the suitcase song

In November I am a nomad. I sleep in hotel beds and on air mattresses and in the passenger seat of Tom’s Mazda, the Massachusetts Turnpike rumbling behind my knees, clomping up and down the Northeast Corridor in my brown suede boots. “You are so loud,” Jackie says, at the sound of my heels echoing on wide-plank farmhouse hardwood. “Seriously. Wherever you go.”

I shrug. She’s right. I’m noisy.

I like people to know where I am.

*

Rachel comes at the beginning of the month and we see the Facebook movie, talk about Facebook, talk about leaving our away messages up all day in undergrad, coming back between classes to find AIM windows stacked one on top of another like junk mail. “I kind of miss that,” I confess, over red velvet cheesecake so sweet it makes my teeth ache. “Knowing where you were at any given moment.”

“I kind of do, too,” she says.

We go to the MFA and stand in front of the Brown Sisters for twenty minutes, hogging the space. I get teary, because I’m a nerd. From year to year those women didn’t change at all but still they’re somehow old by the end, lovely and sad and thick around the middle. I turn to Rach, who I met in freshman English at Maria Regina High School in 1999. She sat one row over, in the front. “You look the same to me,” I tell her. “Except for your bangs.”

I wonder, though, about the time lapse. I’m glad no one follows with a camera.

*

I’m getting paid to write fiction. Imagine that. Jackie says: it’s nice to have someone remind you that you’re doing exactly what you always said you would.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been, for the most part. In my own brain.

*

It’s concert weekend with Sierra and I meet her at the Avis in the New Haven train station, argue with the nasty girl behind the counter, think: well, you’d be mean, too, if you worked behind the counter at the Avis in the New Haven train station. We have mastered the art of iPhone navigation. We have mastered the art of the Applebee’s lunch. At the concert there is pushing and a girl throws her arm around Sierra, drunkenly demands to know if it is her birthday. (It’s not.)

Later we sit in bed at the Hilton, watching The Holiday and eating pizza from the box. We are happy and starving.  Every single person in that movie is miscast.

*

I eat three different Thanksgiving dinners. I make four pies, the most delicious cake of my life, and a pan of brownies. The scale, which is broken, says I have lost six pounds in one day.

*

We get in an argument. It’s mostly my fault but a little bit his. I am my worst, meanest self; I am the dirtiest of fighters.

We make up. We truck on. I make dinner. He washes the floor.

Last night, he said: “Want to go cut down a Christmas tree?”

I said, “I love you kind of a lot.”

*

It’s the third of December.

It’s pizza and beer night at book club.

Yesterday I got nominated for a prize.

I think I already won one.