Jen Larsen's Blog

One of the nice things about having kept an online journal back in ye old golden days of the internet, when we were still making fun of the word “blog,” (she says in a wavering ye old golden girls RIP Betty White voice), is that I had a record, of sorts, of my life. Fully curated, obviously, for all that we were promising each other naked emotional honesty and completely obscured personal information (sorry, “completely obscured”) because our greatest threat was a stranger from the internet appearing at our doorstep, utterly disarming us by their knowledge that our name wasn’t CandyKane56 BUT IN FACT Belinda (this is just an example, you understand) and in that moment of pure unbridled terror because our true faces had been revealed, sweeping us away to their Dungeon of Ultimate Terror where there was no wifi or even ethernet cables.

Right, anyway, if I wanted to look back and see what the actual fuck I had been doing all year, I could flip through the entries and smile fondly at the shenanigans of Past CandyKane56, and chuckle indulgently. And now it’s new year’s eve eve and I am sitting here trying to remember what happened. I don’t even remember what the hell memes were coming at us fast and furious early this year.

I stopped writing; my book came out to kind reviews. I took up embroidery after Failures of Counting thwarted all my cross stitch attempts. I confronted my mortality after a couple of seizures? I think that was this year. I tried to come to terms with the fact that my eyes were almost too bad to even embroider and bought a head-mounted magnifying glass that I have not managed to bring myself to try, because it looks too ridiculous.

I lost an important tooth; I lost an important tooth appliance. I grappled with the fact that teeth are considered “optional bones,” when it comes right down to it, medically speaking, and are prohibitively expensive. I wished I could afford teeth.

Along with my writing moratorium, I stopped reading anything but romances and YA and realized that my field of fucks was sown with only middle fingers, and the corpse of a former English major who still makes shitty comments about the punctuation and grammar was buried head-first in the loamy soil, nourishing the land.

Crom remained the most expensive healthy senior dog fucking EVER, when after having his enter limb reassembled from scratch and he had to have an eye taken out, THEN a lump of cancer needed to be excised for the cost of all the dollars in the world, most of them our grocery budget, and then lots more really fucking expensive lumps to check for cancerousness. (None found to our great relief, despite the absolute flood of money out the door).

I reconnected with some of my oldest friends, and lost touch with some new friends as I sunk into pandemic depression. I got depressed. I didn’t understand why living was still a thing that had to be done. I renewed my promise to Crom to stay alive at least as long as he did. I promised my wife, too, and kind of against my will.

I struggled with my drinking. I quit for a whole year; and then, because for whatever reason I truly believed that not drinking meant Missing Out, I tried to be a Regular Normal Person Who Only Occasionally Drinks but that didn’t really work out for me.

I raged, again and again and again and again, so often and so unhinged, at the unfairness of losing my best friend. I did laugh when I realized he would have laughed at the irony, he really would have — the last-minute transplant just in the nick of time, just when everything seemed lost. The transplant a failure. I didn’t really laugh. I wondered when it would stop hurting.

I felt so disconnected and so plugged in to the terrors of This Modern World, of Late-Stage Capitalism, of Not Knowing How to Explain to You That You Have to Care about Other People, fascism and breathtaking selfishness and how we keep blowing through threshold after threshold, turning point after turning point, point of no return after point of no return and the Here Be Dragons sign just up ahead, or have we screamed past that one too?

I’ve struggled with a way to make any of this meaningful, to turn any of this into hopefulness, to go back to being the person who genuinely fucking believed that the moral arc of the universe really did bend toward justice because how could it not? How could it not? No, tell me why it can’t. Help me out here.

And I’ve sat here typing and backspacing for more time than I want to admit, trying to come up with something pithy and wise, smart and strong and meaningful but not twee, not a total and unremitting collapse into the bottomless drama mines, not something empty and useless. But it occurs to me that I also am tired of the idea that it is an empty, useless thing to hope and to care and to wish for better things. I have been trying to be a better person for most of my life, and always secretly convinced that I’ve been a failure at it. I am going to keep trying to be a better person, and keep trying to feel like I’ve earned my particular carbon footprint, keep trying to Art and keep trying to make sure people know how important and lovely and special they are, in the micro, and keep trying to figure out justice and how to help make it happen, as a battering ram or an encircling shield or a field full of nourishing fucks in the macro, and see where that takes us. Who knows? There’s no certainty anymore, that much I’m certain of, but I guess we do what we can.

Happy merry, everyone. Stay safe. Stay warm. Take care of yourself, please. Be good and be happy and enjoy how hot you are (you are SO hot, and you should realize that now, not when you look at old photos and wonder how you could have been so foolish. SO HOT.)

With love,

me

Unff

When I finish this manuscript, I’m going to
go roller skating. We bought the roller skates a month ago? A couple of months
ago. Maybe a few months ago? There’s a roller skate club in town, which is one
hundred percent the most delightful thing I’ve ever heard. A club, for roller
skating. Roller skaters, wearing roller skates, go roller skate in a church
that they take over for the purpose of roller skating, and that’s where they do
the thing. Skate, I mean, on four wheels.

I picture an enormous stone building with a
soaring roof overhead and stained-glass windows and marble pillars and all the
pews removed and a group of women – it’s mostly women, we are quietly assured,
and pretty queer – doing roller skate things on roller skates, just skating
around and maybe there’s a disco ball that lowers quietly from the ceiling and
the music is like a Billie Eilish remix with rocket sounds and we all go
“woo!”, which sounds pretty reasonable when you think about it. Also
everyone’s wearing rainbow shorts and sunglasses.

So that’s my dream, though we’re going to
practice our roller skating in the garage downstairs first because neither of
us is very good at roller skating. When we got up on wheels at the roller skate
store we mostly went around in circles tilting precariously backwards and going
“ahh!” and “ooofp!” and “eerh!”, windmilling our
arms and then reassuring each other that we’d get real good real soon and then
we would be roller skating super stars who make friends with other roller
skating rock stars and then we’d have roller pals, who pal around doing roller
skate things, as you do, on roller skates. Like, roll. Forward. And then, back.
And then turn? Roller skate things. You know.

