distraction no.99

Omens

September 30th, 2022

When I first moved to Philadelphia, I saw an omen. It was my first weekend in the city in the spring of 2018. I awoke late Sunday morning in the apartment we’d just rented in Center City and headed out to go get coffee. But as I emerged from the lobby I discovered a LITERAL DUMPSTER FIRE directly across the street. I stood there, mouth gaping, but so did a number of others. Everyone was calm, as if this is a thing that happens here often, and so I took my cue from them, snapping this picture with my phone and then just witnessing the fire burn.

After some time I wondered if anyone was going to do something or if we were waiting for it to go out on its own. It wasn’t spreading. But it wasn’t stopping either. Was I supposed to do something? Were we all? No one seemed alarmed. No one even spoke. Then, after a time, two people wearing all black came calmly out the back door of a restaurant and each poured a bucket of water over the fire, dousing it in a last hot breath of smoke.

It was over. People started walking down the street once more. A car passed. The morning went on.

But I admit I was shaken over the symbolism. I’m the kind of person who sees signs in everything, from a random song playing to the words or numbers in a patch of graffiti, so of course I wondered if my walking out at just that moment to see this was an omen of some kind.

You see, I’d just made the decision to leave the only real home I’d ever known, the city where I’d lived my whole adulthood and had always thought I’d grow old in. I might have stayed there forever, like one of those old nonnas in the building next door who’d walk so very slowly together to the market with their hair up in colorful kerchiefs, stooped over their grocery carts, sometimes needing help with the front door. I used to see those nonnas all the time… and then I didn’t any longer. I don’t remember when, or if one was left without the other, but at some point they disappeared from Sullivan Street. Just as I had, to move to Philadelphia.

Was the dumpster fire a not so subtle sign that I’d made the wrong choice? If so, it was too late to change it. The move was done, the lease was signed, the keys to the rent-stabilized apartment let go, the money spent. The boxes were stacked in the new living room, and there I was.

Moving to Philly didn’t end up being what I expected: the pandemic came for us all soon after and I went full hermit, so I’m not sure what my life here might have been if that hadn’t happened. I do know we didn’t stay in the apartment where I saw the omen. I’m now renting a house in a quieter neighborhood away from any dumpsters, with a spacious writing office filled with books. We were meant to survive the pandemic in this house in Philadelphia instead of in our old tiny box on Sullivan Street in New York, and this is not one of my regrets.

Still, every so often, I find myself thinking of the dumpster fire that greeted me my first weekend here. I find myself transported back. Standing on the sidewalk passively watching it burn—doing nothing, saying nothing, a growing sense of doom creeping up my legs.

If you write books and try to publish them, I might ask: Does this feeling sound familiar?

Authors know that pitfalls in our writing careers can come on suddenly. You step out the door one morning and there’s a dumpster lit and roaring and you never even smelled the smoke. Or you can have a sense that something’s rumbling under the surface in the industry and you just can’t put your finger on it… and then some news of a consolidation or a downsizing or a natural sea change in staffing happens and your favorite marketing director or fantastic publicist or beloved editor leaves and it all clicks and you think, Aha, that’s what I was waiting for. There it is.

The smaller things too, the personal cuts. The nos. The lack of invites or the lack of support. It can be anything at all, that one disappointing surprise you didn’t see coming, that gut punch, that sting.

It might feel like it’s about you, but is it really? It’s more the fact that once we step into this industry, nothing is in our control.

Does this make me a pessimist or a realist or a passive ostrich with her head buried in sand? All I know is the fear about what can go wrong can be debilitating. Worrying so much about impending doom doesn’t help keep it away… or get a (good) book written… it only has me standing on a sidewalk panicking and looking around to see what might go up in flames next.

Lately, I’ve turned my attention inward. What I tell myself as I revise this long-awaited* book is that I can’t control what’s going on outside my door. I cannot control one single thing out there. I don’t know when another dumpster fire might reveal itself on this street or another, or when something amazing might fall into my lap. I can’t read the signs, because really everything could change at any moment. But there is something I can control. It’s myself. It’s the words I put on the page. It’s my story, this book I’m striving to write—as well as the other partly formed beginnings and halves and appendages of books I plan to write next, books I believe in, no matter who else does.

