It’s an entire universe. It’s not just you or your apartment. It’s not your life and your friends. This town does not belong to you, this state does not know you. You are not defined by your country, nor are you spoken for by your leaders. It’s an entire universe.

When you cry, the sound is muffled by tragedies you cannot fathom. The moisture is so insignificant that your body doesn’t miss it, the earth doesn’t notice it. Your wondering floats up into the clouds where it meets a billion other worries and a trillion other wonders and they dance and play and laugh and sing. They look down upon you and giggle. They talk about how selfish you are. How little you understand about the universe.

When you ache, the pain you feel is absorbed in the margins of life. There is no ceremony, no pomp or circumstance. The wind blows moments through the trees and into the sky where they disappear like everything before and everything after.

This is an entire universe. It’s a painting. We are not even a color. We are not even a stroke. If we fade or chip or float softly to the floor, if we get swept up in the whirlwind and drift away silently, that is all there will be. Silence.

It’s an entire universe you know. She is busy. Her ache is real. She catches the aches that are absorbed along her margins, too many to sort, too overwhelming to address. She scoops the laughing wonderment from the clouds and tosses it into the night sky, where it dots the darkness with light. She stares upon the canvas and one big wonder, like a single red balloon, floats above her head. Why do they not see it? Why do they feel so different, so important, so alone? They are so small, so one, so same. They are blurred together. They are merely the moments. There is no direction of progression, digression, transgression that does not need them all.

It’s an entire universe, you see. It’s not you or me. It’s not she or he. It’s a sum of laughter, an average of tears. It’s a fabric of quilted thoughts, sewn together by sadness, anger, wonderment, and confusion. It’s not about you. It’s about the universe.

My good friend E came this weekend from New York to visit. I’ve known E since I was in the 7th grade. Back then I had such a massive crush on him that I was unable to do or say anything cool. He’s the star of my John Hughes movie. The one where my two best friends are dating and I’m the girl who follows them around with butterfly clips in my hair, completely oblivious to how painfully awkward I am. Eventually I do something stupid like drink an Ozarka bottle of vodka and go all Custer’s last stand in my bra and underwear before jumping in the pool. That’s where the movie goes from Breakfast Club to that terrible one with Jennifer Love Hewitt, only I’m not her. I’m some extra. And the boy I have a crush on loves her. Good thing we grow up…

The moral of the story is that eventually life righted itself. Turns out my attraction to E was shallow and based solely on his looks. He’s now happily dating my dearest friend in the whole world, and while I still feel like the girl with the blue glitter eye shadow and butterfly clips, I’m married and that makes me look all secure and wise. (Plus I’m fairly certain they’re the forever kind, and I don’t want to be a home wrecker.) This marriage-induced objectivity is allowing me to learn all sorts of things about E. Things he probably told me when I was 14, but I was too busy trying to keep my shit together.

Unlike my husband, E does appreciate a good yoga class. My favorite yoga teacher Marc was kind enough to teach a class for the two of us. It was awesome and intense. Since E is part of the “Because of London” half marathon group, hips were a focus. I could have focused the yoga high into smoothie drinking and wheat grass chewing, but instead I channeled it into bread sticks and CoCos at Bistro du Midi, corn gratin and Pinot Noir at Petit Robert, Duvels at Coda, Julius Etchers at Post 390, and a little Matilda at my apartment at 3AM. Thank god I have that problem with making sandwiches when I’m inebriated. I can’t even begin to imagine how much worse I would have felt without it. As it was, I spent 90% of my day looking like a Williamsburg lesbian/bag lady and popping into every public restroom in the city. It would have been foolish to pass up a perfectly available toilet.

I was unable to eat anything in the latter half of the day. I laid on the couch moaning about my life while the hubs repeatedly told me that I had already told him how bad I felt and continuing to do so would not make me better. I never liked him anyway.

To add insult to injury, sometime during the course of our evening E was talking about the octuple points he gets when he uses his JetBlue credit card to purchase JetBlue flights online. Someone (I believe it was the hubs) thought it would be a good idea to purchase my plane ticket to Texas on E’s credit card so that he could have the points. So we did. At 3:30AM. After eating drunk sandwiches. I was going to pop over to Texas for a long weekend in July to help my cousin celebrate her 21st birthday and maybe spend some time with my parents. You know, go to dinner or something.

I bought a plane ticket to go home for eleven days.