I’m in New York this month, working on a long-form project that has me digging into all kinds of stuff. I’m spending most afternoons at the New York Public Library, which makes me very happy. Every time I walk up the steps past the stone lions and enter the cool sanctuary, I feel reverent, and lucky. The ornate ceilings of the restored Rose Main Reading Room are full of cherubs carved into gilt wood and gorgeous paintings of rosy clouds. There are two whole floors of massive shelves groaning with fat encyclopedias. The staff (I have a huge crush on one sweet librarian) are patient and kind with my various requests for help; I’ve had to relearn how to search archives and read microfilm. It’s great; my little-kid, back-to-school loving self is in absolute heaven.
I’m unearthing many long-forgotten things as I work at the NYPL. Some are painful to look at, and some have unexpectedly shocked me. Buried memories are wicked that way. But I have the fuel to keep going because of the support I have from friends and family, and from people like you.
One of the things that I keep coming back to is how good I felt at one time in my life, and how far away I’ve traveled from that feeling over the last decade or more. And I’m figuring out why I wandered so far as I scroll through spools of old NYC newspapers and pull up magazine articles from 2005. We all lived through some caustic shit when Nicole was murdered.
I had lunch with a very smart literary person last week. He’s familiar with the caustic shit, because his brother was murdered by a man with a gun. We were discussing how the long tail of traumatic loss can affect the choices you make later in life. I told him I’d chosen poorly when I got into a scary relationship with one man, and again when I ended up with a cheating opportunist. Why do you think you did that? he asked me. I think I was seeking out intimate connections with men who would make me feel as bad as I believed I should feel, I said. Sure, he said. But don’t you think you also sought them out because they made you feel alive, in some way?
I nearly choked on my rigatoni. I hadn’t thought of it like that, but it made perfect sense. Of course I got something I wanted out of each relationship. With the first guy, let’s call him A, I got hooked up to the sweet, sweet heroin of love bombing. It was electric, it was exciting, it was the farthest thing possible from anything stable or good, and it obliterated the numbness I’d been feeling for years. And then I have a visceral memory of sitting at my desk at High Times in 2014, feeling sick with despair.
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