I can control only my work and how much of myself I put into it, not what happens to it and not what any of you think. All I can do is make this book the best I can, for myself. And if someone sets it on fire or spits on it afterward, at least I can look back on the effort I put into it—the choices that are in my control—without regret.

Last year, I was on the bus headed home from teaching a class in University City when a series of sirens started going off on everyone’s phones. The bus was crowded with strap-hangers and people piled into every available seat, and a bunch of us were getting emergency alerts from the city about a tornado warning. We were to seek immediate shelter.

Rain came down. The sky turned an ominous color. And yet the bus driver kept going along South Street without an announcement and without a reaction, and after a few murmurs that there was maybe a tornado about to hit, one woman jumped off at the next stop and ran in a frenzy down the block, but everyone else simply stayed on. Everyone around me was calm, collected, unfazed. That’s the thing about the people of Philly that I’ve come to recognize: They really have seen it all. I kept to my seat, the bus kept moving block to block, stop to stop, wind and rain whipping at the windows. And though I’d never experienced tornado warnings in any capacity like this before, my overactive imagination was visualizing a SEPTA bus lifting up in the sky and the ceiling ripping open and our bodies flying out the gaping hole into the Schuylkill, which is a river not at all pronounced the way it’s spelled. I was rattled with doomsday images, thinking of the person I loved who I wouldn’t see again, and the book I was writing that I wouldn’t get to finish and maybe that was okay, maybe I didn’t need to finish it after all, and any of the bad things in my head could have happened because they happen all over the world every day, but what came next was this:

The bus reached my stop as usual and I got off.

I was soaking wet by the time I made it to my front door, my heart beating wildly, but if this was another omen it didn’t harm a hair on me. The tornado passed us by. And beneath it, I was left alive to write another day.

* I don’t know if you would consider my next book long-awaited—but I really want it finished, so I certainly do!
Unidentified Flying Objects

September 23rd, 2022

Image from Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, 1956

I was born with the mark of a flying saucer on my leg. The birthmark is smooth, pigmented a light brown, and creates the shape of a long oval—a UFO setting off back to its homeland in the stars.

When I was young I was painfully aware of the UFO on my body because people would point it out to me when I had a dress on and my calves were exposed, sometimes even strangers walking by—“Is that a birthmark on your leg?” It was darker then, more obvious against my uncomfortably pale skin. And I was more uncertain of myself then, aware of everything that marked me as unordinary: this spot, my family, my shyness, my lack of religion (a Jew to some, not Jewish enough to others), my vegetarian diet, my inability to catch a ball or speak up in class, my outlandish hippie name among a sea of 1980s Jennifers and Heathers and Johns and Jonathans. I took to covering the birthmark with jeans or tights. Later on in high school I often wore black fishnets with dresses and shorts, which I loved for aesthetic reasons, but also, I admit, had the added benefit of distracting from the mark. The funny thing is, in reality, most people probably didn’t even notice my birthmark. I was more aware of it than anyone else, which is the case with most things you dislike about yourself. It mattered to me, and now, years later, doesn’t matter at all.

Now I go whole years forgetting it’s even there. The color has lightened, but it still has kept its smooth disc-like shape, and it’ll be a small surprise when I see it in the mirror, remembering it’s there. It’s a simple café au lait birthmark—so ordinary, so many people have them. They’re hereditary. I seem to remember a long time ago my grandmother on my father’s side saying it’s the “DeLaura birthmark,” which means there are others in her family line who may have had it, maybe on their legs, too, tying me to ancestors I’ve never met and whose names I don’t know. I’m not in touch really with that side of the family, but I’m marked as one of them.

Lately, as I get older, I’ve been thinking of the signs we’re given about the lives we live. Have I listened to mine? There are different beliefs all over the world that say the kind of birthmark you have—the color, the shape, the placement—is not in fact random. That it might hold meaning.

