Your Move, Darling.

I'll wait.

My wife and I play chess in the evenings, and she takes a really, really long time to go. It gets very quiet, even with the music I’ve chosen to play. I change songs, hoping to change the energy, but it doesn’t matter - she still won’t move. When I was using I didn’t go a moment without my headphones, for silence was - and sometimes is - very loud. Maybe when I was high I could withstand the quiet - that may’ve been the point. But the quiet always scared me, because that’s when dread crept in. Like something bad was going to happen. I could feel it in my teeth.

I started playing chess on my phone, on a flight, and I liked it. It requires focus. If I don’t focus, I lose, so I have to. I usually win when I do - at least at the level I’m at - but that isn’t enough for me. I want to be able to play chess and have the TV on behind my phone. I want to be on the subway, and avoid the person screaming beside me, and still win. I want to be in a room of people and try and listen and still play, with my excuse being, in the made up conversation that I continue to have wherein someone tells me I shouldn’t be doing that, that if I do something with my hands I can hear better, and that shouldn’t bother you. I see people knit, and listen - why isn’t this that? Live and let live, they say. Or, as always feels more true to how I was raised: mind your business.

But the truth is they’re right - the people I’ve made up in my head who are offended. I can’t pay attention as well, and it’s rude. I want chess to be a distraction, but it isn’t. It requires all of my focus, otherwise I’m not listening to whoever, or whatever, is speaking. And also, otherwise, I don’t win.

Towards the end of my run, if I had to leave the house - which I tried not to - I was in a frenzy, sweating, looking for headphones. In those days all headphones were wired so they were easier to find. They’d be in my desk chair, or a couch cushion. They’d be in a coat pocket or wrapped up in my unmade bed. I couldn’t sleep without something -anything - talking to me, and if I made it to the mattress that means I was awake enough to need them. Often I didn’t - the drugs worked - and I’d wake up on the couch or the floor. Face first on my desk. That railroad apartment the bed was too far from the bathroom.

I might not be here if I was using in the era of the AirPod. Although if I did leave the apartment it was because whoever was supposed to deliver wasn’t, and so I had to make my way to the subway to Bushwick, so perhaps losing them might’ve saved me. Today, even sober, I often lose one.

Drugs and drinking helped me quiet the noise. The voice that told me I should leave, or why did you say that? The voice that reminded me that I shouldn’t try, because I can’t. The voice that made me be alone, because it told me I had to be. The voice that made anything anyone said negative, and directed at me, and thus hurt my feelings, because it agreed with them. The voice that took away choice.

It sounded like my own voice, which is what confused me. I always thought, when I heard what’s wrong with you, that that was me asking. It sure sounded like me. But even though drugs kept it quiet it got louder and louder when I wasn’t using them, and eventually there was no amount that made it go away.

As you look to kill it, in search of quiet, it’ll likely kill you. Unless, of course, you make peace with it. Unless you’re okay that it’s there. Unless I allow it, it’ll kill me. Unless I make peace with me I’m dead.

If I don’t, I’m dead, is very freeing. Suddenly your ideas don’t seem quite as brilliant, and it’s far more difficult to judge. I always thought I was open-minded, because you can do whatever you want, but I’d never really been one to listen. It never felt their ideas were applicable to me.

When I was little I had an issue with focus, and likely quiet. In lower school, I used to get so bored during class that I would stand up and walk around. Sometimes I would take a pen or a paper clip off the teacher’s desk, and bend it. I tried not to bother anyone, but I didn’t feel like sitting. My feelings were more important than what the teacher said.

I am thrilled that somehow I missed the window on ADHD medication, because my behavior certainly would’ve qualified. I mean, maybe it would’ve helped, and I certainly did enough drugs without Adderall, but if I’m okay with me today why would I add another drug to my urinary analysis. I’m thrilled today to be on none.

Whenever I had to write a paper, or do homework of any kind, I had to have the TV on. In retrospect, perhaps I was trying to distract myself from what my mom was up to in the other room, but at the time I didn’t feel that way. At the time I just thought I liked The Fresh Prince. Or I was curious what was happening with Slater.

I couldn’t particularly pay attention to the TV, or the paper, so both were served short shrift. I remember at my mom’s house there was one computer and it was in the corner, and it was on the same side of the room as the TV. On the opposite wall from the TV was a large mirror, and I would take a small one, from above my dresser, and prop it up to my right, next to the computer monitor, so that I could watch Family Matters. I’m not sure why it was so hard for me to focus, or care, back then. I think it seemed like if I really stopped, and paid real attention, then I’d know something was wrong.

I lived with a friend in my twenties who was a chef. At the time, he was taking a break from the kitchen and was managing the restaurant wherein I worked behind the bar. We used to do cocaine together, which made him loud and made me quiet. I sometimes think cocaine made me too present, like I could hear myself too well. It took away my wandering mind and made me focus on who I was in front of, and they were on cocaine too so I didn’t like them. I didn’t feel boisterous, and fun; I felt insular, and certain. If I liked a song I really liked it. If I didn’t I’d make you turn it off, and if I didn’t like you I’d leave.

We became obsessed with ourselves and the gym and not eating - just snorting - anything white. After a year or so of living this way - hearing the birds four nights a week and then spending three days recovering - we were spent. We needed to start over - he got a new job and I went back to an old girlfriend. Soon he met a girl, and he’s been with her ever since. They have a baby, now. He can’t even watch the Knicks anymore - he doesn’t have time - and I’m proud of him for that.

