2.25.09
A Wet Desert
I moved to the desert six months ago. The high desert with dirt, scruffy looking shrub-trees, thin air, and more shades of brown than I ever knew existed. It’s not the picture of a desert that I first developed as a child. The looming mountains that surround Santa Fe prevent an unending expanse of land and sky. There is no need for mirages or oases. Sand dunes do not belong to this landscape. But it is dry. In the summer it does get hot. The sky seems endless, even with the neighboring mountains. The altitude makes breathing difficult at first and I arrived with the need to adjust in many different ways.
I arrived during the rainy season. One of the first things I came to appreciate about the area was my ability to watch storms in the distance from where I stood dry and warmed by the sun. I loved to see the clouds that looked like they were mimicking the mountains in the way they stood tall, thick, proud with vertical streams of water connecting the sky to the earth. When the storm got closer, I could feel the air thicken and the sky would darken. Underneath the storm, I felt the intensity with which the clouds shed their excess moisture and allowed the dry desert earth to soak it up. During one such storm, I learned first hand about the amount of water the sky could dump upon as I drove home through flooded streets, wondering if my car was going to float away and how so much rain had made such a sudden appearance. At home we ran around closing windows to keep our insides dry and protected. Depending on the wind and the severity of the storm, I would sit on the couch on our front porch. It was more practical to watch storms in the distance from that vantage point, as there was no danger of getting sprayed with cold water.
My own first storm came with the same fury and intensity of a Santa Fe summer rain storm. Not long after my arrival I returned home from the gym one afternoon. I got home to see Bucket’s car. Bucket was good friends with the Rosie, only housemate I did not know upon moving - I moved in with my sister, her then boyfriend and Rosie. While I try with all my might to be open to meeting new people and making friends, with only two weeks between my life in Paris and the desert, my intentions seemed to matter not and I had no desire to be around any of the new people I met, particularly not Bucket. I walked into the house and promptly realized that I needed to leave. I took my iPod and my cell phone and went for a walk.
Unable to understand the emotions welling up inside of me and unsure of what to do with them, I called a dear old friend in hopes of connecting with someone who knew and understood me. I, of course, chose to call the friend who, like me, is notorious for not answering. As I listened to the outgoing message on her voice mail, I lost it. Crying for the first time since leaving Paris, perhaps for the first time since the previous September, almost one entire year, I left a message in which all of the fears that I felt unjustified in feeling came pouring out - I had made a huge mistake in leaving Paris, I was trapped by my decision to live with my sister, I would never make friends and was bound to a circle of people who I found to be annoying and pretentious, I would never find a job and all of my savings would go to waste. Tears streaming down my face and gasping for breath, I could not go back to the house that I had agreed to call home for the next year. With nowhere really to go, I kept slowly walking through the neighborhood.
Much to my relief, barely a few minutes passed before my phone vibrated and I looked to see Tucker’s name pop up. I answered and continued my outpouring of fears, anxiety and sadness. When I reached the elementary school about three blocks from my house, I sat down by the parking lot to continue. “BUCKET!” I exclaimed, “who the HELL is named Bucket!? What a stupid fucking name! Can you imagine, god, her stupid name says it all. She is a bucket. She barely even acknowledges my presence and is so whiney and self-involved. She talks like she’s sooo deep. Her name is BUCKET for fuck’s sake!” Of course it wasn’t really about Bucket at all. Whether or not Bucket had come into my life was really quite inconsequential, but it was easy to use her as a way to vent my frustration.
Knowing me well, Tucker laughed at my tirade and also took seriously the fact that I was in tears. Since she first met me when we were both 17 years old, crying had been a once a year occasion and it took a lot for tears to come. I often felt desert-like when it came to emotional expression. I tend first towards anger and use that energy to plow through whatever might be upsetting to me. Sadness and tears were generally a sign of a level of honesty that felt uncomfortable and abandonment to the idea that I just might not be able to change whatever had caused the tears. And then there were those times when I wanted nothing more than to cry and no matter how hard I squinted, dry-sobbed and worked to produce that salty liquid, I could at best squeeze out one single tear that would dissipate before even reaching my chin. It was as though I cried out all of the tears my body could produce after my boyfriend broke up with me a month into my first year at college.
