January 8, 2011

"How to Be Sure"

“Maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure—never sure of her because you aren’t sure of yourself?”
–John Steinbeck, East of Eden (69)

Bright red charcoal smokes from the metal cauldron our waitress drops into a fitted hole in the middle of our table. The bricks glow and gray, sending ash up before she covers the open flame with a grill. We are cooking our own food, like cavemen, like camping, and this personal fire seems strange indoors. The gray shrimp and bloody beef seep their own juices on the plate before they spit and sizzle, reddening and browning as they must.

I’ve forced my best friend to eat with me, citing a weak moment and playing a rare, ‘I need you’ card, making her leave her sick lover at home. She sighs, smirk-smiling at me.

“Susan Miller isn’t telling you to wait for life to happen. She’s letting you know about opportunities so you can seize them,” she says, jabbing her chopsticks in my direction, then flitting them up quickly in a backwards exclamation mark like a wand.

I have frustrated her for many years now, just as she has frustrated me. And perhaps that’s why we’re best friends—we both need reminding of the things we see in each other so clearly. Our divining rod is an Iphone app by Susan Miller, astrology guru, who’s proven to be extremely accurate, which she has consistently used to help navigate her life. I, on the other hand, have not been so faithful. Only recently when I realized how powerfully the universe has shoved me in certain directions have I consulted the site, www.astrologyzone.com

“It says, ‘with a little extra effort, the work you do in major broadcasting, publishing, marketing, or public relations now could become so impressive that it helps you get increasingly more important assignments related to your growing expertise in the future. If you are self-employed, this is doubly important news, as it will have a very direct effect on your income now and in the future.’ It also says you should put in your applications to those Ph.D. programs you said you were interested in. Promise me you’ll do it.”

“I promise,” I say. It’s what I need to hear—what I couldn’t read for myself—that I am afraid again, unsure again, consulting the stars to find my direction.


Our friendship began in our early twenties, but we’d known each other since the seventh grade. Before we could drink legally, before we could afford yakiniku, we’d spend our nights simply: a guitar, a blanket, and the moonlight. We’d sing and play anywhere to talk about our parents, our pasts, and what we dreamt of becoming when we grew up.

“Have you ever heard of The Missing Piece Meets the Rolling ‘O’?” she asked me one ancient day ago. “Shel Silverstein? You know, the missing piece keeps trying to find an ‘O’ to roll with but can’t because this one’s too big, that one’s too small—she has to break off her edges so that she can roll alone?”

I stared at her blankly. Sure, I had heard of Shel Silverstein. I had even recited his poem, “Sick,” at a speech contest when I was eleven, but I’d never heard of this book.

“You have to roll alone. Get it?” she’d said earnestly, eyes wide with concern. “I can’t be your rolling ‘O’—no one can.”

At the time, I remember thinking this was her way of telling me she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. But she had become my life. We spent every day together, every evening together. She was my therapist and my confidant. She asked me questions no one had ever asked me before and made me reconsider myself in new ways all the time. How could I be without her?

And then I went away to college and she stayed home. Our time together matured and spread out as we aged, eventually turning into monthly, then quarterly catchings-up. A few years ago we gelled back together again, and recently we’ve been hanging out, just the two of us, about once a week.



“This is what I’ve been trying to tell you forever,” she says in that frustrated, pained tone I’ve come to know so well. “You are a writer. You need to write. Stop worrying about how you’re going to get published—just keep walking towards it.”

It’s the same way I feel about her and the guitar—an instrument she picks up sporadically, if ever, these days.

I say, “My intuition tells me the same thing, but it’s hard to trust that it all won’t end up in futility. It’s hokey, really,” I sigh and breathe deep: charred sweet meat. “People tell me nothing means anything, so it makes me doubt what I think I know, even though I’ve seen signs, I’ve heard my wise woman voice, and I’m absolutely sure that god exists.” I pick a couple cooked shrimp from the hot coal stove in the middle of our table and put them on her plate: an offering. “I have a vision of my book in airport bookstores, but it’s the how that gets in the way.”

“Stop talking to people who don’t get it. Be discerning about who you let in. Be true. Be you.”

I hear her, finally. “And what about love?” I ask.