I moved onto harder drugs, sadly - it didn’t work out going backwards, and it’s my fault, not hers. I almost didn’t make it. But he taught me a little how to cook that year. How to chop, and make sauces. How oil and acid is almost always the base. How if you cook for yourself there’s likely fewer calories. But for me there was an alternative perk.

I found cooking the closest I’d ever come to meditative. I had a podcast on, in my headphones, and I had to chop, and I could lose myself in it. I had something in the oven, and something else on the stove, and I couldn’t hear myself for a while. I was still using, but maybe sometimes, cooking I forgot. A beer or a glass of wine was enough. I could fool myself.

But still - today even - as I make dressing, spin a salad, and then plate - things are easier, and the future’s not so dark. The past is less regrettable, and I’m happy where I am because I’m less aware of where I’m not. With too much time I can get disappointed with myself. I wasted so many years doing drugs and not feeling, and not writing, because then I’d have to feel, and having hardly survived that, to stop and consider it might be too painful

That’s when the voice can still get loud.

But if I cook and someone else likes what I made then maybe I can turn it around tomorrow. Tonight I’m making Peri Peri chicken with a big salad and sweet potatoes. We have a beautiful little house and live a beautiful little life and I’m making a beautiful little dinner and I have nothing to complain about. That part of me that questions that can go fuck himself. Sometimes making peace means acknowledging that someone else is wrong and allowing it, even if that other person is also you.

I like to meditate, today, actually, too. Well, I don’t like to, but I do it because I see the benefit. I do it because I still wake up an alcoholic, and something’s still wrong somewhere that I need to fix. I do it because if Fern gets up before I have then she can tell, and that makes me nervous. I do it because I know what happens when I don’t.

As scary as it is to go there, that’s probably the reason to do anything. Whatever I’m looking for is usually found in the thing I do my best to resist. Wherever that voice tells me I shouldn’t is where I should probably go. I’m very lucky that voice sounds less like me, now. In fact, unfortunately, it’s begun to sound more like my mother. But every once in a while, in silence, I hear it when it shouts. Like when Fern takes too long to move.

Fern has either an innate ability to focus, or, as she says, “a touch of the ‘tis,” as she stares down at the board. It’s a blessing and a curse, because she works too hard at her job, and it needs to be done perfectly, which requires said focus, and that can be overwhelming. I’ve made the mistake, in seeing her get bowled over by work, or a lack of auditions, or her family, or me, to suggest she try to meditate, too, but my suggestions tend to fuel more ire.

“I don’t like to meditate.”

“People that like to meditate don’t need to.”

“You bug me.”

“I know.”

So, in lieu, we play chess, which will at least change her focus. She’ll put one hand on a rook, move it, but still hold it, and then guide it back. At first I think it’s cute - how lovely, how different we are - but then I wonder what’s wrong with her? I look at my Spotify and attempt to change the song, as though that’ll nudge her along, but it doesn’t. She takes so long that the voice comes back and I ask myself, instead, what’s wrong with me? How is she able to do that and I can’t? How the fuck did I even get here?

But I breathe, and I wait, because I need to become more patient. My agent has my latest version of my novel right now, and she’s had it for a few weeks. The last I’ve heard she’d like to do one more “close read,” and that could take anywhere from a month to a year, and boy do I want to know which of those two will be. That voice tells me not to do some things, because I can’t, but also makes me act regrettably. It makes me interfere with what’s happening because my need to know the answer is more important than you taking your time.

As upsetting as it is to write that, that must be what I think, because I’d really like to know the date upon which she’ll be done. But the alternative is to let go, and I’m working on that, because I have to.

To let go is to believe that things might be okay, rather than be positive that they won’t, and that’s new for me. But I think that sentence is truer than my thoughts, so I’ll choose to believe it.

I need to meditate. I need to focus. I need to not listen. I need to wait my turn.

I still write with music playing because I like the rhythm that it creates. I like a pulse, but it can’t have lyrics that I can hear, or it has to be a song that I already know. Fern likes to be quiet in the car, so I’ll sometimes sneak an AirPod, in the near ear to the window. I like to learn when I’m driving. But sometimes it’s enough to hold her hand.

Once, Fern was sanding a piece of furniture that she’d bought at an antique shop and was hoping to repaint. I watched her, from the window, as she sanded away, as minute after minute passed. And then an hour, and then another. I went to the driveway, at some point, and asked if she wanted to borrow my headphones or something.

“Nope.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“No reason,” I answered, but I was suspicious.

I left her out there to finish, sure she was crazy, but eventually impressed. It made me think our little kiddo, one day, might have the focus of a champion, and I’ve always been nervous that to pass on anything that was too much like me - like my mom and I. I wrote a book about my grandma because I thought there was something in our lineage that was trying to kill us, and I bore witness to what it did to my mom, and then eventually to myself, in the mirror.

But it wasn’t our genes; it was our sensibility. And my sensibility, somehow, has changed. I like that Fern can lose herself into something, or nothing, and I like that she can’t have a cup of coffee without feeling like she might have a heart attack. I think she’s crazy, but her crazy makes me better, and believe it or not mine hers, too, and I think a little one that’s like us might be really something. They might not have a voice that’s quite so harsh.

So Fern can take however long she wants to move, and I need to be able to sit there. I need to enjoy my wife’s company and listen to the song that’s playing and just be, because I’ve proven that’s possible. I need to focus, otherwise I’ll lose.

Or I need to press BUY NOW on this chess clock that’s in my Amazon cart, because for God’s sakes, darling, we don’t have all day.

But I’m lucky we have forever.

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Thanks for reading! I love ya!

K