When the Traffic Lights are on Your Side
Article by Tasha Finkelstein, art by Sanders Greene
Therapy notes 8/31
1. Meditation
2. Recording OCD
3. Grounding myself in what is
What is?
I walked into a tiny yarn store this summer and said goodbye to the urge to go anywhere far from home ever again. I consider myself more of a dog than a cat, but I do see the appeal in a beautiful ball of yarn. The walls must have heard me because above the window, painted in the kind of script I just can’t seem to master, read a quote: “The essences of life are color, music, and the freedom to express yourself through creations.” - Jivie
Who is Jivie?
I used to think everyone I loved had an orange aura, but I don’t know what my favorite color is anymore.
Rooms that seem to hold the keys to the universe
That one yarn store.
My mom’s old room/my grandma’s office. The walls are pink, they always have been, except now they are chipped. Dust gathers – I am allergic to dust like everyone else, but I have never coughed in there. There is an old air conditioner unit on the floor. Air that will never flow dazzles. Some expectation is released.
The school auditorium I watched assemblies in where I danced after the Fall Festival in where I got bat mitzvah’d in became A Woman in where the time was never too late to dance in Jelly and Peanut Butter where it was after hours we shouldn’t be at school anymore and yet we were.
A safe dark space (The whale at the natural history museum…movie theaters…the shimmer...the song “God is Alive”…the twinkle ringtone on my phone…the look of the logs in the river…stars on the beach…auras [whatever that means])
My friend’s old living room where I first felt your chapped lips against mine. It was November and your roughness pulled me in close. He moved houses a few months later.
I moved only a five-minute car ride away from my old home but every room in that apartment lingers in my mind as a heaven I try to remember but I can't remember what the hell were the colors of the tile in the bathroom.
Is every good room a place you know that you will never be able to return to? Or at least somewhere you know you won’t be for a long, long time…?
On the first of every month, I say rabbit rabbit hoping things will be different.
Every day I pick my pair of socks hoping I picked the right pair, not the cursed pair.
I count in threes until I lose track if I’m on one two or three and have to start over again.
When numbers make me nauseous, I think about the scene in my favorite movie where frogs fall from the sky and start to feel okay about it all. I feel okay when I remember that all it really comes down to is an itch. An itch that can never fully be scratched, an itch that makes me wonder if the objects in my left and right pocket are even. Tissues do not weigh much so even if I have three items in one pocket and two in the other it’s okay. I keep telling myself that the tissues in my pocket are okay. And that there’s nothing wrong with painting my nails three times in one day even if the nail polish remover seeps into my papercuts. I have an itch I need to scratch so I decide to take a walk instead. Isn’t it nice when the traffic lights are on your side?
When it’s August and it’s raining, I spend the night following traffic lights in a daze of my own creation. I cover my ears with headphones and watch as taxis glisten against drenched asphalt on my way to Sundaes and Cones. Only every once in a while do my steps line up with the silver pedestrian’s. But it’s okay. Eventually new visions take over and I sit outside in the rain alone with my banana split like I’m the female lead in someone else’s movie. Please believe me when I say it wasn’t sad (I sat under an awning and didn’t get rained on). I was just immersing myself in what my best friend keeps telling me is the moment. After I lost track of the traffic lights the moment became more than a moment: it became an ice cream stain on my dress that I had to walk home and make conversation with. Luckily, the stain turned out to be a great conversationalist and made everything more great. More real. I never thought of great and real as the same. That makes a lot of sense now.
Names for my memoir/collection of essays
The faint whisper of a squeak
I can’t think of anything else I just wanted to share that one
How it felt to make you eggs
I wanted to be sweet and make you breakfast so I decided to make sunny side up eggs because I thought they would be fast and easy. When I broke both of them at the end my fried heart swam into the pan and came out liquid. Apparently, I was using the wrong spatula. You still ate the eggs (put them on toast and turned them into a sandwich) and told me they were great. It’s not a reach for me to say that you are the only person I would make breakfast for. Making you eggs was like those first few moments of the day between dream and reality when I forget what our voices sound like and everything is new again. At 9:30 the air is filled with puffy eyes as soft as clouds and a room as warm as a heating pad or hot soup. I don’t want you to think it's overwhelmingly warm like stuffiness under the covers. It’s more like the other side of your pillow.
Remember when we walked to the Brooklyn Bridge so I could experience darkness as it's meant to be experienced? Our feet carried us to a destination far off and away that I thought we would never make it to. We passed South Street Seaport, and I caught a glimpse of the narrow ramp that led up to the bridge where walkers walked and bikers biked and lovers may or may not have loved. Once we reached this far off destination our (my) feet turned around. I wanted to be able to walk the bridge at night, but I realized it didn’t matter if I couldn’t walk safely without you there. I didn’t want to use you as the moat to my castle (as if you were a moat, as if I were a castle). If I couldn’t walk the bridge with my own two feet, I didn’t want to walk at all.
I am walking on my own now, something I had always hoped to do. I want to walk I want to dance I want to move in the trance of my own creation but I don’t know whose shoes I’m wearing and you’re nowhere to be found. Something digging into my heels whispers that the bridge is not a bridge but merely a dance floor I am fading into the floorboards of. I bend down to peer into the cracks of myself for anything more than ground to gain footing on. In my quest for something solid, all I find is dust.
I met a DJ who looked a bit like you. I don’t remember his face; I just remember he had hair that reminded me of yours, so I wanted him. He didn't play any of the songs you would play, in fact he didn’t play any songs at all. He didn't look at me, my feet stayed glued to ground that surpassed the feel of what “sticky” connotes, and that’s when it hit me: this is not a bridge, it is a dance floor.
I don’t know who you will meet when I’m not there, but I hope you remember what I told you: you can only tell if a person is The Real Thing if they are the same when you wake them up in the middle of the night as they are at all other times of the day. Please don’t wake anyone else up in the middle of the night.