the habit of being

I feel like I have never seen so much snow fall.

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In Michigan, that one trip, when it was on the ground in piles: It was so cold, and I didn’t bring anything with me but short skirts, because I wanted to look pretty, and his mother asked if I went to a school where I wasn’t allowed to wear pants. And his mother got mad at him for sleeping with me, because I was underaged, so he shoveled the driveway to make up for it. After that, I just called Michigan the “Place Where It Snows,” a surreal land where girls fly in as virgins and come home with pearl necklaces and hating their homes, where it hasn’t snowed in 10 years.

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The storm started the day after Valentines Day, the 15th of February, our fifth anniversary.

A few days earlier, he came home from work and said he had a surprise for me. I said “is it chocolate,” and he said “no, it’s not chocolate.” He handed me a bottle. It was St. John’s Wort.

Then, two days before my period, we had the PMS relationship talk. I was crying; he’d said something about how I’d put my CDs in the same box as his, how I shouldn’t do that, because they might get mixed up, because it might cause problems later on. I thought having your CDs get mixed up was the whole point of living with someone. I think these things, when it’s been a while since the last PMS relationship talk.

In typical fashion, for messes like ours, he asked what was wrong, barely even looking up from his computer screen, and I cried more and said nothing. He asked again and, instead of answering the question, which I desperately wanted to answer, I asked why he wanted to know. I don’t remember his answer, but it wasn’t a good one, and I said so, and he said he was sick of all the pointless right and wrong answer shit, sick of listening to me crying, sick of my disappearing into my own little world. It is like the script from a bad movie. There is the logical, unattached, and seemingly cold boy, the overemotional sensitive girl who contradicts herself over and over, the overwhelming atmosphere of futility and wasted emotion. I find myself looking at the scene that way, like someone who sees it in a theatre rather than someone who was actually there, who actually knows the history behind this argument and the depth of the characters, who can play such vivid roles when not trapped in this soap opera set.

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I’ve walked everywhere in the snow, to CVS for skittles and deep conditioner. I bought new boots for the snow and watched people skiing down the sidewalks. Two feet of snow. Cars buried in snow. I hurt my leg trudging through it; I stopped at the studio on the way home from the church (the old studio) and contemplated getting drunk on leftover wine from the Open House and sliding around the hardwood floors in my socks, because it was late and I had a key and I have pink hair, but I didn’t do it. I walked the rest of the way home and my leg hurt and my eyes burned and an old man asked me if he could buy me a nightcap, said a fortune teller told him he’d meet a redhead for drinks. I politely declined.

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There was some storming away and yelling before I said, finally, “we can’t talk. that’s what’s wrong.” He was lying face down on the bed. It’s not his priority, he said, to fix this. It would take all his energy and he doesn’t have it to give. (”I know that sounds awful.” he said. “Yeah, it does. It sounds really, really awful,” I said.”) He wants to go to Europe. He came here because he had a vision of how his life could be and he thought I could fit into it. That’s all. He didn’t make any promises. He thought I understood. He has said all this so many times. I make myself forget it. I deny it. I can’t live my life day by day reminding myself that I am just a roommate who fucks, because this means I am being used and this means I am stupid. This means when he says he loves me, he means something I don’t understand. This means that the fact that we’ve been together for five whole years is completely meaningless, we might as well have just met, in terms of “commitment,” which I’m beginning to see are the terms that matter most to me. The really sad part about it is that if we’d just met, we’d actually be much better off. We wouldn’t be resenting each other for the past; we wouldn’t be so afraid of one another, we wouldn’t know how badly we could hurt one another.

He said he didn’t see how I could see us being together much longer. I said I saw nothing. I cried and said how can you say this and how can you say that and I said I just wanted to make it better. I just wanted something real. I just wanted to give him something and to get something from him. I said I needed that. Even if it’s not love, there has to be something. Some point. Tears and smeary make-up. A Lifetime original movie star - sitting in a rocking chair from Michigan telling the sloppy truth. He said this and I said that, he said the longer we live together, the more obvious it becomes that I just don’t really like him very much, that we just don’t have the same interests.

Interests. Mine: writing, yoga, bookmaking, website-making, being an artist, emotions. His: going to Europe, Italy, bicycle touring, healthy eating and exercise, Literati, movies. We used to talk about the same things. We used to talk. We used to talk about Us, which was #1 on both our interests lists. Our favorite subjects: Us and Being In Love. Now, we call that stuff “baggage” and we wish it’d get lost at the airport.

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On the anniversary, the first day of the storm, I dyed my hair pink. It was supposed to be red, the bathroom looked like the scene of a murder when I was done. It seemed red enough then, the excess dye dripping down my back and staining the tiles in the shower, pooling at my feet. Now my hair’s blonde on the ends and bright bright pink on top and still pretty brown in the back. I look like a heroin addict. I look like a punk. I painted my fingernails glittery silver. Looking like this makes me feel younger than I have in years, and I am much too young to be saying things like that. I keep looking at myself in the mirror and feeling shocked. It isn’t pretty. It’s very silly and I want to fix it when Commander Salamander opens again and I can get more dye, but it is interesting, and I got dressed up in my fishnets and my feather boa just to have sex. I want to put on a million necklaces and dance.

When I was younger, I’d draw pictures of flowers and write “flower” next to them. I’d do the same with cats and skinny girls.

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We didn’t come up with a solution. We lay together on the bed and laughed about having “theme days” where we only talked about certain things, and my plan of doing one “explicitly nice thing” for him, every day. We felt better for having voiced our opinions and grievances. We felt closer. We had sex, and the next day everything felt okay, like the weight was lifted, just in time for Valentines Day, just in time for the day after Valentines Day, our fifth anniversary. I bought him books about Italy and a little pocket-sized Moleskine journal like the one Hemingway carried. I wrapped it all in red and white tissue paper, with The Executioner’s Song and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We made dinner together, we watched My So-Called Life. In the kitchen, he said “it’s so nice when things are good.” I started my period and the holidays came and then the storm. He brought me flowers and semisweet chocolate bricks we melted in the Everyday Pan and then dipped fresh strawberries and blackberries and even bananas in. And things began to settle again. Lightness does not sustain itself.

The snow just gets trampled on and turned into nasty brown slush, stepped on too much, by people like me.