Venus.

On Thursday, I woke up with the worst cramps of my life. We went to the hospital and I found out my ovary was bleeding. I went into surgery so they could stop the bleeding and drain the blood and fluid. Now I have two little incisions on my abdomen and it hurts to cough.

My belly is rounder than normal for the time being, and I keep looking at myself in the mirror. I learned a year or so ago that the reason women carry fat in their midsection is for when they have a baby, so the baby will be safe in there. That changed everything for me. 

And now I can understand, to some degree, why Chrisanne said that she felt like the Venus of Willendorf when she was pregnant with her son. And why that might be a nice thing to feel.

Venus of Willendorf, 28,000-25,000 BC

Really a real person.

I met this girl once, a while ago. She made me feel like I was in middle school again. She was the loud, confident girl and I was the small, quiet girl. She created a one-way conversation in which she reigned supreme. She asked me questions that put me on the spot, and when I squirmed or hesitated, she spoke loudly, drawing others into her web to listen to her speak for herself and for me.

It was an interesting experience, because I was aware in the moment of what was happening. I told myself, "You're not twelve anymore. You can wrestle your turn back." So I made my own bold assertions, pulled out my own wit, met her on her level, and planted my feet respectably in the conversation.

It was just one evening that I really met her, but I felt a lingering bitterness toward her, for what she'd done to me, for how she made me feel. She had a stoner's face. She was full of hot air. Wherever there was a realness to her, it was buried so deep  that I wasn't sure she remembered how to find it.

For a year, I shriveled when I saw her at social events. We joked about her mercilessly. I had a scale: at one end was this girl, at the far end was your typical decent human being.

But then I found a corner of the internet that belonged to her. It surprised me in every way. It was thoughtful, original, and real. There was pain, there was exultation, there was quiet resolve. I consumed it tirelessly.

The triumph of the discovery was that of finding a real person, not a caricature or a character. I could see her heart--I could almost touch it. If I could, I would have hugged it.

To this girl: I am sorry. It's so amazing that everyone is really a real person when you actually look.

Consuming each other.

This weekend, for whatever reason, I downloaded Tinder again. Because, as I've said before, it's just fun--to look at the people out there and how they portray themselves, to imagine whether you would like them if you met.

But then, I started to feel myself turning to Tinder to distract myself from pain and disappointment--an escape into others' lives.

Within a few hours, I had a lunch date set for the next day. A Tinder date. A thing that I never thought would happen to me. I couldn't sleep that night. When we met up, my hands were shaking.  

But it was fine. I got a little worried that we wouldn't last an hour when he said he mostly talked about tv. But he was interested in things and he made some funny jokes. I expressed my array of strong and sometimes strange opinions that come up during date talk: I think action movies are boring. I like movies where people talk to each other. Not big on tv either. I don't like meeting new people. But he was fine with it all. It was fine. Truly.

After a sparse afternoon and evening's worth of witty text banter, I couldn't anymore. He was a stranger, and I didn't want to spend my emotional energy coming up with quips and wondering whether his jokes were meant sincerely or not. There was no raison d'être there with us. And so I said, Sorry, this isn't for me. You're nice. Bye.

Okay, now listen. I know this isn't a big deal. I know I didn't break anyone's heart. But I've been uneasy about it for two days now.

I'm just disturbed by how we consume one another. We see so many people in a day that we'll never talk to, and so they never have the chance to become fully human to us. They don't impact us. We just look at them. We just consume them.

Endless swiping on Tinder is endless consumption--reducing a person to 5 pictures and 2 sentences and ingesting them. And then, if you make the horrible error of going on a date with one of those people, it's just a slightly more sophisticated level of consumption. We traded facts about ourselves; we traded our date talk soundbites. 

But without an infrastructure underneath, a framework for a relationship, an unspoken promise that we will continue to care about one another after this conversation, all we did was allow ourselves to be consumed. It's even worse in a dating context than when you normally meet strangers, because it rests on each person's individual admission, I'm physically or otherwise attracted to you. Maybe I would date you someday. Maybe I would kiss you someday. And to admit that but then only consume that person is an uneasy hypocrisy.

I can't help but think about this guy. It's easy to never think about him again, but this isn't a tv show, where side characters get hired just for an episode or two and then disappear. He's living his own life somewhere, and the soundbites he gave me are woven into an unbelievably complex and rich person that I will never comprehend. Because when you meet someone new, you have to create a space to care about them; otherwise, you're just consuming them.

Not Forgetting.

I was ten years old on September 11, 2001. After a confusing morning of students being pulled out of school one by one by their parents, we went home early. The bus driver told us that a plane had crashed into a building, and I felt my little child heart relieved. See it's just a misunderstanding, I remember thinking. That's nothing to be worried about.

Sometime later in the day, of course, I realized I was wrong. I remember my mom encouraging me to go on a walk around the neighborhood with my friend Sarah. It was safe, after all, since all flights had been stopped. I remember looking up at the sky, thinking that if I saw a plane up there, that would be bad, bad news.

I remember the long wait for my dad to come home from work, and my incredulity that he hadn't left early. We ate a tense dinner. In my memory, we're all sitting up straighter than normal.

What a day. The events of a morning wrapped millions of people in a shared sense of fear. The pit of every stomach was filled with that awful knowledge that something horrible had happened that we were powerless to fix. A living hell.