Tears were not the only piece of me that dried up during that time of my life. My menstrual cycle, which had never been regular to begin with, all but disappeared. Months would pass and there would be no period. I knew I was not pregnant and at first I suspected the irregularity came from weight loss that had taken place over the two previous years plus the stress of transitioning to college. My mom insisted I see a doctor, but there was never really anything conclusive that they could tell me. I was prescribed hormones to take every time three months passed with no period, but the hormones made me feel like a crazy person and it was much more convenient to just not have a period, so more often than not I just let it go. No period was particularly useful when I went abroad for my junior year of college and when I returned to Paris the year after I earned my Masters degree.
It seems curious then that moving to a desert would bring the liquids back to my life. The reappearance of tears came first and matched the rainy season. The rainy season passed and my tears remained. I also finally got another prescription for hormones to bring my period back after a year of dryness. The hormones exacerbated the crying and life became a series of storms with no end in sight. While I had made a few friends, established a few routines, met and started a relationship with my girlfriend Adi and gotten a job, I remained dissatisfied and overwhelmed by the feeling that there was nothing to look forward to. I fought endlessly with myself about looking back too much, about romanticizing about how things could, should, would be different if. I fought with myself about feeling bad and got annoyed with my inability to see the good for what it was and my life for what it was - complicated.
The rehydration of my life is continuing to this day. I cry at least once a week. I cannot even count how many times in these past months I have sobbed with abandon, laid on my bed shaking, rocking myself, trying to catch my breath and more importantly trying to catch my life. I got my period without the assistance of hormones once and my tender, swollen breasts tell me that I should soon be having another all on my own. While I’ve tried to maintain a full time job and my daily trips to the gym, a combination of stress/hopeless/boredom eating and exhaustion have caused my body to fill out, softening what was once tight and hard, rounding out my stomach, hips, butt and bust. While I miss the controlled version of my body, smaller chest and ass, tighter stomach, I feel womanly and fertile.
There is a lot of growth in me these days. It is the painful stage though, the stage that is watered by my tears and derived from my struggles. I am learning to be more honest with myself about what is going on. I am trying to be more patient with my emotions and to allow them to happen so that they can pass quickly and with more ease. I am working on allowing myself to feel what I feel without turning myself into a victim. I am not happy, but I am figuring out how I can become happy again, how I can become the version of me that I miss. I am also figuring out how I can be happy and unhappy, how I can have tears and still smile, how I can be a softer, rounder me and still feel sexy, how I focus on what is worthwhile in the present without settling or giving up hope for the future. I am trying to love today and not to worry about how much it might hurt tomorrow if I have to decide that I cannot stay here for the love of someone else. I am aware that I need to make decisions based on my needs and my ability to be and to find happiness and I am learning that the road to that happiness, to fulfilling those needs might cause me more pain along the way.
I moved to the desert after a lush year of fun, adventure, excitement, financial stability and sheer joy in Paris. Paris brought me luck and allowed me to push myself in new ways that magically felt easy and good. I learned about my capacity to be social, to be independent, to be adventurous and to seize the day. Valid lessons they were and the process of learning them brought me continual joy and a sense of true, solid contentment. I left feeling confident that I could take all of that with me and that life would just continue to work out with the same luck, ease and magic that I had found in Paris. I also suspect that my body left Paris but my heart and spirit were unwilling to keep up with my body and are still stuck across the Atlantic. It has taken a lot of breaking down for me to even be able to recognize just how hard it has been to move to a place that seems so dry and desolate. And as I begin to wade through the tears this year has brought so far, I am finally able to start to see that the experience here has as much to offer as my experiences last year in Paris; I am finally able to start to see that the struggle is as important a piece of my life as the ease of Paris was last year. It is a different type of learning, a different type of experience. It is a different piece of my life and it adds a new layer to my story, it brings a new level of depth to my emotions and gives me access to parts of me that have been consciously or unconsciously on lock-down for quite some time now. Like the dry desert earth soaked up and was nourished by the water dropped by mountainous clouds when I first arrived, I is soaking up the tears and using what they reveal as they wash over me to nourish myself in a way that is unfamiliar and not always the most comfortable for me.
