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Sparkle (0)
It's five in the morning. I'm stretched out diagonally in my bed, tangled in the black bamboo sheets. It's a perfect metaphor for how my brain feels. I've just gotten off the phone with a man I'm seeing.
It wasn't one of those adolescent “let's talk all night” chats. It wasn't a sexy night-cap round of phone sex. No, it was a serious discussion about things that were bothering him. Things like how he hadn't met my friends. Like how I never invited him anywhere. Like how he didn't really feel like he was a part of my life.
Guilty, guilty, guilty as charged.
I explained I preferred to spend time one-on-one. Lovers are kind of like start-up ideas. You don't share them until they've crystallized and are off the ground. I don't want to spend the discovery process playing Virgil to a Dante newly navigating the spheres of my life or, worse, trouble-shooting the issues that often result from adding more variables to the relationship equation.
I've always been like this. Friends are forged in a great furnace, they are solid and light as titanium, complete with that impressive fatigue limit. Lovers are like spiderwebs—gorgeous structures of spirals and radials, powerful in their own way, of course, but delicate, too.
Eventually lovers enter the furnace. If they come out, they come out transformed into their own sort of element—carmot, an ingredient that holds the promise of immortality and turns everything into a source of plenty. But the process here is different. This is no longer the chemist's territory of understanding. This is pure alchemy. The furnace for lovers is far, far more treacherous. A chemist works with largely observable phenomena. The alchemist, on the other hand, does not.
That's the magic. That's the difference.
You're turning a spiderweb into the philosopher's stone. That's no simple trick.
Especially—if you'll allow me to overextend the metaphor—if your alchemy lab is still charred from the last explosion you suffered trying to conclude the Great Work.
“I don't think you're ready to have a relationship,” my friend Claire tells me on a recent afternoon over Mexican omelets at Urth Caffé on S. Beverly. The spiderweb moves slightly in the wind. The Grand Inquisition has begun.
“How do you know?” our mutual friend Lisa asks her. “When is someone 'ready,' anyway? People talk about this all the time and it makes me crazy. 'I'm not ready to date.' 'I'm not ready to have kids.' No one is ever ready. Just do it already. Take a chance.”
“Lisa, the cafe philo,” I say, laughing. “She sounds like she's in love.”
“I am in love!” Lisa exclaims.
“With three different men,” Claire adds, sipping her tea.
“Four,” Lisa corrects her. “Four men.”
Claire looks at me.
“You're going to take the advice of an irrationally exuberant erotomaniac?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.
Lisa throws her napkin at her: “I am not irrationally exuberant!”
We laugh at the description she's chosen to protest.
Later, I sit down to work on my column, but no words come out. I have always said writing was like giving birth—a terrible, painful labor. And it is, but just like giving birth, it's a natural thing. The body knows what it does. So I sit, prepare my little space and prepare myself for what's to come. And the dilation begins. With the sun comes the first cry of the newborn thought.
Not tonight. I begin time and time again. Stillborn thoughts clog the documents folder in my laptop. Strands of thought DNA lost before they reach conception. I'm sleepless and hungerless, a ghost of myself.
My friend Mia joins me for a coffee early the next morning. We sit on a patch of grass in the sun, sipping on Starbucks. She calls me hummingbird because all I'm eating are the 16 teaspoons of sugar in my venti-sized cup of Pike's Place, but I can tell she's worried.
She takes me to Barnes & Noble down the street to resuscitate me. America, the grand self-help nation. There is no problem we cannot resolve on our own. We're a country of doers. We shall find the way.
The self-help aisle is easy to find. I pull out book after book. You Go Get Him, Girl! How To Make A Man Fall In Love With You. How To Make Him Love You. The backs read like Stockholm Syndrome manuals.
“Why would you want to make anyone fall in love with you?” I scream at the shelves. I turn to Mia. “What the hell is wrong with people? Can't we all just take it easy, go slow, and get to
