Breadcrumb #633

KRISTYN POTTER

In New York City, it’s common practice to give up a vice for an isolated period as a way to prove to yourself that you have some semblance of self-control. In a city that values unabashed hedonism over  the American formula of white picket fence, marriage, and kids, it’s easy to lose sight of yourself; most people give up alcohol or other bad habits in January, but I always like to end the year on a high note. As part of my self-imposed Lent in December, I went the full monty by giving up pork and alcohol, deleting the slew of dating apps from my phone, and resolving to stop having casual sex with my clinically sociopathic ex-boyfriend. All of these sound a lot easier than they actually were.

I needed a purge before the new year so I could guiltlessly partake in gratuitous consumption again. It was the water before the wine; the baptism of bad behaviours. It’s no secret that by February, we would all go back to imbibing and eating too much red meat, but as a good little New Yorker, I was devout to my annual cleanse.

  It was two weeks into December and my fasting was off to a good start: I quarantined myself in my South Brooklyn apartment, constantly boiling pots of herbal tea, starting and stopping books that I’d recently bought, and avoiding texts from my friends asking for a ‘quick drink before the holidays.’ And then I went to Orlando for our family Christmas vacation. 

  Surrounded by God-fearing, self-loathing, two-family-garage toting Midwestern Christians, I tried my damndest to stay true to my cleanse. In between arguments over how I cut onions, when I plan on marrying a black man, and why I never have any money despite making 100K a year, I realized that not drinking during the painfully long weekend was going to be harder than anticipated. I kept myself holier than thou for three days, making statements on my sobriety and carrying myself like a virgin in a whorehouse, but by the final day I broke. It would reverse all of the great work I had done, but I decided to do it anyway. 

  Leaving the timeshare where we spent most of our afternoons and evenings, my aunt gathered all ten of us and drove to a kitschy Orlando restaurant nestled into a boat dock. Caught between a glacial breeze from my right, a mediocre reggae cover band on my left, and my sneering mother seated directly across from me, I quickly calculated the cost-benefit analysis of staying sober through the meal and capitulating to a glass of wine. Earlier in the day, my mother had remarked at how much weight I had gained—a fifteen-pound deviation from my usual one-hundred-pound frame—and I carried the anger from her comment into the restaurant.

  In spite of my frequent side comments throughout the Christmas vacation on my sobriety, I ordered a Malbec from the skinny blonde waitress, thanking the Heavens when my glass arrived, and subsequently cursing under my breath when my aunt interrupted the table’s conversation to say, “I thought you weren’t drinking.” I turned to my little brother, who was graciously picking up the tab, and thanked him for the meal and, more importantly, the glass of wine. I slowly sipped the crimson drink, allowing my mouth to feel each layer of nirvana as it swept across my palate. It was going to be ok, come hell or high water I was going to get through the night.

  Once back in New York, submersed in my daily routine, I was able to quickly slip back into sobriety before the year’s end—not faulting myself for succumbing to a glass of wine in a true time of crisis. I resumed my practice of boiling herbal tea and stayed committed to not responding to my society friend’s nightly texts promising sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I obediently went to work, did my job, came home, walked my dog, set my alarm, slept, and followed this rinse and repeat routine until New Years Eve. Then all hell broke loose. 

  At 10 p.m. that holiday evening, I ran up the stairs at the Grand Street subway station, adjusting my neon bikini top and leather skirt, both covered inconspicuously by my peacoat, and headed in the direction of my DJ friend’s New Year’s Eve party at a frequent subterranean haunt. I wasn’t planning on drinking; I’d resumed my self-righteousness. Two hours later, surrounded by scene photographers, DJ’s, and musicians—amongst the fraternal hoi polloi—I was filled with imposter syndrome and way too much water. I’d never worn something so skimpy in a Manhattan bar as I had that night, and surrounded by quintessential New York musicians whose sartorial choices were nothing short of pomp and circumstance, I couldn’t help but feel like I didn’t fit in. My mother’s comments echoed in the back of my mind each time I looked down at my bare belly, and I accepted my friends’ offer for a glass of wine. And another glass. And another. 

  By 4 a.m.  I was blowing cocaine in a dirty Lower East Side bathroom with a guy whose name I didn’t know. He was telling me how he loved my energy and my moxie, how we were going to marry someday. I could have sworn he was gay, but I just smiled and nodded as we did bumps of blow off of his apartment keys. My cherished wine vice led to a revered coke habit that I could have sworn I kicked, and I was now the whore in the whorehouse and couldn’t care less. I told myself that no one had to know, only the guy in the bathroom and the one who gave us the coke, and neither of them knew me by name.

