In Which We Send The Wrong E-Mail To The Wrong Person

Other Than Myself

by AMANDA OLIVER

So far, there is a man who expects me to always be brief and too busy. There is a man who expects me to always be there and too much. There are several people who expect that I’ll fill in the silence during car rides. There is a girl who wants me to watch her cats. There is a girl who cancels every time we make plans. I hang their expectations like a hammock in my brain. I go to it when I want to feel good again. Whether they are really expectations or not, I seek comfort there.

I live in a friend’s apartment in an old motel the first week. An acquaintance comes to pick me up and says, “Oh, neat! A re-done motel.” There is nothing changed or improved or remodeled or re-done. The motel rooms are just individual apartments now and I am envious of how easy it is for them to change so completely with just a new name.

I live in a friend’s walk-in closet next. He provides me with a sleeping mat and a sleeping bag, company and meals that he pays for with a “just pay it forward” wave of his hand. He offers me the couch, but I can’t sleep next to the familiar noise of an unfamiliar city.

The sirens and shouts and garbage trucks are the same everywhere, but I am different now. I want dark and quiet. I want to listen to the other tenants climb the stairs through the walls at night. I want to hear the bones of this place, not the world outside of it. I want to be familiar with something, even if it’s just the way the dog next door hates the tenant two doors over.

When I go to battle with myself I bring a dictionary and my to-do list. Since I moved to Seattle, I have neither.

+

I drink coffee because I am not sure what else to do here without a car. Someone tells me about a French bakery in walking distance that has good croissants. There is one open table when I arrive. Next to me, a woman pecks at her children, "Are we mean to mommy? Are we mean to mommy?" and the father spins circles around them, a whirlwind of grabbing a fork, then the cream, then napkins, then a fallen pacifier, then napkins again. He bumps the back of his chair into the side of me each time he rises.

A middle-aged woman asks to join me and I can barely contain my excitement. 

"Yes! Of course! I felt bad taking this whole table! Join!"

I'm all exclamation points. I just want to please someone other than myself. She is reading a book and I want to ask her what it is, if it’s any good, but I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed. When she gets up to grab her cheese danish and I see the title, I am.

I watch everything around me and hope nothing is watching me.

+

I purchase a card with an illustration of the typography of a bird on it. It flies out of my purse whenever I dig for a book or my wallet. I trace its body with my eyes in a way I cannot look at myself in a photograph or a mirror lately. The fragile auricular just below his tiny eye, the wing coverts, the scapulars. Flattened on paper he looks unbreakable and incapable of flight.

My father loves birds. One Christmas, a Christmas that we picked names to exchange gifts with a fifty-dollar limit, a Christmas that must have been a decade ago, my cousin’s husband bought him a cheap blue and white birdhouse. I was hurt on his behalf, especially when I saw the price tag for $9.99. No part of receiving it was hard or sad for him. It stills hangs in my parent's backyard. I am always trying to feel things for others first so that they might not have to.

Here, I don’t know who to feel for other than myself and I am not blind, for once, to what it means to be selfish.

+

It takes exactly two hits of Obama Kush from a weed shop in Bellevue to make me think my hair looks very good. I stick my head inside of the built-in shelves in the walk-in closet and think about how beautiful it is in there. Leonardo DaVinci said, “Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.” I want the smallest room.

A friend offers to help me create goals for my year and, five days after I first feel disappointed in not having thought of it myself, I realize we are not the same. I am incapable of shaping my year with a path laid down to larger themes. I achieve in bursts or not at all.

Driving, a new friend asks me what my favorite movie is and I say I don’t have one. He asks, “Well, what movies don’t you like?” And I have no answer for that, either. “Well, do you like music?” I tell him I do. I tell him I like to watch movies sometimes and I don’t rank them. I tell him there are certain bands I listen to when I write. He wants names. I give him three. He asks me if I have a favorite type of movie and I try to explain that I’ll give most everything a try. He finally tells me he doesn’t have a favorite movie and that he hates the question. I find myself barking back, “So why did you ask me?”

I can chew the fat until it’s lean meat. I am learning that I can spit it out, too.

I read several essays about travel and home and all of them make me cry. I am exhausted with constantly bathing myself in nostalgia and rinsing it off with other people’s well-crafted sentences. Cities are beginning to mean less to me. Nostalgia is, too. You can be miserable anywhere. You can be happy, too. I am tired of tallying up my sins and organizing them by zip code.

“I think you’ll feel better when you have a job here,” a friend advises.

The clock above Safeway has been stuck at 7:45 for weeks, perhaps longer. Twice a day, it is correct. Twice a day, it is correct. It becomes my mantra. One morning, it’s correct again all day. It feels like a betrayal.