That’s all happening once the manuscript is
done. When will it be done? THAT’S A GOOD QUESTION.

The book is under contract at Holt, and that
is wonderful. The manuscript, the frustration and tears it has engendered in me
is less wonderful, and my embarrassment about it over all is the worst. Anxiety
and being paralyzed, being paralyzed and feeling sick, feeling sick and wishing
I had never agreed to write anything ever, because I can’t write, are you
kidding me?

“Are you sure this is the career for
you?” my former agent asked me recently. That’s not why she’s my former agent.
She is my friend and she has seen just a tiny part of the wreck I’ve been this
past year, year and a half.

It’s not just the manuscript, it’s not just
writing, it’s not just being afraid. It’s the bad days, the bad run of days
when I have a flareup and the meds aren’t helping and whatever it is that’s wrapped
around my bones and burning me when I move, the smoke has wafted into my brain
and everything is impossible. Flareups are often prompted by anxiety, but
sometimes they’re just a flareup. But it’s all connected, isn’t it?

Maybe this isn’t the career for me. But I keep thinking, this is almost done. This next year won’t be like this past year, where I’ve discovered that mourning isn’t straightforward, a straight arrow from weeping like you’ll never stop to a fond smile and a pang in your heart whenever you think of the person you lost. No, it’s a more like a scream in your heart that sometimes works its way into your throat and you’re hiding in the bathroom of the coffee shop with your head between your knees before someone knocks to see if you’re ever coming out. Or something like that, that is the rumor anyway, someone once told me.

I’m almost done. This weekend I crept so
close to almost done. I’m working now, the manuscript open in another window,
all the random new docs I’ve opened to paste in something I’ve cut from the book
but can’t stand losing forever, or need to move but I’m not sure where, or the
new words I’ve written that are terrible, and don’t go in that spot but they
could work later if I work on them so I’ll just put them over here so I don’t
forget.

I love writing. I sink into it and I’m gone,
sliding words into place until they click and the satisfaction when I reemerge and
everything works like it has always been there, it’s like nothing else and the
frustration when I can’t get it, when I can’t disappear, when the words aren’t
coming and when resorting to the thesaurus just makes me want to slam my laptop
down and walk away forever but I’m always back, sitting down, sinking in, because
I’m good at this and it feels good, and this has always been what I have wanted
to do. I have always wanted to be a writer.

When I’m done – not this weekend, but
really close, just some chapters to flesh out, and the skeletons are there and
the way everything has to go is clear in my head and also on the big sheets of butcher
paper my friend Meagan posted up to help me track all my plotlines, to help me
visualize how it should go, so close to finishing – we’re going to roller skate.
Kelsey’s skates are a minty 50’s green blue and mine are leopard print. I have
leopard print roller skates, with hot pink accents. I have a pair of shorts
already, and they have pockets. I need tights, rainbow ones or fishnet ones or
striped ones, and Kelsey’s shorts have sequins and they’re rainbow, you should
see them.

We’re going to roller skate this week,
okay? No falling down, just flying forward, knees slightly bent, leaning
forward, picking up speed. And I’ll decide, maybe this week or maybe not, if
this is me. If I can do this. If this is the career for me.  

What happens when you get depressed – and it happens whether you’re a little depressed and struggling or whether you’re sunk in that pit of cold water with a boulder on your chest – is that you can’t. You can’t, and you care less and less that you can’t.

Most of what you can’t do is self care – it’s energy, and it’s time, and maybe, sometimes, you think it’s something you don’t deserve, or maybe sometimes it’s something you don’t think about at all. And you don’t take care of yourself.

It’s not like, scented baths and a manicure and a fancy coffee self-care, it’s the basics. It’s changing your clothes. It’s the shower, because getting in and standing and lifting your arms and drying off and all of it, it’s so much. It’s washing your face. It’s brushing your hair. It’s brushing your teeth. It’s looking in the mirror.

When you look in the mirror, sometimes it’s seeing how you look – grey and unkempt, kind of gritty, kind of gross, and thinking that this image, that’s accurate. That’s kind of how it feels. That’s kind of what you deserve, isn’t it? It’s feeling sunk there and not knowing how to dig out.

It’s hating how hopeless you feel. It’s getting into the shower finally, dragging yourself in and sitting under the spray, just a little hotter than you can stand, and scrubbing and exfoliating and defoliating and letting the hot water stream through your hair and over your shoulders, and hoping that it’s washing everything away and you’ll emerge – fine. Okay. Better.

Cleaner, at least, but nothing’s changed, and the sheets aren’t changed, so you crawl back into dirty sheets and you wonder what it will take to drag you back out, and if it’ll be worth it.

It was especially easy to give up when I was drinking. Every day, earlier every day. Drawing a line – this is where I stop trying to cope. This is where I let everything get softer, easier, simpler. I can’t work or write or think when I’m tipsy and I can’t work or write or think or feel anything when I’m drunk and it’s so simple to pour myself into bed and black out, safe from dreams. Get up hungover and that was the thing most urgent to deal with, coffee and Diet Pepsi and being on the couch with dogs and letting it all accumulate like a film over my brain and my skin. Letting it all catch up to me, finally, aging me into sad eyes and bags under them, skin like sandpaper, dull and old lady.

Not drinking now, about five months of it. Five months of never being drunk. At some point there I sat back and said, I guess this is working. I guess this is a thing that’s happening. I am not drinking, I am not getting drunk, and what does that mean?

What does that mean. I still don’t know. But I thought, what can I change right now? I’ve stopped drinking, do I sit here and wait in place for not-drinking to become manifest and meaningful? What do I do from here – what has changed, and how can I mark that?

Reforming friendships, or settling friendships, or smoothing old hurts, mending the things I broke, making amends for the things that can’t be replaced – that’s the thing I want most badly, but that’s where I’m hesitating, hovering, wondering if that is pain and shame I need to come to terms with and fold back into myself as lessons learned, as a solid idea of who I don’t want to be any more and what I have to do going forward. How do you fix all the things you ripped apart, when some of that is how much you were loved and how badly you hurt the people who loved you?

