Over the next five months, I’m a woman in perpetual flight. A woman who has no idea what’s about to happen when she lands in Los Angeles come August.

In California, I step off the plane, fat cat in tow. I am fancy, borderline obnoxious and a car picks me up and I blast Simple Minds’ “New Gold Dream” while eating In-N-Out. My new home is near the ocean and it’s all window and bright light. For two months, I sleep on an air mattress while all of my belongings stagger across the country, get lost, and find their way to me. Boxes filled with broken dishes and a cracked TV.

How did I not see what was in front of me? All the breaking and broken I carried. How did I think it was a skin I could so easily shed by boarding a plane across the country?

How did I think the broken wouldn’t follow me?

Quiet is the cruelest of clarifiers. It cuts through the mess and noise and lays your life out threadbare. In October of 2015, I start my slow descent. I lose big corporate projects. I lose friends. I lose parts of myself and nearly all of my mind and I don’t have curtains yet so I tape sheets on the windows and watch movies banned in thirty-five countries. Pasolini’s Salò is a laugh riot.

I knew the word depression but it always felt like an outfit that never quite fit. No, that’s not me. Until I mapped out my life and learned it is exactly me. It’s been me, all along. It’s me since childhood. It’s me when therapists at Fordham and Columbia offer medication. It’s me cleaving to the drink as an anesthetic. Depression’s the lover who torches the joint, but refuses to leave. It’s the wound I’ve been forever dressing, but one whose origin eludes me. A wound so deep and old, I’ve no idea when I first hurt or how long I’ve been hurting.

In California, I’m a covered wagon crossing the prairie, prospecting. Sifting the terrain for gold. I’ve got my pans and detectors, horses and buggies. I’ve got my blood, my grit. I’m scorched land, burned dry and I rise.

The West brings me to my knees.

It takes me years to crawl out of the grave I’ve been measuring. Nails torn, skin raw and cracked. No one tells you what you lose. Darkness always hovers. Stands off to the side, reminding you of what you’ve lost in the battle on your way out. The friends who wear gloves when they touch you in fear of catching your sadness as if you’re a pandemic. They fear breathing the air you breathe. The friends who admonish you for making your pain public so others feel less alone. They’ll type their support and trot out their hashtags, but they’ll stop returning your calls. You are relegated to spam, to voicemail.

Conveniently forgetting the years you held their hand in the dark. It breaks me, sometimes, when I think about how much I’ve lost. Even now, after all this time. Even now, when I’m better. Standing in a column of light.

In California, I walk barefoot in the grass, in the sand, on the ground, and feel my heels harden. I read the Greeks and publish a second book five people read. There is no book party, no fanfare and confetti, no Vanity Fair and USA Today features. No photoshoots in Boro Park. But I feel fuerte, Olympian.

Now, I have time to think about the years I was a lesser person. Years of hoarding all the pretty finery to fill a gaping hole that was bottomless. Watch me file for bankruptcy, change my business, excise the barnacles, abandon the pretty home in Hancock Park for the mountains, the desert, a little home by the sea.

I spend that year itinerant, moving around Southern California from a mountain town of 160 people to the high desert where the wind kicks up the hot sand that blinds your eyes and stars blanket the night sky. I see mountain lions and bobcats and snakes and coyotes. I feel feral, newborn. The wildest life I’d ever seen in New York was a mouse.

You might see these as failures, but to me it’s resetting the scales to double zeroes. I wipe the slate clean and rebuild my home, my life, brick by brick.

Part of me wants to pause time because it moves too quickly. The lines on my face and the weight on my body remind me I have fewer years ahead of me than behind. And so I walk away from the woman who had so much personal velocity, the woman who said yes to everything, the woman who was cruelest to herself. The woman who starved herself, exercised herself, whittled and carved herself, adorned herself, plucked, shaved, and prettied herself.

I let it all go to wear cotton. Clothes that feel like air. My face is scrubbed clean and I eat coconut milk ice cream and homemade bolognese. I make a house a home with rainbow carpet, thousands of books, and candles that smell of cotton. I buy what I can afford and live quietly and simply. I tell the friends I have left — I love you so much.

Thank you for not leaving me.

In California, I wear my hair messy and eat what I please. I count the people I trust on one hand but I nurture that love like a life garden in perpetual bloom. I want to look back, but I don’t — I train my eyes forward. Because I know the weight I carried, where I’m from, and it’s merely information, data, and details, but not a sentence, a prison.

The slow and quiet begins to reveal the possible. I need not be large and sweeping and famous and brash — I can live a dignified, small life and be the better of it.

I’ve wanted to move west since 1995, since that day sophomore year when I received an acceptance letter to USC’s film school and I had to decide — stay in New York or transfer out west. I stayed where it was home, safe, and it took me two decades to find a place that really felt like home. A place not haunted by history.

I’m conscious of time and how swiftly and unapologetically it moves. And while I’m slow, my decisions are fast and if I don’t make my home in the adopted state in which I live, I’ll make out of the country.

In California I learn you don’t have to be what everyone wants, tells, and expects you to be. You can just be. Hike alone in snow-capped mountains, ride the busses in Los Angeles, or climb rocks in the desert and swim in the sea.

Burning the earth clean reveals what’s possible — the world, a good life, unfurling in front of me.