Between Clever Lines

            I want to dye my hair again.  I think maybe turquoise this time.  I’ve had the turquoise dye under my cabinet for forever, but there’re a few reasons I haven’t dyed it yet.  For one, I don’t want to be that girl, the one who dyes her hair just because she’s heading off to school and can reinvent herself.  I also didn’t want to have dyed hair during the high holidays while I was at synagogue.             But I had a conversation with Cece today about what’s probably the real reason: The Manic Pixie Mythos.  When I had purple hair, people looked at me differently.  They thought I was quirky, interesting.  Just because of the color of the tips of my hair.  Isn’t that odd?  And I didn’t want people to think I was a manic pixie.  I didn’t want to feel like I had to live up to my hair.          ...

Here's the conclusion I've come to. Living your life afraid to get hurt? Isn't worth it. You miss out on all of the good things doing that.  What you have to do is take the times he called you beautiful, that time she put her arms around you and danced to your favourite song, the roses he bought you for your birthday, and you need to put those memories somewhere no one can touch them, not even the people who created them. And you need to remember that once, you were loved. You were loved so much that one person couldn't handle all of the love and it had to be shared between two people. And you deserved that love.  And when she leaves or he says he regrets it, you protect the good memories and lose the rest. You deserve the beautiful memories, but you never deserve the slamming door or the click at the other end of the phone line. So you make as many good memories as you can, and then you save them. And that's all you can do. 

             Once, when I was in fourth or fifth grade, for the last week in November and the beginning of December, my parents wouldn’t let me go into the guest bedroom.   I figured that was just where they were keeping the Hannukah presents, and I don’t like ruining surprises, so I kept out.             At 4:30 one morning in early December, my lights flicked on.   My father was holding a camera and wearing a sombrero.   My mother had just put some mariachi music into the stereo by my bed.   Get up and pack whatever you want to read on the plane ride , they said.   We’re leaving for Mexico in twenty minutes .             I hadn’t been allowed in the guest bedroom because that was where the suitcases were.   My parents had been planning this for months and just decided to keep it a secret.   I do...

            Sometimes, I get so involved in the lives of others that I forget how to live on my own.  I share my hurts with my friends, but I forget to let myself actually feel them, to just sit still and breathe and acknowledge that yes, this hurts.  Very much, in fact.  But that’s okay.  That hurt means I’m alive and it means that I had something that I cared about enough to miss.  And I’m lucky because not everyone ever has something that important to lose.             I need to learn to be my own person, even when I’d rather be have someone else around.  I need to realize that it’s okay to be in my own headspace sometimes.  I don’t need another voice around at all times to tell me I’m okay.  I’m making that time for me to be alone.  Well, alone with Taylor Swift and Ben and Jerry.  Hey, a girl has to have her ways of coping, right?  ...

New York, I love you. I love your insane cabbies, your subway stations with four piece jazz bands busking at random stops, your pretzels of varying degrees of edibility, your parks, your random skaters in said parks who don’t mind coming over to sit down and listen to you play ukulele in Union Square, your nerdy comic book stores, your over abundance of cafes, your restaurants devoted entirely to rice pudding, your quiet streets, your loud streets, your residents who pretend that teens singing Doctor Horrible’s Sing Along Blog in three part harmony on the Q train is nothing out of the ordinary, your ridiculously tiny dogs, your postal police officers, your metro system that is never fully functioning, your knockoff designer handbags, your little corners full of treasures that almost no one knows about, your plethora of Harry Potter advertisements, your inspirational or at least improbable graffiti, your overabundance of knitting stores, and your residents. I love the beautiful pe...