A birthmark could be what’s been called a “maternal impression”: some event or sighting a pregnant person has that makes itself known on the body of the baby. But if my mother had a UFO sighting in the months before I was born, she never told me. A café au lait “stain” as it’s called might simply mean my mother really loves coffee (in fact, she does—mystery solved?). The shape of the birthmark itself might be meaningful: a perfect elliptical, geometrically sound—what might this be speaking to about who I’m meant to be?

Some say a birthmark tells you how you died in a previous life. I look at mine and might ask: Did I drink too much caffeine and my heart gave out? Is it a gaping bullet wound? Did I trip and fall into a deep hole? Others say that a birthmark indicates the lesson you are meant to learn in this life. A birthmark on the leg in particular means that in this life I’m meant to learn to be independent, make my own decisions, and stand on my own. With all the choices I’ve made to get myself here—a writer who made impractical decisions again and again to follow her dreams, a woman who consciously decided to not have children and never regrets it—I might in fact be living what my birthmark has asked me to be.

But the UFO itself—the shape I always saw and took to calling it—what might that mean? It speaks to me about belonging, a feeling I’ve very rarely had, in any place and especially not in any groups of people, which can be especially painful and cause me to isolate and push things away. When I try to be like other people—to do what I see other authors doing in their careers or on social media, for example—I inevitably feel pathetic or disgusted with myself, and then I inevitably fail. So I’ve stopped. I’ve just stopped. Is this what it means to learn to walk on your own? To embrace the alien inside your skin and not hide who you are, even with a lovely pair of spiderweb fishnets?

Every book I’ve written has marked me in some way, different colored stains and shapes all over my body only I can see. The book I’m revising now exposes some of who I am, the girl with the UFO on her leg, the girl who didn’t belong and then who embraced the unbelonging and said it’s what she wanted. I see these things in the sky of my manuscript even if no one else will. This may be why the writing of it has been such a tremendously difficult undertaking, an experience I may only be able to speak about in the future, after I can look back on it from a safe distance.

The closer I get to finishing this book, the more and more it all comes clear, at least to me. This has been a long journey. This has changed me. This has wounded me. This will inevitably leave a mark.
Fear of Falling

September 2nd, 2022

Photo by Ginevra Austine on Unsplash

I have always been afraid of stairs.

In darker moments—literally when the sun goes down—a staircase becomes taller somehow, bending off into unknowable, impenetrable shadow. The fall down is longer, more dangerous. The prickling sensation along the spine comes. I start hurrying up. I can’t look behind me. I have to keep climbing. I can breathe only at the top.

This has been a fear ever since I was young, often rooted in specific detail to the different staircases of my childhood: the hard corner before the banister in Saugerties, the creaky sweep past the leaky window in Pennington, the ladderlike steps to the loft in Kerhonkson, the red hallway and then the lower-level steps of Woodstock, the long steep passage with the painted face at the bottom in West Hurley. When I think about it, it’s not the stairwells and creaking steps themselves, but more the act of turning my back and climbing. Perhaps it’s a fear of being followed. A fear of being eyed from the shadows. A fear of being pulled down into— what, I don’t know. A fear of falling in all the imaginable ways you can fall.

Photo by Riccardo Pelati on Unsplash

This spring, I hurt myself on the basement stairs in the Philadelphia rowhome we’re renting.

These stairs are a short pass of creaky wooden steps, gray-painted and open to the dark below. This basement is unfinished, concrete floors with open areas of dirt and exposed beams, and it’s where we do the laundry. After living for twenty years in New York City and needing to use a costly laundry service because there was no close laundromat, this feels like the height of privilege. (This plus a dishwasher! Modern conveniences I appreciate with every usage!) But I always feel a little out of sorts when I enter the basement.

In a strange loophole in our lease that I didn’t understand but was told by the landlord’s real estate agent that it is fine and perfectly standard, we are renting the whole house except for the basement. We are allowed to store things in the basement and use the washer and dryer, and no one but us will have access to it while we’re here, but technically it’s a no-man’s-land. It doesn’t belong to us, even temporarily. In this way, the basement seems to belong to the house itself.

