HOW AM I HERE? The years are stacking.
I am 11. Papa says, “Boys will be boys. It happens.”
I am 18. The tag on my school uniform collar grates the back of my neck like a vegetable peeler strips an unpleasing outer layer. The principal interrogates me. Despite innocence, I feel defensive, guilty for being a girl. The seat of the office chair is so high my feet don’t touch the ground. Perhaps the seat is cranked high because it’s a way to enforce authority and procure obedience. My legs swing anytime I speak, words I’ve rehearsed in front of the mirror.
When I have purged all details, he says, “Thank you for remaining quiet.”
I don’t remember offering my silence; it is assumed. I return to class. He smiles in a way reserved for me. I hate him. I stay until the bell rings. I leave and return when I’m supposed to, a pendulum on her designated course. My school does nothing. My parents do nothing. At night, I run until my mind detaches from my body. It’s the only thing that feels good.
I am 23. I am fortunate my rape is quick and relatively painless. He is economical with time, force, and me.
I am 24. A Saturday afternoon, I’m on my shift. He corners me, cups my face in his clammy mitt and says, “You’re so pretty. I could eat you up.” I negotiate an apology but that is all. I’m a stain; he is status, wealth, and fame, personified.
I am 27. We don’t need to belabor the details. You were there, my love.
I am 28. Again, you’ve been here with me. Things felt wonderful until they weren’t. Or perhaps they weren’t wonderful. Perhaps I’m cognizant of some pieces while ignorant of others. Perhaps I’ve grown to believe this is simply how things are, and I’m continuing a tale I’ve inherited as a girl in this world.
I am 18, 28, 38, and 8. I see another self on the subway looking like a wad of gum hastily hidden underneath a desk. Gray, hardened, disposed, commonplace. Her eyes meet mine as we try to maintain our balance. I wonder who, where, when. Was she thrown against a wall, into a corner, on the bed, on the ground, or in an alley as her dignity was stolen, her value denied? Were the insults and intimidation thrown at school, over dinner, online, or at work? I can’t say, but I recognize the result, as familiar as Momma’s perfume. A look that comes from indignity inflicted in any form. It is eyes sapped of light, a spirit withered, a voice silenced.
I am 18, 20, 24, 25, 27, 28. The times I’ve said “Yes” when part of me screamed “No.”
Something is amiss. I don’t feel lost, broken, brokenhearted, or disheartened. I know this is my journey to walk. But what haven’t I connected? What dragon have I yet to slay?
Me.
I am 29. I was raised by a bully. I married a bully. And left unchecked, I become my biggest bully. I absorb the venom around me. I find ways to help it course my veins. Here I am, living a story of punishment and longing to find instead a book that is a clear line of love.
My love, I think I’ve sorted our origins. Within me live two voices, spliced since a toddler. One is calm, loving, and kind, and the other, exceptionally destructive. This latter voice declares I’m inadequate, insignificant, insufficient, inept, fat, ugly. It says, Listen to him. Follow him. It says, You worthless thing, what could you possibly do but hawk your physical wares? The first voice is you, my imaginary best friend from childhood whom I never released, while the second is my inner lonely child. It answers to many names, one being Anorexia, for if control is my father and beauty my mother, anorexia is their offspring. You and the wounded child exist by connection. There is a saying I’ve carried now for years. “Beware the unloved. They will eventually hurt themselves, or me.”
I won’t be spliced any longer. I need to align.
I TEXT HIM, “Let’s go for a walk.”
It’s an idyllic spring afternoon. We walk the High Line, dotted with couples, families, and tourists. Everyone drinks the lush energy our City potions so well.
He has just returned from two conferences, BroCon and South by Southwest, and a Vegas bachelor party.
“My friends dared me to convince a stripper to sleep with me for free.” He narrates what ensued. My mind screams, This is not my life.
The conversation shifts back to his company, their latest successes, and my writing. The essay I sent to Papa, I sent to him. I sent it to Momma and a few friends as well.
“It’s amazing,” he says. “So vulnerable and honest.”
“Thank you.” Conflict curdles me. He is empathy, intelligence, ego, and misogyny. He is dichotomous; human. The duality continues in what he draws and gives. Around him, I feel both adored and crushed. How precarious and significant, our ability to lift and belittle the same person.
