December 2019: The Decade In Review
Ten years ago you were twenty seven. You lived on Pacific Street with two roommates and your bedroom window had ivy crawling up the sides. It was the summer that Michael Jackson died, the summer that everyone moved to Portland, OR, the summer that you were invited to do readings in coffee shops with your bad poetry and your t-shirts with the sleeves cut off. You became a Literary Death Match Champion, which meant that one November evening you crowded into the Bowery Poetry Club to do a reading alongside two music writers (real music writers) but you charmed everyone with your stapled zine comic about women drummers. You were so unknown that the host kept having to ask you for your name, even when you won. He would flounder after your first name, then look at you apologetically, so that you had to lean forward in your metal folding chair in the audience and shout: Gillette! I’m Courtney Gillette! You only knew about music and drummers and how to best cut the sleeves off of your t-shirt because of rock camp for girls, the magical two weeks every summer where you volunteered with a bevy of queers and musicians to create a one of kind experience for the young people who needed it, yourself included. Your youth is wrapped up in that camp, so much so that when you went to see Sleater Kinney this year, in the dark October of your 37th year, the drummer was someone you knew from rock camp, down there on stage behind the drum kit, the same eyeglasses and big grin that you’d known in your youth. You cupped your hands around your mouth and yelled her name at the ceiling because here was a way to honor your young self, your 2009 self, the Literary Death Match Champion and her bad poetry, her big heart.
Nine years ago you were twenty eight. Your mother asked you via text message if you would be her maid of honor. You wrote back: Ha yes. Part of this meant that you would try on thirty two cocktail dresses in a department store with her until you find one you can both agree on: it is eggplant and knee length with a spool of sequined lace around the collar. You would never, ever wear anything like this on your own but you’re doing this for your mother. You’re doing this for the happiest wedding you’ve ever attended: the wedding of your mother and Barry. They are married at a country club in Pennsylvania, and you stand behind your mother as the officiant begins the ceremony. Later Barry will say he wasn’t going to cry but then he caught your eye during the ceremony, beaming and sentimental and so proud, and that made him get teary. Facebook will tell you that the photo of you and your mother in front of your house before you left for the wedding was your most liked photo of 2010. When Facebook tells you this, Facebook doesn’t know that you’ve just returned back from the same country club, where the luncheon was held after Barry’s memorial service. When the luncheon was over and everything had been cleared away and all the goodbyes were said, Emily said she was parked in the back and thus led you and your mother that way, but she didn’t know that to open the door to the barn was to lead you to the place where they had been married, where everyone stood as witness and looked up at the balcony where the officiant pronounced Barry and your mother husband and wife. There is a moment that your mother stops, her hand on the railing, looking at the room with such brokenness that you say out loud, we shouldn’t have come this way, but what other way is there to go.
Eight years ago you are twenty nine. The woman you are dating breaks up with you in September with little fanfare and you carry your broken heart around like a tote bag, always there, always slung over your shoulder. You work in the office of a nursery school where you are always on your email, and thus can email friends the way that everyone texts now, but longer letters, emotional missives. So it is that one of your friends writes to you and your broken heart to say that you should visualize your true love coming towards you. That she’s on her way. That she’s walking towards you right now. This promise brings a comfort that you are embarrassed by, but it is still a comfort. You’ll lose touch with this friend until this year when you’re sitting in a sunny coffee shop on Houston Street and a woman will stand backlit by the blinding sun and ask if you remember her, and you have to shade your eyes and you have to dial back eight years but yes, yes, you’ve lost touch, so much has happened, but you stand up to hug her and you want to tell her that she was right.
Seven years ago you turn thirty. It is the year your cat dies and the year you read self help books. Of all of your friends, only two of you are single. Your single friend texts you a photo of a self help book titled Calling In The One and you laugh out loud and tell her to back away slowly from the book, but she buys it and then you buy it and then both of you are drawing maps of your inner child and rearranging your bedrooms to make space for a beloved. This is bullshit, you laugh, but then it is September and you go to a party even when you don’t want to go to a party and you look across the room to see a girl in a bowtie selling books and your friend says that if you don’t talk to her she’s going to go up to her and tell her that you think she’s cute and you roll your eyes and sip your seltzer and then your friend, your blessed, mischievous friend, is crossing the bar with confidence and so you have to race in front of her to sidle up alongside the table of books and smile at the girl in the bowtie and say hello.
Six years ago you are thirty one. You finish your MFA program and your girlfriend (the girl in the bowtie) and your mom and Barry and your dad and your aunt and your uncle and your sister in law all come to see you read and see you graduate. You revel in the applause and the accolades and you know that maybe only a fraction of what you’ve written in the last two years is good, really good, but it has gotten you closer to whatever you are meant to write next. The night of the reading you wear a purple dress with polka dots, one that you keep in your closet even though it doesn’t fit anymore, and your mother takes a photo of you grinning next to Barry, Barry who has never been to a reading in his life but there he is, traveling to Boston with your mother to sit in a dark auditorium and take a video as you cross the stage to get your diploma. That year for Christmas your mother gets the photo of you and Barry framed, and you don’t have a place for framed photos in your small apartment but you set it up on your bookshelf, the one that holds your jewelry and your passport and your samples of face creams and trinkets and later Emily will say isn’t it funny that the only framed photo you have on the bookshelf is of your step father - you never call him your step father - and so you eventually tuck it away but then this year, this fall, you are desperate to find it and make a mess of all the books and dust and trinkets until it is there. You prop it up again. You wanted to finish your book before he died. You didn’t know that he was going to die. You look at the photo every day.
