Ways I Can Change My Life (NYPress)

(Originally published in NYPress, 1994)

1. Make fewer lists, or stick to the lists I make. Stop making lists of lists. Stop putting “change life” on lists of things to do.

2. Stop thinking about Eliza. Just forget all about her. Understand and internalize the idea that it is counter-productive to think about her. Stop calling and hanging up on her machine.

3. Get out more. Go see museums. Enrich myself. Stop kidding myself that walking around Soho with Sophie on a Saturday is enriching. Shoes are not art.

Sophie disagrees. “Get new shoes,” she says. “Change your life.”

She drives me crazy lately, with all her fabulous fatuous answers: get new shoes, fuck somebody else, just get over it. Sophie thinks of all her little philosophies as very fittingly succinct, like Zen. She reads too many magazines.

“You are a classic woman who loves too much,” she tells me. We’re at Whole Foods, cruising vegetarians.

Mahatma Sophie. “You’re a woman who spends too much on shoes,” I say.

A beautiful woman with light red hair, Eliza’s cut, picking dried organic peaches. Almost her. My mouth and eyes water. Sophie whacks me in the upper arm.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s go down to Pearl Paint and pick up artists.”

Maybe I do need shoes. I need to change my life.

4. Pursue happiness. This does not mean trying to drum up invisible lovers at Whole Foods or Pearl Paint or St. Marks Books. This does not mean dashing off the 3 train to go look for some beautiful woman riding the 1 train. This does not mean chasing after Eliza even after she’s made it perfectly clear she wants nothing to do with you. So, I guess I don’t know what this means.

5. Quit weeping. Though, perversely, it is my only joy.

6. Stop watching tv. Start working out again. Read more. Keep my house clean. The usual.

7. Pursue happiness. I still don’t know what this means. Maybe try redefining happiness as that which can plausibly occur even without the slimmest prospect of a potential love interest. Maybe try giving up on love.

8. Get out more.

“You need to get out more,” says Sophie. “How are you going to meet people if you don’t get out?”

“I don’t want to meet people,” I tell her. “I already met people, and she dumped me.”

Sophie sighs hugely. “You can’t stay miserable forever.”

I determine to prove her wrong. “She was it,” I say. “She was the one for me. Whether or not we’re together, I’m going to love her for the rest of my life.”

“Well,” she says, “I swore I’d love David Cassidy for the rest of my life. Maybe you’ll be like me, and grow up.”

9. Grow up. Face facts. Admit it. It’s over. Be adult.

10. Move on.

11. Win her back somehow! Convince her that she is too ready for a relationship at this point in her life! Remind her that she said she loved me! Threaten to kill myself and others!

12. Get a grip.

13. REMEMBER A TIME WHEN YOU FELT HAPPY, AND REFLECT ON WHY YOU FELT THAT WAY.

I was pretending my heart was not a bonfire in my breast, that our arms weren’t ever so electrically grazing on the armrest, that I was actually aware of the plot of the movie. Tried to see her in the dark, her sharp chin, thin neck. Could not exhlae for fear of losing my ground. Prayed for her to inch closer.

We went for something to eat. “The cinematography was inspired,” she said. I could do nothing but agree. She knew so much, and I was just catching on. The toe of her sneaker brushed lightly against my shin. I managed to swallow my breath.

“I’ll walk you to a cab,” she said. It was raining. Every step toward the avenue was a decision against what I knew I wanted to say. We stopped and waited at the curb.

“I have to tell you something,” I started to say, and then she stopped me, her finger to her lips, her lips to mine…

14. Oh, Eliza…

15. Stop whining. You think you deserve love? You think anyone is ever truly loved? Bullshit. It’s all neurotic projection. Nobody knows what they’re doing, we’re all just grappling around, blind as hamburger. Doing our damnedest not to die alone. True empathy and understanding between two people is an existential and empirical impossibility. Love amongst humans is a frivolous conceit. Self-love is where it’s at.

16. Stop thinking about Eliza while masturbating.

17. Quit going to dyke bars by myself and getting all melancholy and plastered-like on red wine and pouring out my tale of woe to a woman who only wants one of the napkins under my elbow. Realize that everybody is lonely, nobody cares.

18. “Fucking cheer up, for chrissakes.”

I meet Sophie at Cafe Orlin. We sit outside and cruise pedestrians. She’s impatient with me now, looking irritated and away, posing archly in her chair with her cigarette at a pert angle.

“You’ve been on this for a month now, why don’t you just drop it.”

I don’t answer her.

“You never want to go anywhere. You never want to do anything. You want to, like, sit around and butcher your haircut and cry. It’s getting old.”

I definitely need to change my life. “I’m in a lot of emotional pain,” I say quietly into my iced tea.

“Well you’re enjoying it a little too much.”

Sophie should talk — or, actually, she should shut up for the rest of her life. The original crisis-addict drama queen sucks her iced mochaccino and hikes her brows at me.

“You know, you’re not the only one who’s alone.”

Just as long as we’ve got each other, Soph. “Right,” I say.

“You don’t have to wallow. You’re beginning to depress me.”

“I’m sorry I’m not more entertaining.”

“Me too,” she says, blowing smoke.

Two women walk by, their hands locked tight, looking fiercely in love. I feel everything in me go with them as they pass, like someone yanking the tablecloth from under the dishes, the table suddenly naked. My eyes swoon. Sophie indicates them with her arm.

“You know there are — literally — millions of other women.”

Shows how much she knows. I happen to have counted them all. “Yeah, and the ones who don’t have girlfriends are straight.”

