I Might Regret This

by Abbi Jacobson

  I need to move positions.

  12:53 a.m.

  I wonder what she’s doing. I know she’s not thinking about me, how could she be? She’s moved on. I can’t believe I’m still here, thinking about her, running through all this. Fuck. Stop doing this! What is wrong with me, why can’t I stop replaying these scenes? I’m like a detective trying to uncover some clue that doesn’t really matter. I’m so mad at myself. What did I think about before all this bullshit? I guess I was just sleeping before.

  What a pathetic detective.

  That’d be a good show. The Pathetic Detective. She sadly solves crimes for other people dealing with heartache, finding the truth of the matter, one clue at a time.

  She’d have a dope look though, sleek, tight leather pants and high boots that were comfortable enough to run in. An effortless top that looked like it was just thrown on with the pants. Piece-y hair with a bold lip. She’d slip in and out of parties, have a signature drink, a Dark and Stormy (also her signature demeanor), and get what she needed to close the case. But in the wee hours of the night she pores over her own unsolved case, rifling through her memory, playing back scenes for some clue, some resolution…that might never come. A loner, an introvert, a style icon (?)—she is, The Pathetic Detective.

  1:15 a.m.

  The red light from the TV is back. The washcloth must have slipped.

  Just ignore it.

  I can fall asleep with one tiny red light on in the room! It’d be crazy if I let this bother me! I’ll just turn the other way.

  No! I can’t let it go.

  I’ll pee while I’m up, then it’s not like I got up just to cover the stupid red light on the TV, it’ll be like I had to pee and just happened to see the light!

  Glad I got my alibi in order??? What? Just do what you need to do.

  1:22 a.m.

  Do I still have to pee?

  No, it’s okay.

  I’ll be able to go to sleep, I just peed. I’ll just lie on my back.

  Fuck me, I still have to pee.

  I am the fucking worst.

  1:30 a.m.

  My shoulder is killing me—I’ll just stretch my arm around in a circle.

  This would all be on the sleep study video if I went into a center. I can’t have this on tape, me doing arm circles in the middle of the night and cracking my wrist like a mad person.

  Ohhhh, that was a good one, loud! The ache is still there, maybe crack it again?

  Nothing.

  Why does this wrist always ache? Maybe I’ve been bitten by a spider and instead of it giving me spidey-superpowers, it gave me a dull ache all the time? Or maybe, before the superpowers come out, they lie dormant in your body for years as a dull ache in your left wrist!?

  Am I spider woman!?!?

  1:46 a.m.

  Brainwaves ended again. I can’t believe it ended again.

  Hmm. I guess I could check out the dating app for a sec while I’m up.

  I hate that I’m on here so much. Why am I doing this?

  I’m being proactive and putting myself out there!

  Ugh, that’s such bullshit, I look at videos of guys and girls and like no one. I’m not going to find someone on here.

  I should stop with this, it makes me feel so shitty. I can’t do this anymore. I should just stay on the road forever, this is where I belong. Alone in a car, moving from city to city, not able to be with anyone anyways! Because I’d never be in a place long enough—I’d have a built-in excuse!

  That’s not what I want.

  Stop. Stop thinking about this because it is making me too sad.

  I should delete this app right now off my phone. Yeah! I’m going to.

  DE-LETE!

  I will never put it on my phone again! I’m done! Real-life love connections await me!

  2:10 a.m.

  Maybe slow music instead of Brainwaves. Yeah, slow jams will lull me to sleep.

  I have to find the right spot. I need to hug a pillow.

  I’d kill in the dating scene if it was just pillows.

  I’m never falling asleep.

  I should really check out those sleep study centers, I think this is becoming a problem.

  SEDONA, AZ → JEROME, AZ

  DRIVE TIME: 45min

  BEST BAGELS

  Measuring one’s life in bagels is no easy task. But like everything else, it’s a way to see where you’ve been and where you’re going, and possibly patterns in weight fluctuation. I haven’t been eating many bagels lately—thus the influx of thoughts about bagels?? But I’m not worried, bagels and I have a well-trodden past, and I know we’re in it for the long run.

  The Bagel Factory

  The first touch of freedom. In high school when I was a junior and senior, you could design your schedule in such a way that allowed you to leave school for lunch. Like a real adult, smack dab in the middle of the day, we had forty-five minutes to do as we pleased! One of the popular spots was The Bagel Factory, a local bagel shop, five minutes from school and the perfect food for the past version of myself that wore headscarves and operated at peak weed consumption. I don’t remember if these bagels were particularly good, but those thirty-five minutes of freedom we had while eating them in those corner booths is something I’ll always remember.

