A couple thousand words beyond Goodbye, Goodbye, I Don’t Think I Love You Anymore.

I need to start pocketing tissues for these girls who shouldn’t shed tears.

It seems to be happening too often these days. Like someone is lining them up along my path to class and asking me to dish out It’s Gonna Be OKs and Don’t You Worry, Darlings for all these sad souls.

And I don’t even know why they’re crying. Don’t even know why the tears are littering their cheekbones. All I know is that it’s too much.

Too much for the library bathroom stall next to mine. Too much for the snotty mess of I’ve Just Got A Cold that keeps cropping up every time I enter an empty restroom.

Every time I’m least expecting a puddle of tears and a bucket of I’m Sorrys, she’s there.

She’s standing at the sink now, blowing her nose like she’s fine, just fine. But I know she’s not supposed to be in here at all. Not supposed to be stringing misery along like it’s a dog she keeps walking because her neighbors paid her while they’re on vacation.

It’s a funny feeling, this happiness that sits in my stomach while everyone around me is drudging up memories of vocabulary terms learned in January and geometry proofs memorized over spring break. It feels wrong, so very wrong, to be singing behind ear buds to my very own Pandora station.

The soundtrack of my life. Playing softly in a silent library. One story above this sniffling girl.

One story past this crying in public restrooms. Two chapters later. A couple thousand words beyond Goodbye, Goodbye, I Don’t Think I Love You Anymore.

But my time here is not long enough to place pick-me-ups along her daily route. On the bus seat she always slides into. On the desk her elbows sometimes lean upon. On the library shelf her fingertips trace as she searches for the book with all the answers.

The book to reset her broken heart. The essay to reaffirm her shaken soul.

I know she won’t find what she’s looking for in this library. Won’t want to listen to the same Pandora station anymore. Might need a mixtape that sounds a bit like mine.

Happy. New. Reassured.

Maybe a handful of brightly-colored tissue packs to pair with it, stuck in places she always visits. The side pocket of her Jansport back pack. Her bedroom desk drawer. Her shower caddy and linen closet.

Leave her a few tissues and bright words where she least expects it.

It is a hard lesson, learning the time is dwindling on this proactive approach to bridging others’ heartbreak with my own words.

But I know this – someone else will be in the adjacent bathroom stall next time, and she will surely know what words this brokenhearted girl needs to hear. 

My Friendship Manifesto

Over the years, I have watched the push and pull of friendship. This is what I know and what I believe. In fifty years, it may be different.

I believe in group text messages.

I believe in saying “best friend” and meaning it. In sitting in diners with a cold cup of hot tea for two hours.

I believe in answering the phone at two a.m. At four a.m. I believe in listening, no questions asked, to the voice on the other end of the line.

I believe in emergency meetups and gas money and thank you notes just because. I believe in virtual hugs and smiley face emoticons and email rants and Words With Friends games that go on just so you can stay close while far away.

I believe in sleepovers and Skype sessions and silly quizzes from beauty magazines. Inside jokes with origins long forgotten.

The feeling you get when you’ve missed this thing, this place, so bad that your heart aches when you return.

The split entrée. The designated driver. The one who agrees, reluctantly, to put the bumpers up at the bowling alley.

I believe in games from Target. Games in Target. Loud music and wet cheeks.

The feeling you get when someone knows what you need — even if you don’t.

I believe in reaching for the phone before it rings and more-than-obligatory congratulations and the communal sadness when It Doesn’t Work Out.

I believe in three a.m. meteor showers and spontaneous road trips to the beach and theoretical plots to egg houses in redemption.

I believe in writing their hearts onto these pages.

I believe there’s no designated time for friendship, no opportune moment for catastrophe.

If you are on the ground, hugging your knees, with no will to live, you call me for one reason. For ten thousand reasons. For a human voice on the other end of the line.

I believe in faith where there is none, in encouraging special talents, in nominating someone for what they deserve.

I believe in friendship that’s not half-baked but fresh out of the oven. Cookies saran wrapped and plated for the new neighbor.

I believe in giving generous servings of it, this little thing called friendship, hoping someone might return the favor.

Mostly, though, I believe in the kind that stays with you through all the awkward stages of growing up until you are ready — eager, even — to repay that favor.

I am learning, with each new email, that we are all hiding behind the Cool Factor.

These days, I am living in my Gmail inbox, breathing in stories of souls who come to me with heavy hearts.

But if you asked me what I’m doing, I’m just as likely to tell you I’m in the business of designing fashionable kneepads.

“Kneepads?” you’re saying.

Yes, kneepads. And elbow pads and wrist pads and helmets, too.

But not just any kind of kneepads. Fashionable ones.

We are in the business of protection and prevention and healing, but we’re making it personal and attractive.

We’ll have pink glitter ones for the Glam Gals. Camouflage prints for the Deer Hunters and ROTC members. Argyle for the Preps and plaid for the Westerners. Teal and tan for the California Surfer Boys and black and purple for the Rocker Chicks.

