love bites

Mama’s Food Shop is an East Village, hipster incarnation of a meat-and-three, complete with screen door and formica tables. And it is delicious.

We ended up there because it was closer than our original destination, and I wanted everything. I chose hastily, but with no regrets.

And, without consultation, he chose what I wanted next-most.

“I don’t love you just because you ordered everything else I really wanted,’ and I helped myself to a few bites off his plate.

He finished telling me why he’d been having a bad day.

“I know. It’s hard,” I told him, “because not everyone can be as perfect as you want them to be. Not everyone can be as perfect as we are.”

I don’t just love him because he ordered the butternut squash and the roasted brussel sprouts. I love him because he knows I’m not joking.

~beatrix


p.s. everyone in the world has leftovers from this place but me, and he doesn't judge.

un-do

Maybe I could just stay here in this stripey sheet-cocoon where I think about nothing but the tips of my fingers and my own breathing. If you concentrate hard enough on not concentrating on anything, the weightlessness can take over.

Sometimes weekends are for fun, but sometimes weekends are for mending.

I like New York because you can order any kind of food and have it delivered. One phone call, and someone will bring waffles and a pistachio milkshake right to you door-- or to your boyfriend’s door-- and you can even pay with a credit card.

But sometimes not even that is enough. Not waffles or two naps or even a pomegranate present from your boy’s football-beer-run.

And now I’ve ended up, head-under-covers, hiding from the world, thankful for the sounds of his typing, and only to be lured out by the promise of sandwiches.

~beatrix

thanks

i am thankful for morning sex, airport-free thanksgivings, the family i miss, and that anyone reads this (this means you).

happy thanksgiving.

~beatrix

hard's not so hard

“Ok. I promise we can have sex tomorrow. Probably. I’ll put it on the list.”

Maybe this is the hard part. . . .

When seeing each other revolves around my hair washing schedule. And we keep ending up in diners at 11:45 on work nights because he works late and the chocolate-covered biscotti I bought at Rite-Aid to get cash back don’t really count as dinner.

When there are complicated logistics involved in ending up together in bed. And once we’re there, all we want to do is sleep.

When the majority of our conversations end with one of us reminding the other that we like our jobs or at the very least other people want them.

I think this might be the hard part.

It’s the being with him that’s the easy part.

~beatrix

on why we do this over and over

It’s hard not to think how things can go wrong-- When you’re wearing a shirt from an Ivy League school you didn’t attend. You uncover that necklace in the bottom of your jewelry box. And you use that Pyrex dish with the nice lid that you somehow ended up with. When you’re looking for your number-six, double-pointed knitting needles and can’t find them or need that little sewing kit you never returned.

Promises break more often than hearts, and you forget why jokes were ever funny. You’ve left a tell-tale trail of toothbrushes.

You change, he changes; maybe it was this way always. And there’s a Christmas gift, purchased for you, but never delivered. Or a birthday travel easel you never collected, perhaps lingering, in the corner of a closet, reminding someone else how wrong he can be.

When it’s over you can never quite remember how you ended up all alone again. You can’t remember what you said or what he said, only that you can be amazingly accurate in your meanness. You can’t remember why you ever liked him in the first place, only that annoying thing he did every time you yawned or the time he stood you up on Valentine’s Day or when he would wear that pink shirt with that red tie or the idiotic thing he said that makes you think he probably still thinks about you. And when you walk down 5th street three times one day, you realize you can’t even remember which building was his.

Sometimes you remember the way he’d answer the phone when he knew it was you. Or the way it felt to fall asleep on his chest. Or that night you were both pretending you knew how to salsa. But not usually.

And you still wear the tee shirt, but you have better necklaces. You never learned to salsa, but that’s never stopped you before. And you’ve found someone new.

You quite like him, but your official stance is “cautiously optimistic”.

Because it’s hard not to think of how things can go wrong. You’ve been here so many times before. Maybe not here exactly, but in the general neighborhood, the suburbs, maybe. You made him dinner in that Pyrex with the nice lid.

Remember this. Remember. Remember. Remember.

Don’t forget to remember the good parts.

And you raise your glass or bow your head. ’Cause here’s to hoping.

~beatrix

what we talk about when the boys don't come to dinner

I found out my cousin’s wife was pregnant in the usual way: a photo of a pregnancy test posted on facebook. My grandma had already commented on it. I guess everyone is happy, even though my cousin’s wife just turned 21. What’s sad is that she could just start to have alcohol legally, and now she can’t drink unless she wants a broken baby. What’s crazy is that when she’s my age, she’ll have a first-grader.

Over Italian food Julianna told me she might get a puppy.

