The summer of 2004, I backpacked through Eastern Europe, alone, for three weeks. I learned a lot about myself — especially that living and writing, for me, are intertwined.
I wrote this in my journal, after leaving the “Hungarian Sea,” or Lake Balaton, where I saw a swan:
In Balatonfured, when I had the experience of the swan, I simultaneously dove into the white solitude while hovering outside the picture. This is what I mean by the difference between the thing itself and the story of the thing. She was exquisite: floating on calm Balaton, alone, in the dark, against a backdrop of heat lightning. I have gendered her. Yeats had his wild swans at Coole and I have mine. She too was traveling alone, and with the sky aflame, I swear I was summoning her — that for a brief moment we spoke a common telepathic language, even as I withdrew to write and hence change her…
Lake Balton, Hungary, August 2004
The Wild Swans at Coole W.B. Yeats
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away.
Now that I’m about to move in with Dan, my boyfriend who’s on safari for seven more days, and my folks aren’t exactly rushing out to get us a Crate and Barrel gift certificate, I’ve been making a mental list of all my friends who cohabitated with partners out of wedlock. I really hate the word “wedlock.” It sounds like the term for what happens in the summer when your door sweats and expands against its jamb and makes that horrible scraping noise.
I couldn’t come up with anyone who hasn’t lived together first. Seriously. Except for maybe Katherine Heigl and Josh Kelley, who aren’t really my friends. Katherine spoke about waiting on Oprah. I mean, she spoke about waiting to live with Josh until after marriage, not about what it’s like to serve Oprah. Which is a whole other blog of worms.
Katherine was also quoted in January ’08′s Vanity Fair as saying “I … didn’t want to live together before we were married. I still have enough Mormon in me—not a lot, but enough—that I wanted to keep that a little bit sacred.”
She’s endearingly lackadaisical on the subject, assured in a honeyed way, and I’m not sure why. Maybe because even though they weren’t shacking up before marriage, or spending concentrated chunks of quasi-Mormon time together, Josh still occasionally took her home — at least according to the song “Hey Katie.” Which contains the following non sequitur lyric:
Just maybe (maybe)
You’ll let me take you home tonight
I’ve gotta have you by my side
To wake up with the sunrise
Its hard to drive when you’re putting on your makeup
Cant stay in the lines
If she can’t drive and apply makeup is she staying or going? Or is Josh driving? Is this morning mascara or late-night lipstick? So many questions. And I wonder if it will be easier or harder to schedule a naked photo shoot once they’re living together:
I don’t understand the opposition to shacking up before door-jam, er, wedlock. Shacking up has a hard-working, summer camp feel to it — you get to mend and repair as a team! I guess “shack” is traditionally derogatory because it implies poor construction and instability. But Dan’s lived alone in Iowa for the past two years and already survived a tornado AND a flood. He needs another set of hands to rake and drain. And we’re the kind of people who care more about books than faulty siding. I mean, I once slept outside in a cabana chair in a thunderstorm on a beach in Rostock.
This is a nice day on the Baltic Coast.
Also, I have plenty of gay and lesbian friends living with partners who haven’t been afforded the opportunity to marry before picking out salt and pepper shakers. When does their shack become a home?
Megan likes to send me statistics for my blog. Here are some she found on DivorceMagazine.com, which luckily is an online publication only, so there’s never the awkwardness of receiving an issue in the mail with a “Mr and Mrs.” label.
8.1% of coupled households consist of unmarried heterosexual partners, according to The State of Our Unions 2005, a report issued by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. The same study said that only 63% of American children grow up with both biological parents — the lowest figure in the Western world.
I understand wanting to keep something sacred in the relationship. It’s wonderful to experience firsts with your partner — like, first bike ride, first fancy dinner, first time you made your UPS delivery man pose with the glib stuffed penguin you share. But the domestic can be sacred, too. I can’t wait till the first time I clog the shower with my hair and can’t deny it because it’s red. Or the first time I “accidentally” turn off Warcraft and erase Dan’s high Orc-slaughter score. The more I watch laughy Kathy, the more….nervous I think she looks. Sacred and scared are almost spelled the same.
In New Zealand, a shack is called a bach. Can’t I just bach up with my boyfriend? That sounds symphonic.