Concrete things first, concrete things to hang on to and build a foundation and feel like solid enough a real person who can move forward. I’ll take care of myself. I’ll pretend I’m a person who takes care of herself, who is concerned about things like skin care and not horrifying her dentist.

Three months of a regimen – every day and every night, brushing, flossing, interdental brushing, mouthwash. Face cleansing, toning, peptides and antioxidants or whatever is in this little bottle that promises me brighter skin and fresh skies and new horizons and a shining star to light my way, and oiling up with more antioxidants and retinols and pesticides or whatever and then moisturizing which I am told closes your skin’s barrier and thus makes all of your unguents and potions work vigorously in service of your derma-health, and then sun screening, religiously, even on those days where it is gray and the sun is tired of your bullshit. Sometimes a hydrating sheet mask. Every morning, every night.

And lately, there’s been a difference. My face is changed, my smile is different. I lean forward and I smile big and my teeth are the white of teeth that haven’t been bleached to hell. They’re my normal teeth – the dental implant that was fucked up by a bad dentist, the fuckup that makes me ashamed to smile sometimes but it is not so bad. My smile is not so bad.

My skin is smooth. Have I ever had smooth skin? Has it ever felt silky and not kind of rough, and when did that patch on my cheek, that bit of discoloration, when did it start to fade away? When did my face start to look dewy? When did I start to look my age instead of ten years older?

My skin is glowing, and it is soft and it is bright and I lean into the mirror and I see my fine lines and the wrinkles around my eyes when I smile, and when I laugh, but look at me, able to smile at my own reflection like I mean it. Look at me touching the skin of my cheek and thinking that I kind of look beautiful and maybe a little happier, just a little bit.

The best skin I’ve ever had, at 46 years old. The first time I’ve ever taken care of myself in any sustained way. Ever. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never thought it mattered. I never knew what a difference it would mean.

Where did I learn that it didn’t matter? What made me decide I didn’t matter? I’m not sure I really believe it even now. But I’m told anything can become a habit if you keep at it long enough.

Every year we swear we’re going to do
holiday things and be festive and every year on December 24, the communal everything
is closed and we are all tearing festive paper off deep fryers and socks and bubble
bath scented like a berry that doesn’t actually have a scent, or a dream you
once had about very cross cloves body shaming a little wad of nutmeg. Do
nutmegs come in wads? Is a nutmeg a plant? Is it a nut? Is it a thing in an
animal and do I have to be upset about that? There are seasonal questions, and
that makes it all the more difficult to celebrate properly.

Tonight, this December 4, which is a full month after most people have already decorated I am not kidding, I have been mad about it for four weeks, we’ve decided to put up the tree as if we were festive people who festivate in an appropirate and time-sensitive manner.

That requires dragging the cat tree out of its spot in the window, overlooking the seawall and the epic, swooping, Roman-empire style battles that the seagulls and the crows have over chunks of Tim Horton donuts, which are actually aggressively mediocre don’t tell the Canadians, or a shoe with a bit of a foot still in it, or whatever that orange thing is. The cats love it. But they and their have been exiled to the other room where they will have to make their own fun in some other way, because this window spot is where we’re putting our little fake tree, name of Nancy.

Nancy is short; Nancy is slim; Nancy is demure and she is about the level of tree we can handle and/or store, in terms of decorations and the spirit in our shriveled little nutmeg hearts. For awhile there we were getting a new Nancy every year because we had no room to store her, but last year we managed to do the adult thing, which is not spend unnecessary money, and we packed her away to slumber the sleep of the just had a holiday.

Last year we tried to buy not a new Nancy
but a fresh tree, smelling fresh and like the holidays, which is money-scented,
but shortly after we placed an order (you can order a fresh tree online! This is
the future that liberals want, only with more glitter underpants and a mimosa
brunch) we got a notice from the condo board that was very stern and said
everyone had to stop it with the fresh trees because they are arsonists and
they will burn the whole building down if you don’t watch them every minute.

That sounded grim and a fine for having a
fresh tree sounded like a thing an adult would avoid, so Nancy the V was
welcomed into our home. She is green because the white ones and the pink ones
were sold out because we bought Nancy on December 20 or thereabouts because
again, we’re bad at remembering that time moves forward and bears you gently
with, no escape. I am proud that we have managed to make in the roads thus far,
but perhaps I should not gloat because right now Nancy is still in her Nancy
hibernation chamber and the big box that I have identified as containing things
one would use to ornament a tree for $500, Alex, it might actually only contain
spiders and regret.

The step after Nancy is doing lights, I have determined, the kind out-of-the-house lights that are small and twinkling and you walk around under and you agree, with your friends and partner and the community that has turned out to walk down paths under lights alongside you, that this is the kind of thing that one does during the holiday month and one enjoys it because festive and twinkles.

This is my second favorite holiday because of the twinkles, and maybe this is the year that we manage and you manage and all of us manage to twinkle it up with out of the house lights and a holiday market and drinking a hot chocolate while admiring something else that twinkles in a way that is holiday and then go to a show where talented folk do noises and movements that evoke a holiday feeling in our dehydrated little broccoli hearts.

Happiness is the reason for the season and I wish it for you and us and for all the people in the world even the terrible ones because maybe they will Scrooge it up or maybe they’ll have catastrophic heart failure in the middle of their dream about ghosts and either way, Happy Holidays!

My mother, in her housecoat on a Sunday.
She is trying to quit smoking. She tears open a package of plain M&Ms and
pours them into her pocket, and it’s an ingenious idea. Candy on your person,
for any kind of emergency that occurs—nicotine craving or chocolate urge, need
for candy or desperate desire to replenish dangerously low sugar reserves.

My mother eventually quit smoking, and I am
sure the M&Ms cured her. As far as I know, she never poured candy in her
pockets again, but ever since then, I have thought about it. I have thought
about just carrying M&Ms and Goobers and Raisinets with me wherever I go. I
have considered lining the insides of all my coats with Hershey’s bars and
pouring hot cocoa in my shoes and padding my bra with Almond Joys.