  Sunday morning bagels

  The most Jewish part about my overnight camp, besides the number of “steins,” “baums,” “sons,” and “bergs” at the ends of last names, was the fact that every Sunday morning, they served bagels. The excitement over bagels was a weekly thing. This might say more about the rest of the food than it does about the bagels.

  Famous 4th Street Delicatessen

  In 2009, I ran the Philadelphia Half Marathon (not-so-humble-brag), and afterward I went to Famous 4th Street Deli for a bagel and lox. Famous 4th is a classic Philly spot, but it was more the connection to the marathon that landed it on this list. I’d been training in Astoria on my own for months leading up to this run, particularly around the track in Astoria Park, underneath the Triborough Bridge. Before the race, I’d only ever run 8 miles at once, and 13.1 was a shit ton of miles for someone who doesn’t consider themself a runner. But I wanted to do this, needed to challenge myself in this physical way. A few friends of mine were going to run the race with me, and all three of them ended up bowing out, so it was me, on my own, which is how I preferred it. I don’t like running with anyone. People who can talk while exercising—anything more than a hike or walk—are insane to me. You want to tell me the drama that’s currently going on at your office? Ohh, your co-worker plays their music too loud?? It’s distracting and no one else seems to care?? I can’t breathe right now! We’re running, I’m just trying to stay alive! So, I was happy in the end to run it alone. Seeing the city from that point of view, running down the middle of Broad Street through Philadelphia, was unreal. It was beautiful and truly one of the hardest things I’ve willingly put myself through. I ran the whole way—my goal—although the pace got slower and slower, but I kept moving. The half marathon ended right in front of the art museum, and as I rounded the corner, the Rocky Balboa statue behind me, I felt like I could do anything I set my mind to, even if it was done very slowly and painfully. I limped to the car with my family and we went to Famous 4th Street Deli. That $16.50 (this is the actual price) humongous bagel and lox sandwich never tasted so good.

  Brooklyn Bagel

  Killing time. Brooklyn Bagel was a few blocks away from UCB Theatre in Chelsea, and it was a spot I’d go before classes or shows to elongate my anxiety and nervousness for what was about to happen. I filled notebooks with ideas and fears, sitting at those shitty, generic tables. The bagels here are so good, but huge. One is almost like eating two. Which at the time felt like quite the deal!

  Bergen Bagels

  Love is getting two different bagel sandwiches and splitting them on the grass in the shade, on a perfect day in Prospect Park. That’s all I’ll say about that.

  “The Shore” bagels
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  A lot of Philly people go “down the shore” over the summer. It’s the term they use to describe the many coastal towns in mostly southern New Jersey. My mom’s parents had a house there and we’d spend any time that we weren’t at camp down there with them. The air is different, salty and hot, but familiar. We’d ride bikes to pick up bagels in the morning when I was a kid, and now I go on walks with my mom to pick them up. Bagels are tradition down there, as thick as the accent.

  The Hidden Bean bagels

  This was a café I worked in Baltimore my freshman year of college, but even after I worked here it was my local spot. Every couple of Saturdays, MICA (the college I attended) provided a bus that would go up to New York City for the day. It would leave at 7 a.m. and return at around 9 p.m. This bus trip was precious to me and I never ever went with anyone. I remember feeling the awkwardness if someone I knew was on the bus as I boarded, how I’d have to explain that I had plans already, even though my plans were in fact having no plans at all. Other students would go on this trip together. They’d end up going to the museums, getting lunch, laughing and being the carefree newly minted nineteen-year-old adults they were. I’d stare out the bus window listening to music, chomping away on a cinnamon raisin bagel with butter I’d grabbed from the café for the ride. Soon I would step off the bus on my own, in the most interesting place in the whole world.

  Yom Kippur bagels

  My family manages to “fast” until around 4 p.m. We’re terrible, but the bagels my dad gets are great.

  Bacon, egg, and cheese

  A bacon egg and cheese with Ilana, anywhere, anytime.

  Bagel bites

  Bagel bites were one of my brother’s and my favorite dinners as a kid. Isn’t this just a common truth for anyone who grew up in the ’90s? We’d watch Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and he’d get up and dance for my mom and me to the opening theme music in front of the TV.

  Jack and Estelle’s egg bagels

  My grandparents, my dad’s parents, were the only people I knew that loved egg bagels. It’s all they bought, all they made us for breakfast when we slept at their apartment on City Line Avenue. I’d never pick an egg bagel, but that smell brings me right back to them.