I’m interested in hearing from my readers. Are you living with a partner or choosing to wait? Is this a generational or regional thing?
Hello. This is Snunshine. I’ve been wasting my time with hanging out with Girl while you are in Africa.
Frankly, I’m twiddling my flippers with boredom. This morning I tried sandbagging the bathtub with flour — remember when I saved Iowa City from raging flood waters? — but it smelled bad in there, and I think it was pretty much bagged already.
So then I went and hung out with my old friend Dirty Bill. Dirty Bill used to fly with a dangerous gaggle back in Florida, but then quit his job and moved to the city to try his wing at a non-profit.
We were talking shit smack about some birds we know, and it was fucking really great, but then Girl stormed in and warned me not to speak in expletives anymore because her parents read this blog. Dan, this is bullshitcrap turd.
I miss our bro time, Dan. Girl doesn’t have any eggs in her fridge and she makes me do dumb stuff, like watch Shear Genius or Katy Perry on Fox News . (I kissed a boy penguin once while on vacation in the Galapagos to get attention from the ladies. No biggie.) And this morning was the worst. She spent like an hour trying to figure out if James Franco is getting his MFA in Poetry, just like she did. Ugh.
No no — the WORST is this lame ass butt blogging everyday until your return. I mean, I get the 12 days of Christmas thing, because you’re in Tanzania for 12 days, but that song is insulting to ME since it’s full of BIRDS with no mention of PENGUINS.
So while Girl is struggling with packing tape (she was too cheap to buy the kind with the razored edge HA HA) I’ve taken it upon myself to bring you a REAL calling bird.
What with Dan in Tanzania, and my impending departure from New York City, I’ve been contemplating absence: a state or period of being away. My friend Brandon sent me a link to Garfield Minus Garfield , a site that reconfigures the original comic strip with the cat erased. What you’re left with is eerily existential. According to its creator, Garfield’s absence shifts the focus from funny to “schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life.”
Yes, life is strange and mysterious. I feel like I’m standing with a rumpled, raised pant leg and a pseudo-silence, a shimmer in the air where just this weekend Dan was but now isn’t. Soon New York will be an invisible paw, too.
I’ve never lived with a boyfriend before, nor have I ever had to fit everything I own into a Honda Civic. I’ve decided to ship books Media Mail, cram essential furniture and clothes into Dan’s car, and toss out the rest. This means I’m not only thinking about the absence of my Safari-Lover (a nickname that might stick) and my dear dear city, but my possessions. The wake of things. Maybe absence implies a hope of return while getting rid of stuff is just loss, plain and simple. It’s absence stripped down to the bare bones of gone.
Because it’s different, really, tossing the tangible. Dan will return in ten days. I’ll visit Brooklyn come Fall. When again will I ever see my desk? Or Bo’s bookcase from Georgia? Do I need a 1995 address book? An unopened jar of honey from my cousin’s wedding four years ago (Our Love is Sweet)? A half-assed seashell collection that somehow includes a puppy’s tooth? Old birthday cards? The movie stub to Maid in Manhattan? What about stuffed animals? Or a leaky hookah? These take up space. So does my bike. Should I sell my pink bike and get a new one? And then there’s the question of my Beta fish, Okiedokey, who’s long been circling his own life like a spent vulture. He can hardly rise to the surface for food anymore. I bought sinking wafers so he wouldn’t have to work so hard at eating. Do I transport Okiedokey 900 miles?
Today is day two of Danzania (hence the turtle doves) and while cleaning out the cabinet under the bathroom sink, I came across a half-used Dove 2-in-1 Moisture Therapy, picked it up, and hovered it over the garbage, not quite able to throw it out, not quite able to box it, either. The second verse to “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was running through my head, and then 2-in-1 became both a metaphor for moving in with someone and a lesson in reducing your shower crap (instead of deliberating over a shampoo and a condition you can just deliberate over one bottle, see!) Dove is still in the bathroom, confusing me.
I feel like a turtle, asked to carry my house on my back, simultaneously liberated and scared. I want to take nothing. Then I really really really want my cumbersome dusty statuette of James Joyce. Right now I’ll settle for this poem.