I get a little worried when I realize
there’s no chocolate in the house. I get a little panicked when I think that I
have no access to something sweet, and no way to fix that. I get emotionally
fraught when there’s no candy at hand and no one wants to give any to me; when
it is offered, I sweep up huge armfuls like there is a candy shortage and the
person who gets the most stuffed inside their face wins.

My sense is that most people don’t have deep emotional attachments to sugar. No one understands candy the way I do. So probably you should all give it to me so that I can take care of it.

Or probably me and candy need to take a break. We need to step back and re-evaluate our relationship. Our terribly, terribly troubled relationship. Our desperate, desperately one-sided love affair that only leaves me feeling kind of like I have never met a vegetable and if I did it would give me the cut direct.

I kind of don’t want to do it any more. I don’t want to eat candy. I mean, I want to eat candy. I want to eat all the candy. I want to swim through a sea of Hershey’s Kisses and shower in a waterfall of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. I want my pockets to always be overflowing with Kit Kats and Nestle’s Crunches. I want the glorious bounty of bad chocolate to always be inside me.

But I also kind of need to maybe consider alternatives, like some of the candy instead of all of it. A portion instead of every. A soupcon instead of a steamroller-full. I don’t want to make it a new year’s revolution, I just want to kind of gently consider the possibility. To convince myself that yes, I’ll still be able to function? Yes, I will still be me. No, candy is not the only thing I can fit in my pockets. Yes, we will figure out a way to stuff them with ponies instead.

There are outdoorsy folk, but those folk are wrong. We invented shelters to be sheltered in and I feel like it is deeply morally wrong and fucked up that some people do not have them (true), and further that if you have one, voluntarily leaving it is a step back, evolutionarily speaking (questionable, fine).

Ask me my religion and I will tell you “indoorsy.” My brother and I were raised that way, besides Catholic. We grew up early-days in New York, in the Bronx mostly, which back in the day had winters you’d best describe as “sure, ok.” Some snow, not too cold, look here’s a picture of us trying to build a snowperson but it’s not a very good one, what were we thinking being outside like this, let’s go back inside.

Occasionally you’d get the big fuck-off snowstorm that had us scrambling around going “gee whilikers! I hate being outside!” (me) or “wow I’m kind of dumb so I’m going to stay out here!” (my brother). But mostly it was just kind of weather-ish and unremarkable and anyway, I was watching a lot of cartoons.

Pennsylvania, thirteen through seventeen, was significantly colder, significantly more snow, significantly more bears, and my understanding of winter was “no,” as I had grown more sophisticated in my thinking. Back to NYC for college and a lot of indoors studying but better yet, to San Francisco for grad school and a lot of indoors writing. California has the right kind of winter, which is “none,” by which I mean “yes, fine, I guess we can have dinner on the patio but then I’m going back inside.”

Why did I move to Utah? Well, I know why I moved to Utah, and that is a long and tedious subject which is framed by the topic sentence, “Here is another mistake I made because I was running away,” so we won’t get into that right now. Utah winters are most clearly understood as “ugh,” which is a combination of pretty cold, and fairly snowy, and there are no sidewalks and you have to drive everywhere, with the end result being scary and bad. So I stayed inside only extra, which was facilitated by the fact that my job was the freelance kind and my office uniform was the no-pants kind and my life was kind of the best, until it wasn’t so I moved to Wisconsin.

This is another of the moves that my essay
about mistakes will cover. It was a significantly more mistakey mistake for a
number of reasons, some of which include the fact that I had to wear more pants
and also that the winter was more scary and bad only worse so.

Here is a story: Once, in Wisconsin, I
tried to brake on a hill in a snowstorm but instead I slid down it and the car
in front of me started sliding too and then we slid past each other, each of us
gently rotating in opposite directions but toward the same unrestricted intersection.

If I and the person in the other car had taken
a moment to wave cheerfully at one another other as we spun in slow motion
through each other’s orbits and to our certain simultaneous dooms it might’ve
been a better story, but I was screaming and maybe they were also, but I didn’t
check because I am a poor multitasker and was selfishly wetting my pants at the
time instead.

First I cried and then I went home and cried more and swore at winter a lot. So I moved to Minnesota next, to be with the lady who is now my lady-wife and that was a good move, in that way. However, the weather was decidedly the worst yet, and thus my decision-making capabilities remain firmly in question. Minnesota has enormous plows and subzero temperatures.

My wife grew up in Minnesota, and has a story about how she got frostbite in both of her thumbs. We feel a similar way about winter (“no”) and our vows included a pledge to live in a volcano or similar for 8 months of the year.

We kind of picked Vancouver, BC by looking
at a map and asking ourselves, “what place in Canada doesn’t have winter,”
and then moving there. We were wrong, though – it is winter now, and our heat
is on, and up, and the dogs are all under the blankets with me, and I’m looking
at the wet sidewalks outside, and the folk walking by with umbrellas, and
thinking about how quickly you can go from thinking 20F is fucking freezing to
finding 40F fucking unbearably cold but luckily you can still stay indoors at
any temperature.

Vancouver winters are rainy rather than
snowy, and it is a fact that rain makes everything grim and gloomy unless it is
rain on a fresh green meadow at dawn in some bucolic place in a Forester novel,
none of which adjectives belong to Vancouver proper. People from Vancouver say,
“the rain is terrible! Wouldn’t you prefer snow?” and we say
“no! no we certainly do not thank you very much and good day!” and
then we go back inside.

Being near-exclusively indoors folk it doesn’t technically matter whether it is rain or snow but from a purely morale-based perspective rain is infinitely preferred, we’ve discovered, maybe just because we’ve been hurt so badly by snow before, and the temperatures required to make it, and the salt required to ensure you don’t fall on your ass in it, and the way it accumulates and grows dirty and remains crowded into corners mocking the idea of the sun, and laughing at warmth and snickering at your hat, which doesn’t match your gloves and your thumbs are frostbitten anyway so why are you bothering?

There are a lot of outdoorsy folk in Vancouver, probably because mountains surround the city and they are the landscape feature most beloved by the athletic, an informal imaginary poll in my head tells me. All those people polled are still wrong, as are the ones who go outside. This is the least bad winter I’ve ever had to briefly be outside in, which is a whole other essay, topic: “Sometimes she learns before she is dead,” and that is the fairytale ending I always hoped for.