  I came to the next afternoon, toting both a migraine and a trash heap of calls that I’d made to my sociopathic ex-boyfriend—the one who added me to his will after a few weeks of dating and threatened suicide when I ended things soon after. 

“By 4 a.m.  I was blowing cocaine in a dirty Lower East Side bathroom with a guy whose name I didn’t know. ”

“I’m in the hospital come help me,” I remembered saying to him—the timestamp on the call log showed that this happened at 10 a.m.. I was still high out of my mind.

  I couldn’t remember much from the conversation, as cocaine has that effect, but one piece of our conversation stood out against the chaotic blur.

  “I’m in bed with my girlfriend,” he’d proudly stated.

“You have a girlfriend already? It’s been less than a month since we broke up. What the fuck is wrong with you? You’re a psycho disgusting creep.”

He hung up.

I could remember shouting insults into the phone—my pride was overtaken by my jealousy. No one wants a suicidal sociopath as a lover, but one definitely doesn’t want that sociopath moving on first. Who was I to call when I infrequently lost control from the carefully-crafted life I had constructed? I needed a scapegoat and he was as good as any; now he’d gone and started grooming another woman for my former role and turned a blind eye to my needs. The audacity was unnerving; the domino effect from displacing personal responsibility mixed with my cocaine-fueled hangover was too much to bear, and I wasn’t in the mood for coming to terms with my personal failings—physically and emotionally.

I spent most of my mid-twenties buoying between cocaine highs and the interminable lows, and knew exactly how to restore my dignity. Purchasing every liquid made possible—and sold—at my local bodega, I nursed myself back to health and swore myself back to sobriety. I’m better than most people, I don’t need anything to distract or entertain me, I told myself, shuffling through my drawer for 600mg of Ibruprofen and wondering where all of my Klonopin had gone. 

The next day, I went back to work with newfound sobriety and optimism for the year ahead. That happiness lasted no more than a few days when I received a rejection email from the job I applied to in Paris, which admittedly sounds like the ultimate millennial first-world problem, but when you’re making six figures a year and mask unrelenting self-control behind obsessive-compulsion, not receiving something that you set your mind to drops you lower than any cocaine spiral. And to make matters worse, I didn’t even have an ex to have sex with for a quick pick me up. 

My nagging sense of entitlement was getting farther from being met as the days went on. I spent the first week of the year applying to jobs in London and Paris—the ‘easy apply’ feature on LinkedIn became one of my new vices that, unlike alcohol or cocaine, allowed me to feel good about myself and my decisions the next day. I was making changes, I was going to do something new this year. I wasn’t going to be the drunken whore in that whorehouse—unless it came with French citizenship.

I’d made it almost an entire week without a drink, but on the fifth day of the new year, burdened by self-doubt and a lack of job prospects in Europe, I realized it was going to take a hell of a lot more to become the Parisian novelist that I aimed to be. I carried heaps of New York stories from my music industry past, but I couldn’t broadcast my cocaine-fueled nights in TriBeCa brownstones in stories or on social media; I had a reputation to uphold. My Twitter page lay blank, staring back at me asking ‘what’s happening,’ but I didn’t know how to respond. I had gained 100 followers in a few days—all European writers and editors and publications. ‘You are so awesome,’ they would say to me, and I quickly paralyzed myself from the possibilities before I could take part in the process.

I couldn’t get out of my head, so I got a drink. It was about a full week into the New Year and I was already well overwhelmed. 

Leaving work with a beer buzz, hazy eyes, and that perfect perception of optimism that only comes from being under the influence, I swiped my Metrocard and thought about the evening ahead of me. I would open the bottle of red wine in my refrigerator and write a new short story to be submitted to those literary magazines that recently followed me on Twitter. God damnit I was going to be a star. The drink gave me both the confidence to assume I had everything sorted out and the keen ability to not give a fuck at quite the same time.

A busker played drums to Al Green's “Love and Happiness” as I impatiently waited for the train at 14th street. Almost ten years in the city and I couldn’t say if New York was love or happiness, whether my cocaine habit had returned, or if I would start regularly drinking again. I didn’t know if anything had provided me with love or happiness for an extended period of time—or if anything ever would. I pushed my way onto the crowded train, grabbed an empty seat, smiled in my drunken haze, resolved to not having the answers at that moment, and headed back to Brooklyn. 