“I think I’ve almost convinced Ed,” she said. “I told him, ‘It’s better than a baby.’”

I’m not sure this newlywed-girl logic is effective. The topic turned to babies.

“I waaant one,” Jules whined. But then she told me, “When we saw Ed’s family last weekend, his cousin had a really tiny baby, like nine days old. And she just had to keep feeding it, and she had to keep a journal of every time it pooped. And it just seemed. . . hard. If I had one, my mom would have to come stay for like. . . a year.”

“I’d babysit for you,” I volunteered, “in like four years.”

Maybe Ed will just let her get that puppy.

~beatrix

some days are really hard

If I were a skirt, my mom would say I’d be fine with a slip.

I’m worn thin today.

It’s only 7:58 a.m. It’s only time for the shop keepers to water-hose the sidewalk. I’m already going to be late.

If you leave a rubber band in the sun, it will crumble.

I’m already ready for Christmas. It’s only Tuesday. It’s only October.

I think I could sleep anywhere.

My elbows hurt.

And nice slips are so hard to find these days.


~beatrix

my mom's probably relieved not to be dealing with these questions herself

I’m, no doubt, feeling like a girlfriend.

Can I wear a weird hat?
What should I do with my hairdryer if I think it might catch on fire while I’m gone?

I wonder if he feels like a boyfriend.

I made him take homemade soup for lunch one day, and he’s had a lot of loaves of breakfast bread in his life lately. And he has a terribly needy girlfriend to remind him.

Weird hat is fine and encouraged.
No, I don’t think you should put it in the oven.

~beatrix

on budgeting time

I spend my waking energy

23% Working at my actual, paying job
19% Making out / Watching Glee
5% Trying not to fall asleep
4% Deciding what I want for lunch
9% Doing something to my hair
5% Pinching my belly fat / using a combination of mirrors to check the visibility of the bones in my spine / wondering if my boobs are shrinking
6% Idly speculating about the lives of strangers
8% Remembering what it was I was going to blog about
6% Deciding if this matches / is too short / requires a bra
5% Calling my mom
10% Trying to convince friends and strangers to get a puppy and/or let me cut their hair

I’ve given a number of successful haircuts. In fact, the only mishap occurred on my own head. And even though I think I might be slowly convincing him, Ted’s not so sure it would be good for our relationship.

Maybe he should just get a puppy.



~beatrix

weekend

I stayed home on Friday night to bake coffee cake. It had apples in it.

My boy came to me after a late work night, and we slept.

I woke up first. It was nearly noon, though you wouldn’t have known it from the grey light through the windows. He was just an occasional arm or leg outside a pile of duvet while I warmed up breakfast and made hot chocolate.

We stayed in bed as long as possible. I soaped his back in the shower, and he watched me put on mascara.

This boy-- he makes me such a girlfriend.

We’re more than six months in, and, yeah. . . it’s still a surprise. The good kind of surprise.

~beatrix

we are gathered here today

We had sex three times then wrote some wedding vows not quite on purpose:

I, Beatrix, take you, Ted, to have and to hold and all of that even if you get fat from all the snacks. I love you more than eating. . . Um. . . I love you almost as much as eating. . . but it’s very close. Also, I promise to try to remember to clean the hair out of the shower drain as long as you try to remember to trim your mustache before it gets long enough to get in my mouth when I kiss you. And you know, I’ll forsake all others. . . unless Natalie Portman agrees to that thing we talked about. So I generally take you for better or worse and richer and poorer, though let’s aim up and not down, ok? Forever and ever.

~beatrix

sweet nothings

For the first time in my life I’m more afraid that something’s not going to work out than that it’s going to.

Maybe we shouldn’t write Valentines.

I didn’t even want to date you when I first met you, but . . .ugh. . . sometimes I think maybe we should just get it over with.

~beatrix

explosionless

Ted and I had our first fight.

“I would hesitate to even call that a fight.”
“Well, I didn’t like it.”

Simplified, it came down to the most basic of relationship problems: I don’t feel that you were paying attention to what I needed.

Explosionless, it came complete with listening and logic.

It was so calm it happened while crossing streets, and by the time we reached his block, I was letting him hold my hand again.

“You are good at that.”
“I didn’t feel so good at it earlier.”


~beatrix

happy day after halloween

these are the things we were not for halloween:

emma and coach tanaka from glee
a lion tamer and a lion
a chicken and julia child
something from a video game (obv. not my idea)

instead the boy went as Over-Worked and i went as Burnt-Out. i didn't even have to fake the unwashed hair or dark under-eye circles.

had a kit-kat for dinner. happy day after halloween.

~trix