Some years ago I
promised my dog, name of Crom and much less small than he used to be, that I
would stay alive for him. The thinking behind the promise being that he would
like for me to stay alive because he is fond of me, his human mother and the
person who purchases his snacks.

Some of the time (when
he wags his whole body because he’s so glad to see me when he puts his head on
my shoulder and sighs real deep, when he insists that he can’t sleep unless I
let him under the covers so he can press his fart butt against my much less
fartier butt) it is easy to believe.

Most of the time
(when he sulks at me, when he whines at me, when he cries at me, when he throws
a temper tantrum at me, when he refuses to look at me because I haven’t given
him a snack, no the right snack, no that’s not the right snack, when he turns
into a full sack of flour in a fur suit instead of cooperating with me to put
on his coat, when he freaks all the way out because I’m paying more attention
to my wife or our other dog or a cat or trying to read than to his needs –) it
is easier to believe that I could pilot my weeping ass into the sea and sink beneath
the wine-dark waves and he would not look up from gnawing on his cow knee bone.

We buy this
creature cow knee bones! And once I called up my then-girlfriend to weep about all
the evil in the world and how I couldn’t take it and I couldn’t be part of it
any more and then we were vegan for two or eleven years!

For this creature I
have discovered in full technicolor what a cow knee bone looks like even though
I still regularly weep at all the evil in the world (I am delicately-feeled and
also deep in the throes of pre-menopause) and despite that, despite the
tantrums, despite the fact that he’s never sent me a thank you card, I’ve still
handed it over to him with a smile on my face because I love him and I’m
staying alive for him, and if you smile you can pretend that doesn’t suck
sometimes.

This creature gets
knee bones and still throws tantrums because he gets bored. He can’t read, he
doesn’t like television very much, and he does not have opposable thumbs but
he’s requested them for Christmas. He wants to run and run after his ball, is
what he wants to do at all times.

This is something he
hasn’t been able to do since the summer, because he’s been recovering from a
broken leg, and his boredom has reached Geneva convention levels of find-him-a-new-mother.
And yet, even when he was able to run, even when we took him to run every day,
even when he ran all morning and gnawed a knee bone all afternoon, he was still
a sad dog, sad all the time, always, because we were always making him sad
because we want him to be bored and sad.

Which is to say we
should have thought of Montessori doggie day care way sooner. We tried regular
day care, but he came home and sulked. We tried hiring people to give him mountain
hikes and beach runs and daily walks at a pace that wasn’t sustainable for two sedentary
women who hate the out of doors and fun first, but he came home and sulked. We
tried letting him sulk, but that wasn’t fun for anyone.

So now we have an
intake appointment for him now to go to a place where he gets supervised play
time with his peers, and then one-on-one time with a tutor who will teach him
interesting things, and group exercise times because a healthy body means a
healthy mind and I am glad I have given up drinking because that’s the only way
we’re going to pay for this place once a week, plus his aquatherapy for his leg
and also arthritis, which is starting to really hurt him. Also there’s a dog
swimming pool now opening right across the way, so. Feeling lucky that I’ll
live just long enough to see our retirement accounts drained.

First: Don’t daydream about being famous, not when you’re still writing. Write your story pretending like that’s not even a possibility, and then fling it away from you. Send it into the world and pretend it never happened. Otherwise, you won’t get through any of the next bits. The ones with where you’re at all of their mercy, for good or ill.

But it really does start out pretty nice.

I had written a memoir proposal — a story about the fairy tale of weight loss, and what an ugly, terrible lie it is, the story they sell you about how being thin solves all your problems and grants you ahappily ever after you’re supposed to drift daintily into, nibbling low-fat wheat thins and always smiling. No, my book was about thinking I was alone, when I realized I had lost a couple hundred pounds and my problems weren’t solved — yet. Realizing that I was so much more than finally-thin, and about girding my loins to go find a real kind of happiness that meant something.

For over a year and a half editors said right, but how is this different from all the other weight loss memoirs? The part where there’s no happily ever after, I said. Right, so how are we supposed to sell a weight loss book without a happy ending? It’s not a weight loss book I said. Right, so what is it then?

So I sighed and said YOU KNOW WHAT, FINE and just gritted my teeth and wrote the damn thing.

THERE THAT’LL SHOW THEM, I said. HA HA HA, I added.

The manuscript went back out into the world, back to the skeptical publishers and the confused publishers and the suspicious publishers and around to anyone else we had possibly missed the first time.

More waiting. The waiting feels like it’ll never end. That’s maybe my most important piece of advice: Publishing is glacial. The pre-climate-crisis kind of glaciar, I mean.

But it finally happened, and it happened when I was in a Target in Salt Lake City, Utah. I had a shopping basket over one arm and was flipping through a rack of sale cardigans — too young, too young, too weird, too young, why is greige still a real colour. 

The phone rang — my phone never rang — so I fumbled with it a bit and when I got it up to my ear, my agent was saying, “Jen? Jen? Did you hear me? They want it!”

I said,
“What?”

“They want it!” she said.

“Want
what?” I said. I dropped my basket. There was a pair of leggings in it, and my
wallet. I watched the basket tip over on the navy speckled carpet.

The manuscript had been picked up, she said. An editor I loved at a small press I loved wanted it.

“What?” I said.

Very slowly, very patiently, she said, “Seal Press is buying your manuscript,” and then suddenly I was on the floor of the Target, hunched over my tumbled-over basket of leggings and weeping, my face stretched into a terror-mask of glistening mascara tears and the inside of my head pounding yellow.

“Miss, are you okay?” a Target employee asked me, crouching down several feet away. I was hugging the leggings in my arms. I was making monkey noises into the phone.

I looked up at her. I clutched the phone to my chest. “I’m so happy!” I wailed. She left me alone.

Publication is supposed pure happiness for a writer. It’s validation, right? It’s the holy grail. It’s the holy grail of validation and I don’t know any writer who really means it when they say, Oh, I write for myself, full stop. I mean, they might. And I bless them and their purity.