Five years ago you are thirty two. You and Emily move in together. You look at three apartments: one on DeKalb where the window is broken and you are suspicious that he broker keeps insisting you write a check for the deposit right then. One in Greenpoint that is so small that the refrigerator is blocked whenever you open the living room door, and the man showing you the apartment asks twice if you will be having two bedrooms or one bedroom, and twice you answer that it will be one bedroom, because you are partners, and you don’t realize that you’re holding your breath until you’re back out on Manhattan Avenue. Finally: one is on Hart Street, so close that you walk there from your current apartment, and even though it is dark and the apartment is poorly lit you can see the big windows, the hardwood floors, the tiny nook off of the bedroom that could be a writing studio. You find the apartment on Valentine’s Day. Heart street, your mother says on the phone, incredulous. You found an apartment on Heart Street on Valentine’s Day? You laugh and tell her there’s no e in Hart Street, but yes. Everyone gets a happy ending, or at least you’re dumb enough to believe it.
Four years ago you are thirty three. Your mother and Barry come to your annual Libra waffle party. They stand in the living room that is crowded with friends and co-workers and your downstairs neighbor and friends’ kids and you feed them waffle from mini paper plates and your mother brings you flowers in a vase and you introduce them to everyone because you are so excited to have them in your home. Now when it is autumn and dark you look at the spot in the kitchen where Barry stood eating a rosemary cheddar waffle, chewing thoughtfully before saying, “This is good, Court,” and every time you cry about it you tell Emily it’s just not fair and Emily rubs your back and says I know, babe. I know.
Three years ago you are thirty four. After Christmas, your mother and Barry insist that you travel with them to Lewes, DE to see the plot of land where they will have their dream house built. You tease them about it endlessly: we’re going to see a plot of land? They are so excited about it. The plot of land is on a street right after you drive over a little bridge, so that if you look to your left there is the bay, expansive and beautiful. There are tall trees and pine cones, birds, and a path at the end of the street that leads to the bay and a gazebo and a few benches for sitting peacefully. You take pictures of the lot. You take a photo of them in front of the lot, a sharp beam of light cutting through the white of December sky. YOu walk to the gazebo and we marvel at the bay, at the water, at something we can all agree is beautiful. The development allows you all to visit the construction site of another house, similar to the one that will be built for them, but you must all wear hard hats. And so it is that there is a photo of you when you are thirty four, in your winter coat and a grey hard hat, frowning at the camera with good humor. Behind you, Barry is laughing, adjusting the hat to make sure it fits. Later you realize that it was a live photo, the kind that makes a little movie, and so that if you unfreeze it, it will play: Barry steps into the frame, examines the fit of your helmet while you frown at your mother, and his laugh, his little laugh, can be heard, just at the tail end.
Two years ago you turn thirty five. There are literary prizes for fiction writers younger than thirty five. You no longer are eligible, and you’ve also never written fiction. Still. You get a new job at the same university where you went to college. All of your friends have children now. You didn’t know you’d be so hungry for your youth, but there it is. For your new job, you have to use your university email. They won’t give you a new one, even after you make the case that you haven’t looked at this one since 2004 and it doesn’t seem very professional. Still: every time you search for something in what is now your work email, it is like a time capsule. You find e-mails from your mother about what time your train will get in when you come home, a paper that you wrote about gender in music, a listserve from the lesbian bar you went to every Thursday night, break up letters to the woman you dated when you were twenty one. It is a punch in the gut, to be in your office, searching for words like “publicity” and “conference” and “deadline” and finding instead so much ephemera from your youth. It always stuns you, as if your younger self is staring at you between the words, judging your choices, asking you if this is all there is.
One year ago you were thirty six. It’s the year you get engaged and the year you start teaching creative writing. You talk to your students about going where it’s warm, honoring the truth of the story, searching for the vein of the narrative. You tell them that some stories answer questions but the best stories ask them. You are surprised to hear that you have so much to share about writing, about storytelling, about this noble pursuit. This year, at the beginning of the semester, you have them fill out time capsules for themselves. They each write down one intention for the class and one question about writing that they hope they will answer. This afternoon you rummage around until you find them, carefully sealed, their handwriting - now familiar to you - on the front. You tuck them into my bag for our final class, and then you freeze. When you started the semester, he was alive. If it ends, then you know he is really gone. At the beginning of decade he was here. If the decade ends without him, it means that this is true. Last night you were at the apartment of the dear friends we’ve known for so long, and you asked one another where you each were in December 2009. It was remarkable to measure time in such a way. One of us was still drinking. One of us was in California. One of us was in the wrong relationship. One of us was trying to write it all down. The trouble with looking back is that you have to turn around again. You always pause before you do.
Love,
c