Beside the stairs is a separated area through a doorway that we call the brick room. In it is a light bulb on a string, the water meter, and… a random pile of bricks. It’s a small, dark cavern, and I am aware of it—very aware—whenever I climb the stairs into or out of the basement. I am always aware of the brick room. Sometimes I think of it while falling asleep in bed three narrow floors above.

Photo by J. Balla Photography on Unsplash

It was an ordinary morning. The laundry was finished and folded and I was heading back upstairs.

At first the climb back up was innocuous. I was aware of the brick room, but I didn’t look at it. It was daytime. There was no reason to allow any space for fear.

I hoisted an admittedly overfull laundry bag over one shoulder and time seemed to slow as I took my next step. A thought of the brick room crept in, but maybe even calling it a tangible thought is giving it too much credit. It was more a sliver of unease. I was stepping up and somehow I slipped, and in that long breathless moment I teetered, the weight of the laundry bag pulling me down toward gray concrete floor, toward bottom. I righted myself, jolting forward, and felt a small lightning strike of pain in my shoulder as the strap of the heavy bag pulled. But I made it upstairs. I rushed to the top of the steps, got out, closed the door, locked the door, dropped the bag, laughed at myself, and that was it.

Only, no. This was about to be a lasting injury that I’m still dealing with. Whatever I did to my shoulder (I thought it was only my shoulder) caused incredible pain in the weeks after, turning into a numb arm and hand, an inability to turn my neck or carry things or bend over, sharp prickling pins and needles running straight through to the tip of my index finger. My right arm, my right hand—my writing arm and hand—were barely usable for more weeks than I want to count. Doctors’ visits told me this injury was in fact a pinched nerve in my neck. That’s why my arm was burning with fizzy pain and why half of my hand was numb weeks and months later, and why it was painful to sit in a chair and attempt to type words on a computer, let alone work on my book at my desk.

Such a small thing, a slip on the stairs. I caught myself. I didn’t fall. And yet.

Photo by Icarus Yang on Unsplash

It goes without saying that my book deadline hit a frustrating roadblock, my momentum lost. I blamed the staircase. I blamed myself for over-stuffing the laundry bag. I blamed my irrational fears.

It’s months later, and I’m still healing. The rush of pins and needles in my arm and hand is far less frequent, and the pain is much more manageable. I can sit at my desk now, propped up with pillows and with a new ergonomic setup to keep my neck from bending. I’ve found ways to help (OMM therapy, stretches and other exercises, THC tinctures, Dragon Anywhere dictation software though thankfully I can type now without much/sometimes whole days without any pain). I’m getting better, yes, but the truth is this injury set me back for months. I ended up asking for a class I was due to teach to be canceled (technically postponed to spring), I stepped aside from other opportunities, I lost hold of my book. I had an allergic reaction to pain medicine and lost more time, then when I was leaving my house only for masked physical therapy twice a week, I somehow caught COVID and lost two more weeks of time.

I lost so much precious time.

Photo by Kyle Laviree on Unsplash

I have always been irrationally afraid of staircases. Yet if I think on it, this isn’t the first time I’ve hurt myself on a set of stairs (the cold iron steps outside Think Coffee on Mercer Street, the sweeping stairs that begged for leaps in Nef Studio at MacDowell), so it could simply have been healthy bursts of premonition.

What happened may have delayed me (and frustrated me), but it has also given me a forced pause, a time to rethink and reimagine, and re-listen.

Don’t concern yourself so much with what’s behind you.

Don’t worry about who’s watching.

Maybe I was wanting this to be a quiet, tucked-away announcement no one may ever read about why my next book is taking so long, but I also know this is only the latest obstacle to come during the writing of the third draft. There were other difficulties during the pandemic and during other drafts, other pits of dread and brick rooms of lost time and heartaches and mistakes, let’s be honest.

How many staircases are between me and the finishing of this book? What is there to be afraid of at the bottom… and also at the top?

Keep steady. Keep climbing. Don’t look back.