We’ll stock them in all the university colors and people will begin to buy them as graduation presents because what better way to say “welcome to your new life” than to suit up for an epic battle with impending disaster?

Growing up, my mom had to wrestle my Barbie bike helmet onto my head. She had to paint a picture of what might’ve happened if I had an accident and wasn’t wearing it.

And even then, that didn’t stop me from complaining about the bangs in the eyes or the constant itching at the back of my neck as my ponytail scratched me.

That didn’t stop me from feeling like a Loser with a capital L.

But these days, I am wishing it were that easy—strap on your kneepads and helmet and swerve to avoid all the orange cones:

Loneliness. Depression. Breakups. Anxiety. Divorce. Suicide.

I am learning, with each new email, that we are all hiding behind the Cool Factor.

It’s not cool to be depressed or self-harming or bulimic or otherwise unable to cope with change and disaster and heartbreak and low self-esteem.

But it happens.

So I am hoping we can unravel this piece of fabric knotting our lips together in favor of something new—open minds and fashionable kneepads and attractive ways to say You Aren’t The Only One Suffering.

Because you’re not. Have I told you that lately?

Guest Post on Good Women Project: Hearts on Sleeves, Tequila, and Drunken Lips

Today I’m guest-posting on GWP. I adore the site and its mission and have had the pleasure of posting several times over the last year, beginning in February 2011 with my definition of a Good Woman. January’s topic is emotions. Below is a small segment of my post, but read the rest on GWP.

—

She kept whispering the same haunting phrase, over and over, across a wide wooden restaurant booth.

“Drunken minds speak sober thoughts,” she said. Drunken minds speak sober thoughts.

Pretty soon I heard the two of them crying — not the wet eyelashes kind, either, but the snotty, sticky mess — about love that falls too short. About boys who stole too much from them. About marriage and living alone, forever, as unlovable women not worth the commitment.

My heart was breaking. Piece by piece cleaving off as I tried to focus on my own conversation with a girl who had run from the only boy who ever loved her.

“I don’t understand how people get married,” she said, whether in response to the two sobbing seniors sitting across from us, or just because she had wondered—we believed—this very thing for countless nights holed up in her room.

She has always been the girl who does not cry. The girl who holds herself inside, tucked beneath a bedroom floor filled with too many shirts and pants and unopened boxes of granola bars and textbooks she’s never read. The girl we do not know.

[continue reading]

A friendship spanning more than half a century sat on the table like a hand of cards she’s not ready to fold.

via weheartit.com

She sat across from me in her own kitchen, the stained-glass chandelier looming over our heads.

And she listened to bubbling rants of a girl who didn’t know how to make intrigue less intense or passion less peppy.

The 94-year-old woman sitting in the other room had given up on life and we were here, in the center of it all, buzzing.

We could skip over nursing homes and intravenous tubes and head right into breathing life into scribbled words on a page. Not because she particularly planned on writing a book, but because it seemed nice enough to think about.

Nicer than cold, frail arms and skin that hasn’t seen sun since last October. Hands that need other hands to stand up straight and feet that fumble over carpeted floors.

We headed for tips for writing short stories and “where do you draw your inspiration from?”

Blue skies over thunderstorms. Anything to steer the ship for safer shores.

We avoided the parts where I told her about giving up on life, about depression, about old age and real life getting the best of you.

I skipped right over the passage about life expectancy rates and she tried to skirt around the issue of growing old herself.

I watched the cheeks of a 75-year-old woman break out in stress acne and realized we’ll do anything not to think about love and what it’s done to us. A friendship spanning more than half a century sat on the table like unspoken promises and cards she wasn’t ready to fold.

She’d bet on the races coming into town for the weekend and the winning lotto numbers, but her friend’s life wasn’t one of them. She’d hold that hand of cards until someone told her the casino was closing for the night.

It’s the first hand she can’t cash in on, the only one she can’t control.

So she turned the tables on the young girl still free from betting habits and chained to the 8 o’clock news to listen to the evening drawings.

My handmade journal became the most important thing in the room, for just a quiet afternoon in the heat of July.

I started by showing her the colored threads weaving across the front cover. Let her feel the handmade pages from India, each a different thickness.

Like our days of the week and moments in the day—first light and cheery, then heavy and dark.

She started asking questions about ideas and inspiration like I was a dictionary with a definition for every sticky situation and tough question she came across. I didn’t know any of the answers.

It’s the first time I realized anyone could worry themselves busy, clinging to anything other than the knowledge that tomorrow might be harder than today—not easier.

I did what I do best: I kept talking. As long as the words spun inside her head, she didn’t have to think about the elephant in the room.

I told her how I felt like more of a writer then than I’d ever felt. And her eyes lit up.

That’s the first time I realized writing could save a life, could pump blood through arteries and keep demons at bay.