For my part-time work, I send the wrong e-mail to the wrong person. I follow up with an apology and I write the word “form” instead of “from". There were whole years I refused to apologize for anything. Now all I want to say is I got it wrong and I’m sorry.

Amanda Oliver is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Seattle. She last wrote in these pages about writing back. You can find her website here.

Photographs by the author.

"Pony" - Wavves (mp3)

In Which We Came To Expect The Answers

Misplaced

by AMANDA OLIVER

Your life is not what you thought it would be. You thought by now you would have a best-selling book or a house or at least a baby. When did you first think these things? Eighteen? Nineteen? Always? After you turned twenty-five life started to feel unreal, like you'd be getting a do-over button any day now. Your peers started settling down and sorting out and you felt misplaced.

Adulthood only mixed things up for you. Responsibilities disrupted the idea of dreams, which were never very clear to you anyway. A book, a house, a baby. You still think about that king-sized bed in Boston and how you discovered your body could roll away from him twice and you still didn't reach the edge. You still think about driving drunk down the street you lived on, going five miles per hour, sobbing and pleading he would be waiting at your place. Using the rules of The Secret to will it into existence, but you didn't see him again for another three years and, by then, good riddance. You wandered New York City and cried in crosswalks for one full month and slept with friends of friends and boyfriends of friends. You bought platform shoes.

Your cheeks became surfaces of tiny bumps and your mother tells you, Rosacea. Your mother assures you, Rosacea. Just like her. You plan trips and you travel and it feels good to have something the rest do not. Books, houses, babies do not travel well, but you do. In Nice, you yell "I'm leaving" at the British geologist who asks whether you'll sleep on the beach with him. You yell it at least twice before you realize there is no tram service or taxis and the inquiring man has thrown his hands up and walked away backwards like it's a stick-up.

You plod the length of the tram, looking down side streets until you find a driver willing to take you back to your hostel. He takes all of your European money and your American money as fare. It’s late, he explains. In the morning you write the British man an e-mail to apologize and he responds that he enjoyed you. Was intrigued. Will you meet him by the beach you first met on a few days earlier? Whole paragraphs and you never write back. You picture him standing on all of the rocks and squinting into the sun as he tries to look for you. He probably went swimming. He probably met someone else.

In Barcelona your host expects that you'll be like the other Americans who have come to stay. Party, party, party he explains and tells you a story in broken English about two girls pretending to be "Funny Bunnies". You stare blankly back at his expectant face when he is finished. "That's not an American thing, sorry. I'm not sure." You feel old. Dislocated. You travel. You travel. When you do not, you rotate around routines. Farmer’s market eggs on Saturday, Kramerbooks on Sunday, at least one Smithsonian museum a week. You count the escalator steps, you guess what people will eat for lunch.

You apply to creative writing MFA programs for fiction and you are not a fiction writer. You are rejected from every single one and you wonder whether that was exactly what you wanted. Your stories make no sense to you a year later. You decide to forgive everyone who has ever hurt you. You decide to quit your job. You decide to be happy. Decisions are not your strength -- wavering is. So, you waver. You seek the ocean. You come expecting answers and you get waves. They're no longer the metaphorical things they used to be, but they are still beautiful. You try to see yourself in that, but you're tired of metaphors and similes and anything that might be related to writing or poems.

You listen to the same song on repeat and words come, but they are not your own. You have written the lyrics. You finally get glasses and you stop traveling so much. You commit to a person and a place. You bake bread and wash the dishes in the sink. Loading the dishwasher will never be your thing. You buy a box of records and only listen to The Carpenters and John Denver. You think about buying a car or a moped or some form of transportation that you cannot sell for 50 dollars on Craigslist when you leave again. You walk every day and use a face scrub on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Your desk piles with new books and you miss several hundred others in boxes back east.

You write, but it is no longer a way of discovering yourself. It is for paying credit card bills and achieving notoriety or at least a Google alert. You write, but you can never decide on endings. You seek endings, but you can never settle. You have memories, but it feels like you weren’t there at all. Like you are remembering stories someone told you when you were little, half-heard whisperings just before you gave into sleep. You commit to a group climbing Mount Kilamanjaro. You look for the cheapest flights to Alaska. Your life is not what you thought it would be.

Amanda Oliver is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Photographs by the author.

The Best of Amanda Oliver

Keeping company

Fourteen countries in one summer

Developing a travel notebook

Trying to maintain better posture

Her name on a bathroom wall

Following each other on the website

In Which We Fight For Nothing

Other Than Myself

by AMANDA OLIVER

So far, there is a man who expects me to always be brief and too busy. There is a man who expects me to always be there and too much. There are several people who expect that I’ll fill in the silence during car rides. There is a girl who wants me to watch her cats. There is a girl who cancels every time we make plans. I hang their expectations like a hammock in my brain. I go to it when I want to feel good again. Whether they are really expectations or not, I seek comfort there.