I wanted to be published because it’s what I had wanted from the time I had walked by the Random House offices in midtown manhattan, hand in hand with my dad, and recognized those silver words spelled out on the building, on the front doors, from the spine of a book at home.

“Oh!” my dad said. “Yeah, that’s where they make books.”

 “THEY MAKE BOOKS?” I said. Apparently I had thought you found them under a bush or in the damp confines of clouds after a rainbow.

My father patiently explained that authors were people who made up stories which were brought to the publishing houses by storks or something – he was unclear on the entire byzantine publishing process, as most humans are – and then voila! We’re reading Little Women at bedtime again and as usual you’re getting really angry about Jo selling her hair.

“That one,” I said to him. “I want to be that one.” A person who made books.

And even though I didn’t actually ever finish even the shortest short story until I was almost thirty, that conviction lodged like a splinter in my heart all those years, wobbling every beat of it. It still does. I want to be that one. On the floor of a suburban Target, I realized that I finally was that one.

And I was so unprepared for what that meant. Or no – I wasn’t naive. I knew exactly what that meant, every possibility that I could encounter as a writer; I just had forgotten to think about it because I couldn’t keep all of it in my head at once, while I was writing a draft, because otherwise I would be writing this from beyond the grave.

But still, the thing I was most unprepared for was how I would react once I finally let myself imagine what it really truly meant to have, specifically, a memoir on the shelves. A true story, hand to god. A book that, from cover to cover, ripped open and spilled out all the tarry, sticky, factory-seconds and -thirds and -fourths parts of me. That asked you to look over this collection of mistakes and mishaps, fuckups and misdeeds, and like me any way.

Oh, I
stopped sleeping, once the final copy edits were in and the next step was hard
copies, sold in stores for cash money, to anyone who could pony up. But I also
knew all those dreams authors have, about being a bestseller, about going on
Oprah, about winning the Man Booker and the Pulitzer in the same year and etc.
all have about the same odds as lightning strikes or humans being alone in the
universe.

Don’t panic – but also don’t sell yourself short. That’s the other thing.

The month before the official publication date, my agent called me. I was in a nail salon in Green Bay, Wisconsin, visiting my oldest friends – the ones who knew me at my heaviest, who worried with me before during and after surgery. Who told me that a memoir would for sure be the coolest thing ever.

My agent said, “Okay, are you sitting down?” and I wasn’t, but it didn’t matter because she kept going. She started screaming, actually. “PEOPLE MAGAZINE. YOU WERE REVIEWED IN PEOPLE MAGAZINE.”

“Oh,” I said, sliding down the wall.

It was a good review, the one on the lead page, too, and more reviews came out, because I had the world’s best publicist, let me be clear. There were requests for radio and print interviews, and then the book was published and Good Morning America found me and there was no time to think, because I had to cut out of work on my first day at a new job and sprint home to meet their camera crew.

They showed up with a van of equipment, told me not to be nervous, that this would be fun, and could I maybe turn off that buzzing noise coming from the kitchen while they set up their – and they gestured at the piles of television things that apparently had to be set up.

The timer on the 50’s-era stove had been broken so long I didn’t even notice any more, but I raced into the kitchen and started pounding on it. I had pulled out a hammer when the camera operator came up behind me and said “Hey, whoa!”

He called in the whole crew and they crowded around us. They muttered at each other. He said to me, “Don’t worry about this, okay? You just go focus on being a big TV star.” He patted my shoulder, and he shooed me away.

The buzzing
had stopped by the time I emerged from the bathroom, dry-eyed and ready to face
what I had wanted all along. What I had brought on myself.

I thought I did – well, fine. Actually, I have no idea, because I have never watched or listened to a single interview I’ve ever done, because that way lies madness. Probably I’d be better at them if I had, but was erring on the side of self-care. But I lived through it, and that was enough for me.

The segment aired the next morning. They called it, “Woman Loses 200 Pounds, Still Miserable.”

I looked at
that headline, and I covered my face and I wasn’t sure if I was going to laugh
until I died or die of embarrassment or a little bit of both, because really,
that’s how this book was going to get distilled? That’s how this whole complex
mess of feels and doubts and worries and figurings-it-out was going to come
across?

Once your book is loose in the world, you have no control over where it goes, or who sees it. Who sees it, or what they say about it. What they say about it, and what they want from you. Don’t read your reviews; they’re none of your business and anyway, the good ones won’t even leave a mark.

Pick up when your bikini waxer calls to yell, “I SAW YOU ON THE FRONT PAGE OF YAHOO,” but do not look at the comments on the article. Turn off your laptop and walk away when you are told by a reliable source that there’s an entire forum of people ripping you to shreds for being a whiny, self-aggrandizing little bitch who didn’t do the surgery right, is a terrible role model, can’t even write a sentence and anyway, Brenda, your story is way more inspiring, you should have been the one who wrote a book.

Freak out when someone from the Oprah network calls, and say yes without thinking because you’ll think yourself to death. Don’t watch that show when it airs either. But at every opportunity, make sure you tell the story about the incredibly ripped camera guy who stripped his shirt off every time before the camera started rolling, to help you relax.

Writing is hard, and publishing is weird, and publicity is exhausting, and confusing, and dumb and so is publishing. Because you know, all that was great but my second book – it sank, as they say, like a stone. My next publishing house was a big one with a million other titles coming out at the same time, and mine just wasn’t that important, and that’s how it goes. Lots of younger readers thought it was too complicated. A reviewer thought it was ugly-simple-ignorant, the way I had written the fat main character, because what did I know about being fat? OBVIOUSLY NOTHING. And etc., and so on, and then, and then, and then.

You have no control over anything but the writing. You have no control over anything but the truth in all of its capitalizations, in fiction and in non-. You have nothing else, and it’s enough. So then you just go from there, as best you can.

