the girl on the half shell

A romantic in a lost world

It is a Laverne and Shirley.

Laverne decides to vo-dee-o-dodo with a man because she believes the best about him, despite the evidence and Shirley’s urging that perhaps this man is not what he seems. It turns out, Shirley is right. Sitting on the sofa in the middle of their apartment, Laverne tells Shirley she feels stupid.

“You’re not stupid,” Shirley says, “you’re a romantic.”

I was nine or ten when I watched this episode, but I had already experienced a few things that made me feel stupid, marked for the worst, the same way Laverne felt marked for the worst. I breathed in the word romantic, the escape of it.

When I was a teenager, I was deeply interested in beat poets, the roots of psychedelic thought, social justice movements, and folk music.

A used record store opened up in my neighborhood, and even though I felt uncomfortable shopping alone in such a small place, the music was important, so I went and began to sift through the bins of albums. Each one was like a portal into a different time, a different way of seeing the world, and myself.

I was the only customer. A small group of adults was gathered by the counter. They were old, I thought, about my parents’ age, the owners of the store, I presumed. I could feel them watching me as I shopped.

I took several records to the counter. Peter, Paul, and Mary. The Mamas and the Papas. Melanie. As I was leaving the store, the group of adults made faces at one another, eyebrows arched, laughing. The laughter confirmed to my teenage self that there was something weird or off about me, something that made me stand out. I understand now, of course, why they were excited, but I didn’t understand it then. I was marked for the worst.

That store is long gone, a Starbucks now doing business in its place. The neighborhood’s diners, restaurants, and bookstores of my youth are mostly gone, replaced by Great Cuts, vape shops, and suntanning beds.

It’s sometimes disorienting to live in the town where I was a teenager.

There are ghosts everywhere, overlays of memory, grief embedded in the sidewalks, but also younger versions of myself with her uncontrollable hair and mismatched earrings, each version as real and present as the next.

There is a building I pass on my daily walk that swells my heart. It’s a four-square apartment building with paned window sunrooms on the front of each unit, a historic building that exudes an energy of complex life. When you look at it, you can see the forties and the seventies, all decades existing at once.

I wonder about the people who live in it now. Do they hear phantom music they can’t quite place or see dancing shadows in the light that streams through their windows?

A similar building, the one I lived in when I was in college, is slated to be torn down, along with the rest of the block of sturdy, historic houses. What’s happening here is happening all over the country - the destruction and disposal of what was beautiful and unique to make way for ugly, cheaply constructed multi-use buildings.

The divide between those who have money and those who do not is stretching us to our limits. Restaurants here are gold-rimmed plates or drive-through fast food. Shopping is Anthropology or Dollar General. The middle ground is being erased, the stressed areas falling into ruin while private nightclubs thrive.

I remember my kitchen in that old apartment building and how meaningful it was to have curtains because they felt like something an adult would have. My grandmother made them from a black and white checked fabric. My friends also lived in the building and we flowed in and out of one another’s apartments.

I remember getting ready for a Christmas party, a group of us posed next to my friend’s Christmas tree. We were all wearing vintage. My dress was long, magenta crushed velvet with rhinestone buttons. I don’t know what happened to that dress, but I remember what it felt like to wear it, the way the fabric moved.

I was walking yesterday when Joan Baez sang Diamonds and Rust and stopped me for a minute. I was young when I first fell in love with that song, but now I’m old enough for my bones to understand it. When I hear it, that line about the crummy hotel in Washington Square, I am transported to the city.

I stand there, looking up, waving at the figure in a window, my heart breaking.

I remember the brownstone I walked past twice a day, to and from my apartment, when I lived in the West Village. On my first day, my roommate pointed it out. Bob Dylan lived there, she said, and I never walked past it, not once, without glancing in its direction and thinking, Bob Dylan lived there. Joan Baez sat with Bob Dylan in that room. They made music or made love, or fought there.

I sacrificed so much of my youth on the altar of romantic and sexual love, the dream of that love. I gave years of my life to relationships that should not have held one week of me. I offered myself again and again to people who did not or could not or would not love me. I tried to be all the love, enough for both of us.

Sometimes I wonder if being a romantic is a sort of haunting, a way of being haunted. I walk through the world attuned to its invisible layers, not just the people and places lost, but the emotions that once informed them. The way curtains move in morning light. A record sleeve in my hands. The way a line from a song can hold my whole life inside it.

Maybe this way of being in the world is a sort of devotion. A way of saying: I was here. This mattered. We mattered. Maybe, like Laverne, I will always be a little too quick to believe the best, to trust the glimmer of something meaningful. But if that’s the worst of it, alright. I surrender to it. Because I’ve learned that to be a romantic is not to be foolish, it’s to be awake in a world hellbent on destruction.