• • •

Breadcrumb #626

ERIN DORNEY

Each time I add a shell to my pocket, another disappears. Bright pink and tiny as newborn nails crumbling to dust between my fingers. The sliding glass doors in the lobby double onto themselves and I study it—they’re my mentors now. On all four an etched wave multiplies, never quite aligned but almost. 

The waves are there to protect people, children, birds—all who mistake glass for mirror, search for glimpses of their next selves. The waves double and undouble, the girls follow each other around the trickling fountain. 

Overhead the chandelier sways like a slow zoom. I haven’t yet told anyone how I can make things larger and smaller with my eyes. How I can shrink a woman down to crib-sized and fatten a man until he bursts. How scale changes meaning in a heartbeat, the amount of time it takes for the next wave to come once you’ve already heard the first crashing. 

“How I can shrink a woman down to crib-sized and fatten a man until he bursts.”

The waves, I tell the child hiding behind the sticky wicker chair next to the Birds of Paradise in stinky water—the waves are the only ones who touch my other body, the only ones who know it’s there, a small shell crumbling in a clenching and unclenching hand, a girl knee-deep in the mosaic fountain. 

The child turns, runs, topples the “Check Out” sign, and falls. We watch the mother scream. The doors open again and again, an insatiable mouth—sometimes at the last minute, sometimes when no one is around at all. A wave is always there just in time, ready to wrap itself around you. The steady pressure of water, open arms.

• • •

Breadcrumb #624

GWEN VAN VELSOR

This place is not my home anymore but it once was. Kombucha is for sale at the newsstand and a white guy with greasy hair plays acoustic guitar in the airport. I wonder if he gets paid to play or if he does it just to turn people on. Native place names still exist here: Tacoma, Tualatin, Tenino, Willamette. Just names to many of us now but also remnants of who this place belongs to. Like finding an old cement foundation in a field where a house used to stand. 

The freeway turns into dark highway turns into darker road with a yellow dotted line up the middle indicating freedom to pass a slow truck even in the rain with no street lights. The glow of deer eyes on the shoulder around every bend causes me to grip the wheel too tightly, repeating the mantra to drive through the deer if they decide to bound into my headlights, instead of slamming on the breaks. 

The coffee pot perks its never-ending song all day at my sister’s house. We share marionberry pie and pass the new baby around from embrace to embrace. Salt air makes its way up to the second-floor bedroom where I go to sleep early under a homemade quilt. At 5 am my eyes won’t stay closed any longer and I get dressed and drive the seven minutes into town to find an open coffee shop. 

“We share marionberry pie and pass the new baby around from embrace to embrace.”

The dark roads are illuminated by the Astoria Column, still lit up in holiday colors. I detour up the curvy road, guarded by endless deer, and park in the misty rain. This tourist overlook is home to a painted column for tourists to climb and admire the view. I trudge up to the old wooden door in an inadequate cotton jacket. Somehow, at 6 am, it’s open. I climb the metal spiral staircase, up and up, 164 steps to another wooden door leading to a small balcony overlooking the mouth of the great Columbia, where fresh becomes salt, the sea absorbing this massive river without effort. It’s dark now, nearly two hours until sunrise, but it’s easy to make out the swathes of land and water below, sprinkled with red and white light. 

The Columbia was once a wild thing, waterfalls and rapids spilling over boulders and carved rock. But now it’s nearly placid, deep enough to support huge freight ships that twinkle in the dark of the early morning. The dams make this body of water a wide one, supporting electric life on either side. This river runs deeply inside my body, a cold aorta slowly carving canyons through my flesh. I am home. This is my place, although I’ve denied its memory. I see my reflection in the heavy clouds, my face in every drop of rain. 

Later, under filtered daylight, my nephew and I squat in the backyard near a crumbling old stump covered in slippery black mushrooms and pale green moss, a fairy house. We find tiny purple flowers and thumbnail-sized pinecones, wrap them in alder leaves and place them near the door of the house as gifts, in reverence to this forest, the roots of these trees and to our own connection to this place we were born. 

I dig into the loamy earth and find pieces of my fingernails, clumps of hair, groundwater tinted with my blood. All around me the ferns and colored mosses are remembrances of who I once was, the makeup of my bones. 

Since I’ve been absorbed by the salt I’ve forgotten so much of this place. I don’t know if my soul remembers it, or longs for it. But my bones do. They know the rain, not as cold dampness, but as the source of my life. They know the land, as their own brothers and sisters. 