“There was one sentence specifically that really spoke to me,” he says. “About power. Where’d you get that?”
“Do you mean the line, ‘The danger with any power, be it beauty, wealth, fame, or influence, is if loved too enthusiastically, your power can become your prison.’ That one?”
“Yeah. Who’s that from?”
“Me.”
“Oh. Okay. It’s a good line.”
“Thanks.” I pause. “That’s interesting.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I shake my head, smile.
“Do you ever think about writing a book?” he asks.
“Sometimes.”
“Why don’t you?”
I shrug. “Acting’s what I do.”
He nods.
We walk past a pair of guys in their early 30s. They laugh and recline against the High Line railing with the swagger shared by those who are cozy in their longitude and latitude in the world. I always admire this in men—the nonchalance with which they stride through life. They may have a paunch or a receding hairline, be ill-dressed or short or not very bright, kind, or handsome. Their easy confidence doesn’t come from such details. It stems from maleness and a lifetime of being treated well. Rarely have men been told, “You may want to watch your weight” or “Don’t laugh like that, sit like that, dress like that, talk like that. It isn’t becoming.” While the carefree boys saunter, we girls suck in our phantom tummies, tug up our skirts or jeans to cover our imaginary muffin tops, and arrange our parts carefully like flowers in a vase.
My love, do you ever wonder who you would be were you born the opposite sex? My sister and I play this game often. We describe who we’d be, what we’d believe, how we’d act, what we’d look like had we been born with the male set of rights, advantages, favors, and forgivenesses. What would we do with the allowances society reserves for men and men alone? My sister laughs and says, “With your brain and looks, you’d fucking own the world. And everyone in it.”
In the past, we’ve giggled and I’ve replied, “Thanks!” But now, as the years layer, I think, What a sad fate and goal to have. How lonesome. How narrow. How damaging.
I watch the light dappling his face. If I were male, I would be more like him than my ex-husband. We share an ambitious bloodlust that few have. But invariably, there would be a fork in the road.
“We have something so good here,” he says suddenly. “I wish I had more time for us.”
I feel a sickening vertigo grab my chest.
“I need to ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“Have you been sleeping with anyone else?”
“You’re the only person I’m dating seriously.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“Just once. It didn’t even . . .” the sentence trails away like trash ferried by the wind.
“But it’s a betrayal.”
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I feel horrible.”
Sorrow mutes me. I feel cold.
“It was a misunderstanding,” he says suddenly.
“That doesn’t make sense. No.” I sound small but certain.
He carries on with characteristic finesse, trying to negotiate my assent, to agree with the reality he desires. He gave me a book last year, The Gift of Fear. Gavin de Becker writes, “Remember that ‘No’ is a complete sentence. It is not the invitation to begin a negotiation. It’s the end of a conversation.”
When I was a kid, I had a wretched habit of taking a nibble from every piece of chocolate in the box. I couldn’t commit to an entire piece lest it make me fat. So my habit sated my desire for something delicious, and my desire to control.
A man on the quest for more. Perhaps he wants a bite from each of us, to collect as many as he can, because he can, believing such is the road to fulfillment. Perhaps he has decided that I, “genetic anomaly,” have grown beyond acceptable limits, and require a reminder of who’s in power. I search for anger but find none. He is a person living his journey, trying to stake his claim in the world. Besides, I chose and remained by him.
He continues to apologize. Suddenly I remember that when I met him, I asked you and myself, Why must I meet him now, when I’m doing so well? My love, perhaps some characters are sent specifically when we are walking tall and steady, to test our loyalty to ourselves. This man, like my ex-husband, has been a gift. An alluring tempest sent from a path I refuse to follow.
“Just so you know, I’m always safe.”
He delivers this line with majestic aplomb as though he has done me a great benevolence by wearing a condom while having sex with other women. My insides recoil the way skin warps when touched by fire. Astonishing, the ingenuity with which the men in my life dirty its pages.
As is often the case, I realize now what I should have before. Regardless of sex or labels, my company deserves anyone’s full respect. I don’t need to “earn” full status. I already am.
A final fact coalesces:
I am 17 through 29. Forever living by extension and reaction, as someone’s daughter, someone’s prey, someone’s lover, someone’s landscape to plough. I am one in an assembly line of girls, each an expendable commodity, vying for the coveted role of Leading Man’s Girlfriend.