What do you get the girl who saved your life? I chose a trip to Costa Rica, when an unexpected royalty check came. And I chose Alajuela, deep in the countryside where rolling, dwarf-tree spotted hills gave way to old-growth rainforest. A tree house, in the middle of a hot springs resort. I didn’t explain to Kelsey why I needed to whisk her away from the breath-stealing Minnesota cold and into tropical luxury, when I present her the confirmation email; she doesn’t ask. We don’t talk about how a nature resort would be unlikely to sell alcohol, and how grateful I was for that.

“A girls’ trip!” her mother calls it. She is still getting used to
having a daughter-in-law and not a son-. At some point Kelsey and I just start calling
it our pre-honeymoon, even as I feel swallowed whole by my absolute conviction
that she shouldn’t, should not marry me, something I had never confessed to her.
What if she believes me?

An unemployed writer. Drinking problem. Not suicidal any more. Not
really.

The night before we leave, I scrub the house shining so that we
could fling open the door to an apartment that felt clean, and fresh, and new. I
appreciate metaphors, especially the clichéd ones that are clichéd for a
reason.

At five a.m. we fly out of the Minneapolis airport. survival-mode
time when coffee replaces conversations and you realize you haven’t made direct
eye contact since the alarm went off at three a.m.. We come stumbling through
customs close to midnight. I white-knuckled the flight without my customary
collection of tiny airplane-sized bottles, and my coping has dwindled to mist
and vapor. We drag bags full of things we weren’t sure we’d need, but maybe, who
knows. Tourist sites described endless rain and warm sun both; hot and sticky
but also chilly and gray, muddy roads and dusty roads and rocky roads and watch
out for snakes. Kelsey went on a shopping frenzy months before, buying sturdy
shoes and plastic raincoats, pants and t-shirts and hoodies in high-tech
fabrics you could re-enter the atmosphere in, everything and anything she could
imagine, prepared for any contingency, as is her way. She had shown up at my
apartment that night without anything at all, and held me until I stopped
shaking. Every time I say thank you,
and I’m so sorry, she shakes her
head, and again and again, and her arms are fierce, around me.

Our ride from the airport is a dented and rusting gray van that
smelled like pine air freshener. Our driver, Delano, rattles out of the city
and flies up into the mountains, on an unlit, one-lane road so steep that maps
and newspapers and coffee cups go tumbling into the back seat in a slow-motion
avalanche. The van lurches and rocks and rattles around the endless blind
corners and Delano texts on his phone, glancing up at the road and sharply course-correcting
when we drifted to the right, inches away from plunging into the dark and empty
abyss beyond the guardrail. I squeeze my eyes shut and cling to Kelsey’s arm.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.

“Why are you sorry?” she whispers back.

“We’re going to drive off the mountain.”

“We’re not going to drive off the mountain,” she says. She
takes my hand and squeezes it.

“I didn’t mean to pick a vacation where we would drive off a
mountain,” I say, clenching my fingers around hers. “We should not
drive off a mountain on our first vacation together.”

“Oh, sweetheart—” she starts off soothingly, and then Delano
drops his phone and curses in Spanish, swerving to avoid the dog standing
calmly in the centre of the one-lane road.

The van scrapes along the guardrail and Delano’s head is somewhere
around his knees as he scrambles for his phone. I lie face-down on the peeling
leather back seat next to K and cover my ears with my hands and try to do the
kind of breathing that is supposed to prevent a panic attack but just means I am
hyperventilating. I flinch when the radio clicked on. Delano keens along with
the trumpets and pounds the steering wheel to the beat.

Kelsey puts her hand on the back of my neck and whispers something
soothing that I can’t hear over the driver’s cheerful singalong. Under my
cheek, the foam smells like cigarette smoke. I don’t want to cry.

“Is he still texting?” I ask her.

“No of course not,” she says. I do not believe her. She tugs, and I
slide over to put my head in her lap. She strokes my hair, leaning forward as
if she could shield me.

“This definitely wasn’t the way I planned to die,” I say.
Because it was funny, really. Her hand tightens, just the tiniest bit, on my
neck and I hear her suck in a breath.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper after a moment.

The van swerves again, Delano curses again, and I sob, the sound
thumping out of my chest.

He laughs. “Have fun!” he calls back to us. “Don’t
worry, this is easy. I do it all the time.”

We arrive. We lived.

When we pull up, the treehouse lights are all off. In that instant after engine putters off, it is so dark that the sound of the insects seem to echo in my ears. On Airbnb there was a photo of the treehouse at night, surrounded by canopy of elephant-ear trees, glowing gold like it was welcoming us home. “Yes, yes, yes,” Delano just says, climbing back into the van as we ask if someone is going to meet us, if there is a key, if we should go up the miles of stairs looping around to the treehouse far above us and let ourselves in. And then he pulls away in a stutter of gravel and the shriek of an ancient transmission, and we’re left in the dark with our bags at our feet.

K turns on her phone, aiming the light of the screen at the wall of trees surrounding us, too dense to see between.

“Well,” she says.

“I’m sorry!” I say. “I thought someone was going to meet us!”

“Hey look, a little frog!” she says, crouching to examine the moist-looking thing crouched on the second step.

“It’s probably poisonous,” I say. “We are in the jungle. This was a terrible idea.”

She puts her arm around me. She is an engineer, as steady and rational a human can be. More aware than most of us that regrets are unhelpful. She does not point out that we are here alone in the dark in the rainforest, surrounded by the rustling undergrowth in which Costa Rican zebra tarantulas probably thrived, and there is nothing we can do about it. She just says, “Someone’s going to come.”

I settle against
her.

“I know,” I say.

A flashlight beam, from the end of the driveway, and a voice almost drowned out by the insistence of the insects. Our host, Johann, appears in the glow of Kelsey’s phone, so happy to see us. He is very beautiful, and he grew up here on this land. We spend the whole week admiring his perfect romance-novel-cover, shoulder-length fall of thick red-shot chestnut curls.

He throws our bags over his shoulders and leaps quickly up the steep, winding steps. He has his perfect tourist spiel memorized.

“Just a 45-minute drive from the many activities in Fortuna and
Volcano Arenal, including volcano hikes, ziplines, swimming in the pristine
waters below the La Fortuna Waterfall,” he sings. He and Kelsey pause on
the landing above to wait for me to catch up to them.