I live in a friend’s apartment in an old motel the first week. An acquaintance comes to pick me up and says, “Oh, neat! A re-done motel.” There is nothing changed or improved or remodeled or re-done. The motel rooms are just individual apartments now and I am envious of how easy it is for them to change so completely with just a new name.

I live in a friend’s walk-in closet next. He provides me with a sleeping mat and a sleeping bag, company and meals that he pays for with a “just pay it forward” wave of his hand. He offers me the couch, but I can’t sleep next to the familiar noise of an unfamiliar city.

The sirens and shouts and garbage trucks are the same everywhere, but I am different now. I want dark and quiet. I want to listen to the other tenants climb the stairs through the walls at night. I want to hear the bones of this place, not the world outside of it. I want to be familiar with something, even if it’s just the way the dog next door hates the tenant two doors over.

When I go to battle with myself I bring a dictionary and my to-do list. Since I moved to Seattle, I have neither.

+

I drink coffee because I am not sure what else to do here without a car. Someone tells me about a French bakery in walking distance that has good croissants. There is one open table when I arrive. Next to me, a woman pecks at her children, "Are we mean to mommy? Are we mean to mommy?" and the father spins circles around them, a whirlwind of grabbing a fork, then the cream, then napkins, then a fallen pacifier, then napkins again. He bumps the back of his chair into the side of me each time he rises.

A middle-aged woman asks to join me and I can barely contain my excitement. 

"Yes! Of course! I felt bad taking this whole table! Join!"

I'm all exclamation points. I just want to please someone other than myself. She is reading a book and I want to ask her what it is, if it’s any good, but I’m afraid I’ll be disappointed. When she gets up to grab her cheese danish and I see the title, I am.

I watch everything around me and hope nothing is watching me.

+

I purchase a card with an illustration of the typography of a bird on it. It flies out of my purse whenever I dig for a book or my wallet. I trace its body with my eyes in a way I cannot look at myself in a photograph or a mirror lately. The fragile auricular just below his tiny eye, the wing coverts, the scapulars. Flattened on paper he looks unbreakable and incapable of flight.

My father loves birds. One Christmas, a Christmas that we picked names to exchange gifts with a fifty-dollar limit, a Christmas that must have been a decade ago, my cousin’s husband bought him a cheap blue and white birdhouse. I was hurt on his behalf, especially when I saw the price tag for $9.99. No part of receiving it was hard or sad for him. It stills hangs in my parent's backyard. I am always trying to feel things for others first so that they might not have to.

Here, I don’t know who to feel for other than myself and I am not blind, for once, to what it means to be selfish.

+

It takes exactly two hits of Obama Kush from a weed shop in Bellevue to make me think my hair looks very good. I stick my head inside of the built-in shelves in the walk-in closet and think about how beautiful it is in there. Leonardo DaVinci said, “Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.” I want the smallest room.

A friend offers to help me create goals for my year and, five days after I first feel disappointed in not having thought of it myself, I realize we are not the same. I am incapable of shaping my year with a path laid down to larger themes. I achieve in bursts or not at all.

Driving, a new friend asks me what my favorite movie is and I say I don’t have one. He asks “Well, what movies don’t you like?” And I have no answer for that, either. “Well, do you like music?” I tell him I do. I tell him I like to watch movies sometimes and I don’t rank them. I tell him there are certain bands I listen to when I write. He wants names. I give him three. He asks me if I have a favorite type of movie and I try to explain that I’ll give most everything a try. He finally tells me he doesn’t have a favorite movie and that he hates the question. I find myself barking back “So why did you ask me?”

I can chew the fat until it’s lean meat. I am learning that I can spit it out, too.

I read several essays about travel and home and all of them make me cry. I am exhausted with constantly bathing myself in nostalgia and rinsing it off with other people’s well-crafted sentences. Cities are beginning to mean less to me. Nostalgia is, too. You can be miserable anywhere. You can be happy, too. I am tired of tallying up my sins and organizing them by zip code.

“I think you’ll feel better when you have a job here,” a friend advises.

The clock above Safeway has been stuck at 7:45 for weeks, perhaps longer. Twice a day, it is correct. Twice a day, it is correct. It becomes my mantra. One morning, it’s correct again all day. It feels like a betrayal.

For my part-time work, I send the wrong e-mail to the wrong person. I follow up with an apology and I write the word “form” instead of “from". There were whole years I refused to apologize for anything. Now all I want to say is I got it wrong and I’m sorry.

Amanda Oliver is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Seattle. She last wrote in these pages about writing back. You can find her website here.

Photographs by the author.

"Summer of Love" - Waxahatchee (mp3)

"The Dirt" - Waxahatchee (mp3)