I lie on the sofa in my ruffled bikini, crying. It’s the last weekend of summer 2014. An hour ago my best friend canceled our day trip to Coney Island while I was at the store buying us beach Doritos. Once again my life is in shambles.
I am almost 34 years old. I’ve essentially laid waste to all those years and counting. I’m broke. I miss my dad, who is dead. Cockroaches scale the kitchen cabinets. My boyfriend sometimes wants to kill himself. I sometimes want to kill myself. We take turns hiding each other’s pills. I haven’t slept for two nights because of the fighting. Alcohol is a factor. The only words I’ve produced in six months are sadsack diary entries and advertising copy for septic tank companies. I’ve eaten all the beach Doritos myself. And the beach Cheetos. And the cookies I’d baked for Coney despite knowing they’d inevitably get sand in them. The sky is cloudless but the curtains are drawn and I know my tears are the closest I’ll get to the seashore today.
I recently collaborated on a young adult novel about five teenagers with problems that far eclipse my own. After putting them through the wringer for a bit, I took pity on these disordered kids and in my infinite mercy endowed them with spiritual cores that could withstand every calamity by reshaping pain into gratitude. I felt this was the right thing to do. Helping the youth is its own reward. But I have to make a confession: I’m a phony. I never dreamt of internalizing the abundant life lessons I showered upon my characters. I wrote the book with blinders on, caring for those 16-year-old psyches while neglecting real life’s rampant dysfunction. I gave the kids souls when I was in despair about having lost my own.
On the last day of summer, after I’ve cried all the tears and put on some underwear not made out of Spandex, I have a vague notion of turning my life around. But a concrete strategy eludes me, so for the next two hours I devour inspirational quotes on the Internet. Three or four hundred inspirational quotes later, I’m finally ready to leave the apartment. “It is never too late to be what we might have been” (George Eliot). I intend to wander around, look at things, maybe buy some cheap fruit from Mr. Kiwi.
The Brooklyn sidewalks are riddled with people whose beachy dreams seem equally crushed, but I am staunchly determined to get over myself and fall madly in love with life because “Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have” (Hyman Schachtel). And when an ambulance driver gives me the middle finger because I’m teetering like a drunk astronaut on the curb, I remind myself that “Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling” (Margaret Runbeck). And by the way, who are these enlightened people on the Internet, and have they ever sleep walked down Broadway in the sweltering heat with a death wish and nacho cheese indigestion?
In my aforementioned novel, a spiritual healer materializes out of the New Mexico desert and sets my tormented teens on their path to enlightenment. “This is ridiculous,” I’d muttered to my computer as I brought the shaman into being. “This is so YA. This would never happen in real life, to a real grown-up.”
This intersection looks like a good one to flop myself into. Perhaps I can get run over by something official, like a police car or a fire engine. But no, that’s stinkin’ thinkin’, because “If your compassion does not include you, it’s incomplete” (Jack Kornfield). And I must recognize the beauty in every moment, because “Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them” (Leo Tolstoy). And I need to force myself to “Enjoy the little things, for one day [I] may look back and realize they were the big things” (Robert Brault). The J train screeches on the tracks above me as if its cars are dragging the chains of hell. I take a deep breath and vow to wake up to the wonders of the world.
An elderly lady stands beside me on the curb, patiently waiting to cross the street. She’s loaded down with so many plastic shopping bags I wonder if the cement is going to fracture beneath her. I don’t want to offend her by asking if she needs help because her back is straight and she can’t have more than 70 years on her. I say something plaintive about the traffic light. The preternaturally-preserved woman studies my face for a full count of five before agreeing that yes, this intersection could use a pedestrian signal. I self-consciously overtake her when we cross, but I’m still drawn into her orbit. She walks a few paces behind me, on the same sidewalk, past the same vendors of tube socks and cell phone cases. I want to turn around and confess to her how black my heart is. I sense that she’d be down for this discussion. Maybe we could have it telepathically. The air between us is just that charged.
In my YA novel the shaman makes his grand entrance with a pet coyote. On Broadway I see nothing of the kind. Maybe a mangy dog slipping under a barbed wire fence as if he’s just been kicked.
At the next intersection the elderly woman sidles up to me. “Would you mind doing me a favor?” I’m relieved that she’s making the first move. She lacks a free hand to adjust a strap on her shoulder, but won’t permit me to carry her bags, saying that even though she has three great-grandchildren, she still plays basketball and can run a mile without breaking a sweat. She has no need for my strength. I desperately need hers.
I cannot shake the feeling that this woman is extraordinary. Being enclosed in her energy’s orb is like entering a messianic tent revival. She’s the human embodiment of an inspirational quote. And not one by Donald Trump or Tony Robbins; I mean one by Confucius or Martin Luther King. So I trot along beside her, savoring bits and pieces of her life. As a girl she wanted to be a Freudian psychoanalyst. She became a teacher.
We arrive at her destination: Fat Albert’s, a discount home goods store I know all too well. My new friend gathers that I’m loath to leave her so we continue talking on the sidewalk. We grew up in the same small town 200 miles away, 40 years apart. She wants to know my birthday. “You’re a Libra,” she says, peering into my diminished, flickering soul. “You need to meditate in order to hold your center, and you need to live near the water.” I haven’t felt my center in years and the only water I’ve known lately has been boiling.
And now I am a sniveling child, inexplicably undone by this woman and the spiritual medicine dispensed by her gaze. She’s not sentimental about the dumb heartache writ large on my face. She tells me that I’m smart and strong, like her. In front of Fat Albert’s, she matter-of-factly reveals the secret to a happy life, and I promptly forget it. Something to do with love. Though I don’t retain a word, I cling to everything she says, everything she is. Before we part I hold her hand in mine. I haven’t felt anything so soft in skin and so formidable in presence since my grandmother’s hand when she was dying. The woman gives me her number and says one of these days I should come over for pie.
Walking home, my heart wells up with the world and its magic. The second I resolved to see beauty again, I was sent this emissary from heaven who’d transformed a filthy square of Broadway sidewalk into a dropped pin on a rainbow. You can’t make this stuff up in Yeah books. I smile at everyone I pass, and they smile back. I’m having the best beach day ever. I glide across the sand dunes in front of Fat Albert’s, breathing in the sky’s salty mist. I pause next to an overflowing trashcan near Mr. Kiwi’s watermelons and feel the ocean’s ecstatic power. My eyes fill with grateful tears. I am alive I am alive I am alive. God bless America.
But no, that is not my eureka moment. That moment comes the next morning after I wake up feeling sad and dyspeptic again and am dismayed to find that yesterday’s blessed burst of enlightenment hadn’t carried over to Day 2 of the rest of my life. “WTF?” (Wistar Murray). I realize that I’ll need to restart the process from scratch, perhaps with a quiet sit or 500 more inspirational quotes. Because it’s hit me that happiness is something you must fight to inhale every second your airways are open. It’s a book you must keep writing and reading on a continuous loop, so the kids inside it won’t lose heart. Naturally the book will never be finished. It will always be in the midst of happening. In fact it’s happening right now, at this urban intersection, while we stand together in our bathing suits and wait for the light to change.