I hate September 11 every year now. I hate the empty rhetoric of "Never Forget." I was ten then, but I'm twenty-four now. No one old enough to remember that hell will forget it. It's just a fact.

So what is it that we aren't forgetting? No one says exactly. I think they mean that we're not supposed to forget that people lost their lives. We're not supposed to forget the heroes. We're not supposed to forget how we banded together.

But what I hear is We won't forget what you did. We'll never forgive you. We won't forget that you spat on America--that America endured something it doesn't deserve. I hear vengeful message.

There are so many countries where people endure things they don't deserve every day. Right now there's a Syrian refugee crisis. And lots of countries are opening their arms to them and right now we're not one of them.

After September 11, several European countries held National Days of Mourning. Tens of thousands of people brought cards and funeral wreaths to the US Embassy in China. The president of South Africa halted all broadcasts for the rest of the day. A village in Kenya gave 14 cows to help out America.

I didn't know any of that until I read it on Wikipedia just now. All I know is how hurt we are, how we continue to insist that we're hurt year after year. I'm not saying we weren't hurt. That hell was real for all of us. I can't imagine how bad some people had it. All I know is that if the tables are turned, and it was another country that got what we got, we wouldn't have stopped the TV for it.

Isn't the point of "never forget" to keep history from repeating itself? I just don't think "never forgetting" is going to keep people from terrorizing us in the future unless we look around at all the people with open arms to support us and start acting like we know they're there.

Feelings are embarrassing.

I've been thinking that emotions are embarrassing.

The other night, I finally finished a paper for school that I'd been procrastinating all summer. When I left the library, the cool night air was exceptional. I drove home with the windows down, listening to "Dancing Queen," smiling at people walking by.

The emotions all ran together for a second, and I felt overwhelmingly good. The song, the night, the relief of finally being done. Even the pang of knowing that if I had procrastinated less, it wouldn't have been nearly so horrible made it sweeter. 

For no explicable reason, my friend Davi popped into my head. My eyes filled with tears. I love her so much! I'm so happy right now! I've never been so happy!

Then my mind said, "I've never been so happy? Did I sincerely just think that sentence?" 

And then I felt embarrassed. And I thought, All really deep sincere feelings of happiness are embarrassing.

And I think maybe all emotions are embarrassing--because you're being vulnerable with yourself, and even that's uncomfortable unless you're used to it. You almost beg yourself to show a little more discretion.

But realizing that you're embarrassing helps. Knowing that normal feelings make you feel embarrassed makes it seem more like embarrassing feelings should make you feel normal.

Like that guy I see every day at work that I'm attracted to for a few seconds, before my mind goes, "Ew." That's going to keep happening and I'm going to keep feeling embarrassed about it.

I'll probably feel embarrassed about writing this some day.

That's how you know.

I seems like everyone my age is always talking about how you know you're really an adult. Probably because it's basically impossible for us to really know.

I think part of it is when you want the Almond Joys more than any other candy in the assortment. It's also when you'd rather have

lemon frozen yogurt with raspberries than chocolate with chocolate chips.

It happens when you do your taxes the very next day after you get your W-2.

Today, it happened because I chose to listen to a podcast while I was running instead of music. A podcast about the economy.

That's how you know.

The Four Seasons of 1989.

Fall was Shake It Off.

It was new and it was thrilling. Taylor had been around for a while, but here was a side of her no one had anticipated, a side which, you could feel instinctively, would be better than ever before. You danced in the car, in your room in the morning getting ready--anywhere. 

You stopped on it every time without fail when flipping through the radio stations. It was a bonus when you came in during the chorus and found out you hadn't missed the second verse. Forget the liars and the dirty, dirty cheats of the world; you were getting down to that sick beat.

Winter was Blank Space.

You thought you loved Shake It Off, but Blank Space made you go crazy. It was everything to you. If you weren't listening to it over and over, it was stuck in your head. Everyone had their favorite shots in the video, and you had yours.

You stopped on it every time without fail when flipping through the radio stations. Tired drives home from school were suddenly energized. You were young and restless and took it way too far. It left you breathless, and you couldn't imagine any nasty scar.

Spring was Style.

That's when things went wrong. What happened, Taylor? You didn't like what she was saying or how she was saying it. Suddenly, the rhymes didn't seem all that clever. Most of the time, you pretended like Style had never happened, and you were quite happy.

But the radio gods had it out for you. Somehow, when you were flipping through the radio stations, you always managed to hear it from that tell-tale beginning. You changed the channel immediately. But sometimes you didn't. Because if you ignored part of what you were feeling, truth is you still liked it. When you'd go crashing down, you'd come back every time, after all.

And summer was Bad Blood.

Taylor's chance to turn things around. At first you thought she couldn't. It was, after all, all it had ever been: a lot more stupid rhymes, hidden in a catchy tune. But what a catchy tune. You found yourself saying, "Guys, I like it." Sometimes it seemed clear that she had made it up to you.

It came up on the radio more than ever. Half the time you changed it, half the time you stayed. And when you stayed, you turned it up loud and angry and sang loud and angry. Every time, for certain, you found yourself wishing you could go back--back to Shake It Off, back to Blank Space, even back to Style. Maybe even back to life before 1989. But if you live like that, you live with ghosts.