Back at the airport, a man plays “Come Together,” on an electric xylophone. I sip a perfect foamy latte and breakfast on chia seeds and yogurt. I don’t long to come home here, but rather allow myself to be from here. Allow my bones to long for the soil from which they came. I don’t know how far I’m going, or if I’ll ever come home. But this is my place. 

In the sunrise distance, aboard the plane, Mt. Hood comes alive. Stone covered in clean snow against milky clouds. The man beside me lets out a low gasp.  Frozen waterfalls suspend their spill into the river at the foot of the mountain. I breathe a deep, warm breath, and remember.

• • •

Breadcrumb #614

BRIANNE KERR

When I was young I used to sit at the foot of the wooden rocking chair in my living room, empty,
and reach underneath the seat for the horizontal wooden bar. I would push and pull that bar, up
and around, making the chair rock, but I would pretend I was kneading bread, a task I saw only
in fairy tales, but I was sure that it would be like this, a rhythmic slow wave, with just enough
resistance to feel something. My parents would see me and worry about pinched fingers. Now,
older, on some Sundays I bake bread that I have yet to perfect enough to share and I don’t even
own a rolling pin so instead I run my fingers through its viscous flour and water and I go again
and again, fold and flatten, up and over, a sloppy ballroom dance in a kitchen neither cottage
nor palace, just here, and when I see the clock it usually tells me I’ve gone for too long.

• • •

Breadcrumb #564

MERCY TULLIS-BUKHARI

My brother was, again, drunk, lying on the top step of the big church on the hill, the one with the bright bronze doors. He lifted his head to say, fuck you, to the bright bronze doors of the church, then he put his head back down on the step, closed his eyes, and cradled an empty bottle of Bacardi the way he cradled his stuffed elephant toy when he was a child. Our neighbor told my mother over the phone, your son is drunk again. Find your drunk son on the steps of that big church on the hill, the one with the bright bronze doors. No one walked towards him to shush him, said the neighbor, and the priest did not stop watching child porn in his private quarters to offer my brother forgiveness, and Jesus did not step down from his cross to make my brother a disciple, or even share a bottle of wine with him. That’s why he said, fuck you, to the big bronze doors of the church on the hill, the neighbor said. Jesus turned water into wine for people who could have had a wedding without wine, but my brother needed that wine to keep living. This ain’t no wedding; this is life. 

My mother, begged my father for a ride to the big church on the hill. Fuck no, he said. Fuck that drunk. You see, my brother was not my father’s son, so he washed his hands of any responsibility for him. My father did not have any guilt, of what he could have done wrong with my brother, if a wrong decision in his childhood made my brother so broken that he had to say, fuck you, to the doors of a church, the one on the hill, then fall asleep cradling a bottle, the way he cradled his stuffed elephant when he was a child. My mother, she lived with some guilt, I am sure, so she begged my father. Please, take me to him. I need help carrying him to his bed. Please, drive me to him. Fuck that, my father said. I may lose my parking spot. I need to wake up early in the morning. What would that teach him, if his mother constantly runs to him whenever he falls drunk on the steps of a church. My father still drove her, though. My father really was saying fuck you to the man who never responded to my brother’s letters. That man sent that stuffed elephant to my brother with a promise of connection, then cut that connection as soon as my brother said, I love you, Pop. Thank you for the elephant, Pop. I love you. 

“Please, take me to him. I need help carrying him to his bed.”

He was on the top step of the church, cradling his stuffed elephant, I mean empty Bacardi bottle. The gold doors shined behind my brother, and my mother, walked up the hill, then step by step by step by step by step, to the doors of the church to get to my brother. In that bible story, the son returns to the family, but at this church, the mother was returning to the son. My mother, went to him and pulled the bottle away from his arms. Startled, he yelled, fuck you, when the stuffed elephant, I mean the Bacardi bottle, was out of his arms. My mother said, this is your mother. Watch your mouth. Get up now. Someone may see you. He said, fuck you, again. My mother said, we don’t want people talking about you being a drunk outside of a church. He said fuck you again, then cried. My mother said, don’t cry out here, son. Let’s go to your bed. She carried the stuffed elephant, I mean, the empty bottle, I mean the stuffed elephant, I mean the empty bottle, because leaving an empty Bacardi bottle at the church would be an affront to Jesus and crosses and saints and solid bronze doors and priests who watch child porn. She placed his arm around her shoulder, placed her arm around his waist, then walked to the car. My mother, walked my brother and the elephant, I mean the empty bottle, to the car. The car running, my father looked ahead waiting patiently to hear the backseat car door close. My mother knew her burden, but she loved him. If she was the only person who did love him, she was going to love him.

• • •