I am done.
We arrive at my apartment. He hails down a cab. I’m pondering the appropriate way to say goodbye when he pulls me in for a kiss. He releases my mouth, squeezes my butt a final time, and slides into the cab. As the door closes he says, “I’ll see you soon!”
I smile meekly and wave. I climb the five flights to blessedly sit.
Soon fails to arrive. As is expected. As is ideal.
THE ROOM IS pregnant with pretties. Half of us are here to audition for a television pilot in Studio A, about a team of sexy spies. The other half are auditioning for a shampoo commercial in Studio B. We are in House Productions, one of the most elite, renowned studios in New York. The halls and rooms sparkle, polished to gleaming, with floor-to-ceiling windows allowing in light.
All around me, men and women drape across low couches like splendid, slender cats decorating the savannah. Their sultry musculature and litheness are mesmerizing.
Never will I be underwhelmed by beauty. Before and beyond being its addict, I am a lover. I will always gasp at a watercolor of clouds and swoon from brilliance in person, on the page, onstage, or from a podium. Being an admiring witness is one of my favorite parts of being alive. Near the end, Nana Bhai said, “I don’t have any regrets but I have sorrow. I will miss the sunset. I will miss poetry.”
These men and women glint light into my awestruck eyes. In physicality, I cannot touch them. Those aren’t words of affected humility. I stand a good half to full foot beneath these men and women. I look up at them with the wide-eyed wonder of a child in a candy store. The length between their eyes, the dip above their lips, the sweep of their foreheads, it’s as though every section was drawn, erased, and redrawn with meticulous attention. Yet it wasn’t. The same amount of time went into the consideration of their parts and everyone else’s. The science, the futility, the magic, the mathematics, this is what fascinates me. I’m further intrigued by how we respond to the luck of genetics. Not only do we covet, we wish to understand, control, and own something that begins and happens with such little thought, control, and ownership. The cells divide and form in rapid, miniscule steps. Little do they know the impact they will have.
Today, as always, I’m the wild card in the mix called in to audition. What I lack in height and impeccable perfection of body and feature, I redeem with my mind. This odd brain of mine, my love, seems to come in handy. It lends a nuanced spin to a script or photos, creating a decisive difference that occasionally leads to booking the job.
It’s unusually quiet in the waiting room. Ideal for reading, but I can’t seem to concentrate on the book I hold, Wild by Cheryl Strayed. Her words are wise, her voice luminous, the book a masterpiece. Yet it isn’t what I seek. Daily I realize I need to sort my past. I seek still the book that will hear, hold, and perhaps even heal my marred world. I think I’m drawing closer to finding it.
Every night, I’ve been continuing the enigmatic pages on my laptop. So used to reciting the words of others, it feels heavenly to voice my own. Along with the mysterious pages, drawings have been arriving nightly, of lingerie-clad girls falling from the sky, of roses weeping blood. Now, my mind flies frantically, wishing it were creating instead of waiting. Restless, my eyes scour the faces around me.
There are a few in this room who I can tell make a sizable income from doing what it is we do. They exude an aura of barely contained glee and relief. I smile, sincerely moved by their hard-to-attain joy. I feel a swell of love, kinship, and protectiveness for each person. It isn’t a nice job.
No one asks the painting its thoughts on itself or the world it comes from. Yet everyone has a vehement interpretation of what it means. Everyone has aggressive emotion, desire, intention, and opinion attached to the flowers, the bloom, the light, and the shadows.
We paintings are stared at, yet rarely seen. I wonder, too, of the possible compounding toll of reciting words written by others, especially if those words play against one’s truth. I wonder how many men and women in this room chose acting because, like myself, they wished to be a voice for those without one. Have we voices of our own? Here we sit, a living irony.
A dear friend recently secured a role in a new sitcom as the ditzy girlfriend of the male lead. Her job is to repeat subtly different versions of the same sexist one-liners, week after week. The show’s unoriginal, closed-minded ethos caters to a large demographic. It will likely be enormously lucrative.
My sweet friend cried from joy upon booking this role. Her exorbitant paycheck will grace her life financial stability and success, dreams anyone can empathize with. The role may lead to fame. For her, this is the definition of happiness. For me, this role is a form of poverty that happens to pay well, like marrying a person whose best quality is his wealth.