A guy on a bike slows to catch Sophie’s eye, which she is just flinging out there with desperate abandon. They share a longing, lingering moment of look-sex, and he rides on. She frowns and turns her attention back to me.

“Well you know, as I recall, at one time you used to be straight too.”

Of course. Back in my less enlightened days, when I thought I had to sleep with men. A lovely reminder of my many happy experiences with the wrong (oh sorry, opposite) sex. Wonder why I’m not as nostalgic for those days as Sophie seems to be.

“I was never straight,” I hiss, and stalk away.

19. Get a better haircut.

20. Get a better job.

21. Get better friends.

22. Get a better job. Try to channel all my excess frustration and anxiety into developing my career. Wind up channeling all my excess frustration and anxiety into being more frustrated and anxious at work.

23. Get better friends. Get more friends. Get more gay women friends. Meet more gay women, dammit.

24. Get a better best friend. Understand the many ways in which my life has already changed. Understand that Sophie doesn’t understand it. Try to ignore the fact that she finds it inconvenient, wishes I’d “turn back to normal.” Find somebody who understands.

25. Stop looking for what I need from other people. I’m just not going to get it. And since self-involvement is good enough for everybody else, it shoudl be good enough for me.

26. Yeah.

27. Give up on women. Choose not to belive the big beautiful lie. They’re all horrible wretched self-absorbed disappointments, including me. Especially me. Even I can’t stand to listen to me lately. I need to change my life.

28. Pursue happiness. Begin by turning off the tv.

29. Focus my daily meditation on something other than the bitter irony of perfect empty aloneness.

30. Get back into therapy. Investigate the many new psychopharmaceutical alternatives to my actual personality.

31. Convert to radical asexualism in the name of political extremism, or just pretend that not getting laid is on purpose.

32. Put all my recent poetry into one reeking, maudlin pile and torch it.

33. Stop calling Eliza.

“I did it again,” I tell Sophie, weeping over the phone. “Oh God, I did it again.”

I hear her struggle to wake up. “Smmhang on,” she mutters.

I wait, daubing plaintively at my leaky nose. A long, loud piss resonates in the background, then a groan. She returns.

“Smm back. What happened.”

“I…I called her.” Out and out weeping, I burst.

“What’d she say.”

I thought we agreed not to contact each other for right now.

“Sophie, she…”

I don’t want to see you. Why can’t you please respect that.

“What’d she say?”

“She doesn’t want to…”

We’ve been over this. I’m not in love with you. My feelings for you have changed.

“She doesn’t…she doesn’t love me…oh God, Sophie, she doesn’t love me…” My stomach hurts so bad over this one undeniable truth. “She doesn’t love me anymore…”

Sophie lights up a cigarette and takes a fat mid-morning drag.

“Shh baby, it’s okay,” she says. “Come pick me up, we’ll go buy shoes.”

34. Commit meaningful suicide. Assassinate key figures in the white supremacy leadership and then turn the gun on myself. Fly to the Brazilian rainforest and lay down in front of the bulldozers. Spontaneously combust in front of her house in the East Village.

35. Go volunteer in Bangladesh. Enlist in the Peace Corps. Do something valuable and important and covered in flies. Put my misery in its vastly insignificant perspective.

36. Get new shoes.

“I really like those cork-bottomed mules,” says Sophie, pointing discreetly.

We’re at the New Musuem, cruising eclectics. “For chrissakes, will you look at the art?”

It’s becoming shatteringly obvious that Sophie and I are looking for different things. She looks so remote to me now, my closest friend, a tweezed stranger.

“Why?” she says. “I’m enjoying this museum in my own way.” She purses her sticky lips. “Tolerance, right? Respect for people’s different lifestyles?”

Excellent. I can’t wait to grasp the “message” behind this. “What’s your point,” I say.

“My point is, everybody is special, okay? You are not more or less special than anybody else, including me, and you need to get over yourself.”

Oh, I just love it when Sophie tells me what I need. Usually it’s really crucial intelligence, like, “You need to get L’Oreal Living Lips in Natural Nude,” or, “You need a pair of cork-bottomed mules,” but I’m always grateful for the little insights, too.

“Maybe I shouldn’t expect you to understand,” I tell her.

“Why, I’ve never been dumped? Please, do I need to go and list the number of cretins…

“You don’t know what it feels like for me,” I insist. “You’ve never had your heart broken by a woman.”

“Well, you’re wrong,” she tells me, stamping hard on her stacked heel. “You’re breaking my heart. You’re my best friend, and I love you, and you’re acting like an asshole, and it’s breaking my heart. Okay?”

I am a woman in love, and I’ll do anything…somebody somewhere is playing Streisand for me. I am watching a slow movie of my six weeks with Eliza, and suddenly it seems…almost funny. There’s me — endlessly attentive, slavishly devoted, then hollering like an idiot in Tompkins Square Park — and then there’s her — smirking like a crone and walking away. I can see myself, finally, alone and bug-sized on the sidewalk, waving my arms and squealing my indignant helium squeal, “But you promised! You promised! You said you loved me!”

And then…it’s over. The movie ends. I get up and leave the theater. Sophie is shaking my shoulder.

“Hey, you know,” she says. “Straight girls need love too.”

Oh god, poor adorbale Sophie. What a complete ass I’ve been, ignoring the woman who really loves me for the memory of a woman who can’t. I lean forward and she gives me a hug.

“I love you Sophie,” I tell her, snuffling into her shirt.

“Well, don’t get all dykey about it,” she says. “Now come on, let’s go over to Tootsie Plohound and cruise footwear.”