“Activities,” Johann adds, leaning over the rail and
beaming down at me. “Many activities for you.” His head disappears. I
can hear him talking to Kelsey on the landing above me. “You need a kettle?
Or hand papers, maybe,” and her murmurs in return.

He hurls our bags up to the loft, high above the main room of the
cabin and only reachable by a ladder, pats us on the shoulders and thunders back
down the stairs. It’s silent. My hands are trembling, but only a little.

“Bed,” Kelsey says, and prods me toward the ladder. “Sleep.”

Outside, the locomotive shriek of a monkey or a monkey being murdered. Behind me, Kelsey jumps and mutters, missing a rung on the ladder.

Our loft bed is surrounded by white netting, romantic in the warm, low light; close up, it is covered in a squirming carpet of insects, too many of them in poisonous-looking colors, too many of them too large to be real, too many of them with too many legs.

“I’m sorry!” I say, when she makes it up the ladder and squints at the netting around the bed. She pushes me through an opening of gauzy curtain and then settles it back around us, closing it tight.

“So many activities,” she says, turning off the lights, gathering
me up, tugging the covers up around us, drawing me closer. “We can do
anything,” she says, kissing my temple. It takes a long while to fall
asleep, blanketed by the dark.

Anything: Five days tucked into the treehouse with the rain
thwacking the windows and the trees swaying around us. We eat peanut butter
sandwiches and drink terrible coffee. Kelsey tears through all the books we packed,
pages damp and soft from the humidity, while I nap beside her, heavy dreamless
sleeps I wake up from disoriented. I haven’t slept that hard or that well in
too long. We nest in our bed, skin to skin when the weather cools, an arms-length
apart, fingertips touching, when the heat ramps up. We are as indolently
pleased with ourselves as the sloth wrapped around the branch outside our
window.

We only venture out of the treehouse when the rain pauses to slide
into the remarkable hot spring waters that dot the property. It is as easy,
between Kelsey and I, and as smooth as the water pouring down between the piled
rocks that encircle each of the natural hot springs, each hidden among the
trees, appearing unexpectedly as you follow the path around the largest tree
you’ve ever seen.

Kelsey and I, we were unexpected. I had been in love, or something
terrible that I somehow mistook for love, with her best friend — a man who exceled
at saying one thing while he meant ten thousand others. Kelsey didn’t think she
was interested in women. When she and I met, we became immediately inseparable.
The night she kissed me, everything changed.

Together we slip into the hot spring, dark in the tree-filtered
sunlight. We sink up to our necks and close our eyes.

“I feel like we’re doing it wrong,” I say on our fifth
night. I trail my fingers through the fountain at the far end of the pool, hot
water pouring from the mouth of a carved stone panther. This is the warmest of
all the pools and it hurts almost as it soaks through my whole body and fills
me up with something that could have been mistaken with well-being. We haven’t
gone ziplining or to see any volcanoes. We haven’t seen anything of Costa Rica
except each other. “Am I doing it wrong?” I ask.

She stretches out, resting her head against the rim of the pool,
letting her legs float up. “No,” she says. “But we could do something,”
she adds, opening her eyes. “I don’t want you to feel like you’ve missed
something.”

“I don’t think I’ve missed anything,” I say. I shift out
from under the unexpectedly pounding pressure of the fountain. “I don’t
want you to miss anything.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says, and I know what she means. I
am grateful to still be here. For the warmth of the water and the shining gold-brown
wing of her hair across her cheek, her graceful neck, her careful hands. The
complex universe of her heart and the incandescent, intricate lacework of her
brain. The luck of it all.

Later, as I’m drowsing beside her in bed, she’s reading, and I open my
eyes every once in awhile to make sure she’s still there, and then she reaches
over and takes my hand. “Let’s do that hike tomorrow,” she says.
“The rainforest hike around the resort. Before we leave for the
airport.”

“That’s what you want?”

“I did buy hiking shoes,” she says.

That morning, just a few hours before we have to get back into the
van that will take us down the mountain, we follow the hand-drawn map our host
left us. Muddy paths that swerve off the edges of cliffs, swing around trees,
have helpful nylon ropes to let us drag ourselves up nearly vertical surfaces,
slipping and skidding, holding hands as we crash through the brush and get
increasingly lost. My internal compass has gone haywire. I am filth from my
neck to my knees; Kelsey is splattered, her new hiking shoes are soaked and probably
unsalvageable, but look of pure and wretched determination, lit by the weak
beams of light that penetrate the forest canopy, turn her into a Renaissance
portrait of an arrow-studded saint.

We forget to watch for the edifying wildlife we were told to expect;
we are just trying to make it back alive.

The trail abruptly curves sharply left – the wrong way. Not the wide circle around and dart back east that the map insists we were supposed to making right here. We climb over fallen branches and circle around a mud pit, knowing that we going more and more the wrong way. Kelsey stops and glares at the map. There’s a wrinkle between her eyebrows, one she hadn’t had before we met. I need to smooth it out with my thumb.

“Let’s go that way,” I say, pointing to a break in the bushes.

She glances at me, and then at what could be called a path, if you were generous. She tucks the map back in her raincoat pocket, grinning. “Okay,” she says. “Go Team Us.” She squeezes my fingers, and my heart squeezes too.

Together we duck under the grasping limbs of swaying trees and around rock formations and burst suddenly from the canopy and into a field greener than a crayon. Two cows with blank with bank teller expressions regard us steadily. It’s the pasture west of the property we’re staying on, we realize. The worry in my chest cracks open and relief and euphoria pours out, seeps through me.

“Hello, cow,” Kelsey says, throwing her arms around its neck. She is covered in mud and her hair is sticking straight up and her face is red and she’s not relieved, or looking saved. We made it out of the jungle, because of course we were always going to. She just looks happy. I try not to worry that the cow will bite her face off, because I have finally learned that all animals just adore her.

“All right, now what?” she says, when she’s done cooing at her cow friend.

“Home is that way,” I tell her. I don’t need to look at the map anymore. I point at the hard-packed dirt road just beyond the pasture’s fence, and take her hand.