“Stop playing games. Stop worrying about control. It’s a new moon. Anything you start now will echo into the future.”

And I know she’s right: that I’m missing the guy I’m seeing, a guy I really like, waiting for him to call me because I don’t want to be the man in a relationship again. I want to be pursued. But I realize this is a game, this waiting. Just then, the third Earth, Wind, and Fire song of the night comes on, and we google the lyrics. This is another sign, these words that never made sense to either of us until this very moment when they so succinctly describe exactly how I feel right then—how physical desire clashes with a mind that wants reasons; how those reasons are more about pride than love. So after I drop her to her car, I call him.



“I don’t want to seem too forward,” I say into the phone, “but can I come over?”

“Who could say ‘no’ to you?” he asks me thirty minutes later after kissing me ‘hello.’

It occurs to me that I don’t know how to answer that question, so it’s a good thing it’s rhetorical. And magically with those six simple words, I’m back to being hunted.

“Like I said before, you’re always welcome here.” Again, I know what I always know when we’re together—that he likes me—something I always somehow forget when we’re apart. We’ve spent a lot of time apart, so it’s no wonder I’m regularly unsure about how he feels.

This time, we ease into our not having seen each other after two weeks. I’m sitting on his counter while he opens a beer for me and pours himself a glass of red wine. Visions of him disrobing me ripple through my mind in the interim. But we talk about what we did on our separate New Year’s Eves—mine here, and his in Vegas instead. Later on the couch, his forearm warms my leg as he flips through a photography book by Annie Griffiths Belt. An elephant stares at us from a two-page spread of rust-colored dirt and dead branches: a thin camouflage.

The rest, they say, is history. We stay up until four or five in the morning talking about our lives—how his greatest adrenaline rush was fighting fires, how he had nightmares about an asphyxiated cat he carried out of a burning building like a baby, how the flesh of a man’s arm slides off when it’s been charred bad enough. He tells me about the four women of his past—how all four married the same year he moved here.

And I tell him about the three heartbreaks of my life: one was a man I loved, another was my father, and the third was my brother—something I never realized until that very moment. I tell him about the four men of my past, how the last two were like salves to my first heartbreak, how I don’t even remember what one of them looks like.

The whole time we’re talking, he’s holding me, stroking me, playing footsie with me. And afterward, because I’m so happy, I can’t sleep. Which reminds me of the still-anxious prey who keeps running even when she’s no longer being chased. And what about this basic desire to be pursued? Why, as a strong, independent woman, does this animalistic, ancient instinct affect even the self-aware? Why do I want a big, strong man to make babies with me? Am I ready for the responsibility of love? Am I equip to face another husband? Another divorce? These are questions I stop myself from asking because I know I’m not ready to answer them just yet. Instead, I watch the houselights on hill outside his window for a long time, where my best friend lives, and it makes me think again about rolling alone.

“I need to take a page out of your book,” I tell him. “I need to learn how to be okay alone.” He tells me how it’s like Buddhism: constantly letting go of wanting and expecting. And it reminds me of what my best friend said about having the space to be naked and unjudged—something I had with my ex, having mistaken acceptance for love. But that sureness was deadening and it wasn’t free.

I tell him that if I wanted to stay safe, I would have stayed married—that without a little pain, there is no growth, no pleasure either. And I realize that I’ll never know for sure what I think I know when I’m in his arms. I realize that this is the pain, this is the pleasure; that he is never going to be me, never going to fill me up or sustain me, because that’s work I have to do for myself. There isn’t an incantation he could say which could secure me, even if we were serious and in love. I must roll alone. This is the spell: I must be self-sufficient so that I can be free, so that he can be free, too. It’s the breaking off the edges that’s the difficult part—the part I’ve already initiated—the loving myself in my own space that I’ve got to do now. And it’s exhilarating and terrifying.

Because that ebb and flow of panic still sets in—those moments I feel like I’m having anxious contractions from giving birth to myself—when I realize I’m completely alone in this house, in this world, and no one can feel that pain for me, grow for me, or love me more than I should ultimately love myself. And that’s the only way I’ll ever be sure of anything: by doing the difficult work of embracing my self fully and trying to love all the sticky, boring, and quirky imperfection therein.