I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(46)

Wrong is the one thing I cannot stand to be.



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I knew in my bones that John was not the problem. But I took my discontent out on him because he was the closest person to me. Because he could see how messed up I was, I became even more aware of how messed up I was. He pulled me close, but when I looked into his eyes all I saw was my own warped reflection. I imagined how grotesque I must seem.

When I look back now at this time when I craved solitude and escape, I see that I wanted to be unwitnessed for a while, that’s all. I didn’t want anyone to see how wrong I felt. I wanted a chance to feel messed up without also feeling self-conscious. It was like the feeling I used to get before I fainted—an inkling of a crash, a hunch that I should get close to the ground. I needed a place where I could hit the floor without the added anxiety of knowing someone was watching me fall.





Nora Ephron and the Lives of Trees


There’s a line in Nora Ephron’s autobiographical novel Heartburn—“Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I’ll show you a real asshole.” I read the book for the first time in seventh grade (not exactly age-appropriate) and again as an adult, which is when I thought, Wait a second—I cry sometimes when leaves fall. I’ve also been known to get a little teary when I see a craggy pebble that looks like a frowning face. I sniffle when I see a skunk in my yard who looks lonely, like it’s dawning on him that all his skunk friends went on an adventure and purposely didn’t tell him where they were going. I laugh, too—like when I see a twig that looks like it’s giving me the finger. I chuckle when I see an ant trying to carry half a Froot Loop.

I like to draw birds and jellyfish and flowers wearing hats, and very often these creatures feel as real to me—and as filled with inner narratives—as people. This is true of me now and it was true of me as a child, when I doodled puppies on every piece of paper I passed. I have always seen animals as characters. The way some people stop at every stroller to coo over a baby, I stopped to pet dogs. I imagined backstories for every canine I met. Seeing a dead dog on the side of the road undid me for days (and still does). I couldn’t turn it off, the imagining, so I’d envision everything that led up to the dog’s tragic quest. What compelled him to go into the street? What was he seeking? Maybe he wandered off in search of a snack. Maybe he was tired of his neglectful family and his concrete kennel. Maybe he just wanted some exercise. Maybe he saw a bird.

As a cartoonist, I use my imagination to bend the light of humanity through the prism of the natural world. A drawing of a penguin who’s mad because the self-tanner she bought doesn’t give her the even bronze glow it promised makes you think, That’s ridiculous. And it’s not ridiculous just because penguins don’t use self-tanner. It’s ridiculous because a tan is a goofy thing to get so angry about. It’s silly when a penguin does it, and it’s just as silly when a person does it. Projecting our foibles onto other creatures helps us get perspective and laugh at ourselves.

I shouldn’t care what the late Nora Ephron would have thought of me. It’s not like we were friends. She was old enough to be my mother, but she was not my mother—or my aunt or my cousin or anyone with any connection to me. But we people-pleasers want to be liked, even by people we’ve never met, especially by people we admire. How many times have I seen When Harry Met Sally? More than I could ever remember or count. Oh, how I marveled at the words Nora Ephron put into Meg Ryan’s and Billy Crystal’s mouths. What a genius she was. I wish she were still alive, so I could explain to her how much I loved her work and also how wrong she was about this one thing.



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The other day I watched a video of a helicopter rescuing a cow in Italy. The cow had gotten stuck in a ravine and she—he? I can’t call animals “it”—couldn’t scale the walls to get out. Of course she couldn’t. She’s a cow. Cows can’t climb. But do they know they can’t climb? Did that cow panic? A veterinarian friend of mine says animals don’t dwell on the past and future. They live in the moment. This is why it’s so kind and responsible to put a dog to sleep when it’s in pain from a terminal illness. The dog doesn’t think, I want to stay alive long enough to see the snow fall one more time. The dog just feels that his legs hurt, that he cannot get up onto his favorite chair, that he is vomiting again. That cow wasn’t thinking ahead to her demise and worrying about whether her family would miss her, nor did memories from her calf-hood flash before her eyes. She just knew she was stuck.

After the rescuers hitched her into the harness and took off in the helicopter, what must have gone through her mind? A cow has no instinctive concept of what a helicopter is. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? she must have thought, as the propeller chopped through the air. I can only imagine what the cow made of flight, as her feet left the ground and her view of the familiar meadow tilted and widened.

We all know animals have emotions and personalities. There’s plenty of science to back that up, not to mention anecdotal evidence all around us. There’s a squirrel in my yard who shoves all the other squirrels out of the way at the bird feeder. He’s a bully. Dogs and cats and other animals can have anxiety, depression, even OCD. Just ask my yellow mutt, Woodstock, who can’t sit down until he turns around forty-five times and who, once he sits down, licks his own paws until one of us places a hand on his head and says, “Enough.”