Acting is my calling. So I have long believed. My dream was born from watching intelligent roles played by Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Angelina Jolie, Katherine Hepburn, and Dame Judi Dench. They were my role models, imaginary and real. They strengthened my spirit. All I’ve wanted is to do similar work, to help empower others.
My love, I want more than the life available within these walls. One quality Meryl, Cate, Natalie, Angelina, Katherine, and Judi have in common, and I’ll never achieve, is they are white. The upper echelon of leading roles, of intelligence, maturity, and creative verve, remain closed to women of my ethnicity and other women of color. Occasionally a Black or Latina actress will play a role of bold intelligence and creative license. But most of the roles for women like me continue to emulate the tired models: the exotic vixen, sexy spy, drug-addled stripper, street-talking best friend. The times may be changing, but I cannot convince time to change faster.
I look down the line of girls who will audition before me. Six before my turn. I have time to check my makeup and hair, see if I’ve wilted from bombshell to bedraggled. I enter the bathroom and meet our reflection.
What need is there for another pretty face?
How can I bridge the distance between my reality and my truth?
I blow onto the mirror to make a small spot of condensation, if only to prove I’m still here.
I retouch my lipstick, re-fluff my hair. Walking back to my seat, a simple, sensible fact crystalizes. If there isn’t a role that fulfills me, I’ll genesis my own. Reject the world’s script and author my own anthem. My love, what if I moved? What if we flew away from these glittery rooms, mined our own creative intelligence, and pursued work that purely helps others?
There is also something else.
I am tired. The years have stacked. I’ve had my heart dismantled, again. I carry ashes from my childhood. And though you are here, I still don’t have anyone who can hug me. Not as often as a body needs. The last time I was touched, it was by him. The same touch that let me know he had been with someone else.
I need love. I need family. I need to sort my pieces.
I walk past my chair and toward the floor-to-ceiling windows. How arresting New York is. Her beauty can stop and draw traffic. I take in our skyline. I think of my beloved agent, my very first friend in the City. He has always said, “Own yourself. It will all make sense.”
My gaze is tugged by a quick, light movement. My eyes connect with a stunning young girl, sitting a few feet away. She is barely 17. She looks like an ethereal, fantastical creature with languid limbs stretching for days, features softly fashioned from clouds, hair cascading down her back like a sonnet flows over the tongue. Her skin emits the glow of unblemished innocence. Words have yet to be broken. Crimes have yet to be inflicted. Trials have yet to be endured. She gives me a nervous, tremulous smile that deepens when I smile big and warmly at her. She sits visibly taller. I see my sister in her. I see the girl Momma was before she was married off and suddenly pregnant with me. A sweet, tender sprite, an unrealized promise.
She jumps as her name is called. She leaps to her feet, layering her portfolio, headshot, and script to her chest like packaging to secure safe travels. She runs into the studio to meet her panel of scrutiny.
The door closes behind her like a verdict. I worry what she will face in the room, now and in the coming years.
Suddenly, I feel as though I’ve sprung awake, nudged by an invisible, firm hand. I fill with a certainty that feels like a memory, something I’ve long known and needed merely to recall:
The book I’ve sought all these years, my clear, unhurried line of love, is one I’m meant to write. Just as a man cannot answer my heart, neither can another’s voice. I cannot recite anymore. I need to speak.
I leave before they call my name.
I’VE LEFT PEOPLE BEFORE. But leaving an identity and a home to create one anew is a tectonic endeavor. As the studio falls away and I walk toward my apartment, I take in the cacophonic wonderland that is New York. The one place that feels like mine. I love her even when I don’t.
My phone dings the arrival of a text. Hello, Peter Pan.
“Sold apartment. You need to leave by the end of the week.”
“Cool,” I reply.
How perfect. Although I love the City, without acting, there isn’t a strict reason to stay, while there are vital reasons to leave. I need to spend time with my family. Furthermore, my old identity is wrapped tightly around New York’s finger. My adored city, the Epicenter of More, while it boasts extraordinary art and culture, capitalizes on consumption and toxic power—the very things that persuade me to hurt myself. If I want to write, to become, a story of remote strength, I have to give myself a fighting chance.
Another ding. An email from my Warrior Mama.
