So I have to get started now. It’s time to get started now. And why not? I wonder. I have a job. I am in love. We have an extra bedroom that we are currently using for shoes, boxes, and occasional guests. I am told my dog is unusually good with children. I already look fucking pregnant. Why the hell not?
I can feel them. The babies. They’re not crawling all over me. They’re not vomiting in my hair or shrieking. They’re doing perfectly normal baby things, and I’m keeping them alive. But I resent them. Their constancy, their intrusion on my relationship and my free time and my naps and my imagination and my heart. They’ve come too soon, and I can’t do any of what I had planned. All I can do is survive.
My most frequently recurring dream is one in which I suddenly remember I have a number of pets living in my home that I haven’t tended to in years. Rabbits, hamsters, iguanas, stacked in dirty cages in my closet or beneath the bed. Terrified, I open the door, and the light touches them for the first time in ages. Desperate, I dig through the clumped, wet wood chips. I’m afraid they’re decomposing in there, but I find them still alive, thin and milky eyed and filthy. I know that I loved them once, that they had a better life before I got so distracted with work and myself and let them shrivel up and nearly die. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I tell them as I clean their cages and fill their bottles with fresh water. “How can I make it up to you?”
You wrote me a beautiful letter,—I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was.—I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love.…When you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am.
—Letter from EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY to EDITH WYNNE MATTHISON
I’VE HAD EXACTLY ONE serious girl crush, a term I have been taught to hate by women I admire (but do not, in fact, have girl crushes on). Also, being in possession of a gay sister, I find the term “girl crush” slightly homophobic, as if I need to make it clear that my crush on another woman is not at all sexual but, rather, mild and adorable, much like … a girl.
My crush’s name was An Chu. I was in third grade, she in fourth. She wore thermal t-shirts, wide-leg jeans, and a headband on her hairline, creating the impression that it was holding on a glossy black wig.
She was, in hindsight, maybe gay—into kickball, the kind of swagger that isn’t designed to arouse guys but does anyway during the preboner years when a girl being able to horse around is a bigger sexual stimulant than boobs. A laser-sharp focus on her select group of girlfriends. An was gorgeous like a lady but unknowable like a man. She was active but quiet. Her smile was slow, and her head was too big for her body, and when I looked at her I felt uncomfortably warm.
We never spoke, but I watched her closely on an overnight class trip to a nature retreat, gazed as she shook a rain stick and analyzed an owl pellet, and after my parents picked me up early (I had barfed), I spent the next weekend in the guest room at my grandma’s house imagining An and me sharing secrets in the dim orange light of a sleepover.
I haven’t had a crush on a woman since, unless you count my confusing relationship with Shane from The L Word. I’ve never wanted to be with women so much as I wanted to be them: there are women whose career arc excites me, whose ease of expression is impressive, whose mastery of party banter has me simultaneously hostile and rapt. I’m not jealous in traditional ways—of boyfriends or babies or bank accounts—but I do covet other women’s styles of being.
There are two types of women in particular who inspire my envy. The first is an ebullient one, happily engaged from morning until night, able to enjoy things like group lunches, spontaneous vacations to Cartagena with gangs of girlfriends, and planning other people’s baby showers. The bigger existential questions don’t seem to plague her, and she can clean her stove without ever once thinking, What’s the point? It just gets dirty again anyway and then we die. Why don’t I just stick my head…