“We need you,” she writes. “Come stay for a week or two?”
“Of course,” I reply.
I download “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and play it on repeat for the next two days. I give the furniture and art I had collected for a future home to friends who are married or soon to be. Beautiful things deserve to be enjoyed. Everything else goes to homeless youth centers. I whittle my life down to my laptop, art portfolio, and two suitcases, one with clothes, one with books. I’ll be leaving with the same amount of matter with which I arrived, except for the $1,000 I had back then, my college graduation gift from Momma and Dad. My bank account is down to a few hundred. Enough for a plane ticket to Oregon. I book the flight and am left with $7. I look around my little light-filled apartment one last time. This apartment has seen two bedbug infestations and countless mice. It has also been my sanctuary.
To Soho I go, into the room they call Reema’s. My Warriors, the actress, tennis legend, and their beautiful girls. The walls of their home are covered with drawings, photographs, and decorations celebrating every evidence of their connected joy. They throw parties often, for every occasion and without occasion. We dress up for the minutest event in costumes, glitter, and fairy wings. I carry my wings in my art portfolio. Over the years, my recipes were written into their history. They’ve collected and hung my drawings of angels and portraits of the girls. They grace me the honor to mark their lives.
Their home is completely relinquished to the happy, messy thing that is childhood and family. Theirs is a childhood done with bold appetite, licked from all ten fingertips with delight like juice from sunburst berries. I arrive and the three girls literally bowl me over. I tumble onto the floor, happily helpless, in love. They call me delicious names. The Mary Poppins of New York. Our Traveling Fairy Princess. Our Star, although I’m light-years away from being one.
Over the years, in her devotion, I’ve glimpsed Momma. In him, I’ve seen fatherhood done decisively well. He travels red-eye after red-eye to ensure he’s home for breakfast. He wears any Halloween costume they wish, whether it’s a chicken, pirate, or king. He is Santa Claus every year for the Barney’s in Soho. He rushes home, takes off his tie, and reads bedtime stories in a voice reserved for his girls. They giggle and crawl over him like koalas, chinchillas, and gibbons. They know his presence the way an inhale knows an exhale, the way the right foot knows it’ll be followed by the left. An unquestioned togetherness. Oh, the things we wish we could take for granted with the nonchalant trust we place on oxygen and gravity.
I’m unclear why she asked me to come now. I haven’t worked for them in years. They have two wonderful nannies and a personal assistant.
I mean to stay a week, but it turns into a month. The morning before my arrival, she has a hemorrhage in her vocal cords. She is a world-renowned singer who is now ordered silent. A year from now, she will be singing more beautifully than ever, her voice soaring to new heights. But now, leading up to and after her surgery, she isn’t to speak. We invent a language she calls our “silent sisterhood.” From years of knowing each other so intimately, spending days beside each other in the dance of raising children, we share an intuition. I translate her facial and hand movements and the occasional scribbled shorthand on Post-its. We navigate the tsunami, survive and swim to the other side. At the end of the month she surprises me with a check for $1,000.
“What’s this for?”
“Your presence,” she writes. “You’re something that can’t be explained.”
Her husband adds, “If you can just figure out how to bottle yourself, that’d be great.” They smile.
I’m speechless. I’ve asked Momma and Dad if I can live with them while I get myself sorted. They’ve said, Of course. $1,000 is ten months of cell service, the sole expenditure I’ll have while living with my parents.
Ten carefree months to write. More than financial means, they have given me invaluable insight. I feel like skin being touched by sunlight for the first time. Years ago, she and her husband nicknamed me Angel. But mine is the path lit by their nearness.
I’m leaving New York with the same things I brought in. Two suitcases, a laptop, and $1,000. To most eyes, I appear to be the walking embodiment of failed expectations. I am nearly 30, I don’t have any savings, I don’t have a partner, children, a career, or a clear destination wherein to plant my feet. I’ve faced every rejection, personal and professional. If rejection were a fruit, it would appear as though it were my feverish favorite, its bitter nectar dripping down my chin into the hollow of my torso as I sit here on the floor, propped against a wall as I wait to board the airplane.
Now, my love, replace “rejection” with “experience.” Replace one word and my entire story changes.
Uncertainty is a form of limitlessness. There is nothing holding me here. There is nothing holding me back.
It is time.