  JEROME, ARIZONA

  On my way out of Arizona, toward California, I planned a very personal detour through Jerome. I had been there years before, on a trip with my dad and brother. We stopped for lunch on the way to Flagstaff where our journey through the Grand Canyon would begin. It was April of 2001, and I was seventeen, a junior in high school, and my dad pulled me out of class for ten days to go on a dory boat (small and wooden as opposed to a raft) trip down the Colorado River. My English teacher was not happy and almost failed me, because of my absence and my lack of involvement in the reading assignments relating to The Crucible. But what I took away from that trip far outweighed the by-rote education often taught in the public school system. I returned to school in time for us to NOT discuss any of the most important issues and allegories surrounding the play, but rather watch the 1996 movie incarnation starring Daniel Day-Lewis. I might have missed my teacher’s stray observations on Arthur Miller’s handiwork, but I had been on an adventure.

  And now I was on another one, but this time I was going to Jerome for my mom.

  My mom is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. Her capacity to love and thoughtfulness toward others have been through lines in her life. She is five foot one, with spiky hair, two hearing aids, and a cochlear implant, but her enthusiasm for life is roaring. It fills up any space she enters. She’s reinvented her life over and over again, finding new love, new friends, new shells…She’s been making a lot of shell art lately.

  My mom lost her hearing when she was in her twenties. It was nerve damage, but there was never a specific cause or moment to pinpoint what happened. She hardly ever talks about it and doesn’t allow anyone to feel bad for her. She isn’t defined by her disability, in fact I have never even thought of her as having one. She’s literally a bionic woman, a tiny superhero walking among us. We laugh when she does an Emily Litella (one of Gilda Radner’s most famous characters), hearing a word or phrase so close to what was said, but in her interpretation, it’s hilarious and doesn’t totally make sense. The last time this happened, we had a whole conversation where I was talking about my childhood and the lack of Jews around, and she thought I’d been talking about the lack of juice! “What do you mean? We always had orange juice!” She’s always able to laugh with it, but I know it affects her. She doesn’t like crowded places because it’s easier for her to miss parts of conversations and she worries about power outages and batteries being charged because she depends on them. It must have been so hard for her to lose her hearing right when life was picking up. For something so vital to be all of a sudden taken away like that and for life to just continue on.

  I often wonder if her hearing loss is one of the reasons she began making more with her hands, leaning into the other senses because that one was failing her. Throughout my childhood, besides being a mom and working at Bed Bath & Beyond, she had a bunch of businesses that she ran out of our house. “Do Me a Favor” (best name ever?) was a party favor company where people could hire her to help plan their kids’ birthday parties. There’s a picture of us and my brother in a local newspaper, advertising the range of party favors and services available. She also had a clothing line she sold at craft shows, mostly consisting of vests and dresses she would paint and draw on—my personal favorite? Tie-vests (ties were sewn around the bottom of the entire circumference of a vest, so they hung and swung around when you walked). I used to wear one of these to school every so often—not the typical fourth-grader outfit, but she was never trying to make anything typical. Her shifting media and interests is something I find in my own work—the ability and desire to try new things is always there. When she moved to working with clay, my mom really found her voice; she combined her love of hand-building (without a pottery wheel) and found objects to make her clay boxes. They were all different sizes, and over the years, she experimented with style and changing the way she glazed and fired them. She started collecting antiques and objects, not just for our home, but now for her art—marbles, tiny dollhouse furniture, porcelain doll heads (these disembodied heads were terrifying)—and created scenes on the tops of the boxes. They were called “Boxes of Love,” and each had a tiny piece of paper inside, with a message she’d seen somewhere and been inspired by that read:

  BOX OF LOVE

  *I bet you think this box is empty—it’s not, it’s full of love. It’s a very small box because there isn’t one large enough to hold all the Love I have to give. The wonderful thing is—I didn’t buy this LOVE—I was born with it and I can give it to anyone I want. I hope you will enjoy and treasure my Love because it never runs out and I have more to give.

  *please don’t sue my mom if you wrote this or know who did. Consider it a loving homage.*

  She became a fixture at craft shows in Philadelphia and New Jersey and it’s what we did on a lot of weekends when I was a kid. My dad and her would set up this stand made from wire shelving and we’d help her package her boxes with bubble wrap and bag them as they got sold, handing them happily over to her customers. One weekend when I was about seven or eight, she set up at the Garden State Racetrack in Jersey, and I set up my own “booth,” a tiny TV table next to her, and sold football pencils for twenty-five cents a pop. Football pencils, you ask? Yes, football pencils—pencils with team logos and colors for NFL teams. I had been working at the school store a few mornings before classes started, and saw that these pencils were popular, so even though I knew nothing about football or the teams (I was more of a soccer gal), I bought them in bulk from the school store and sold them out of an old tin box my grandfather gave me. I might not have known much about football, but I was trained from a young age to know what buying something wholesale and selling it for more meant. As often as people question my Judaism, I should probably lead with this fact. I organized the
pencils and got everything ready—I had change on hand and rubber bands if people bought a bunch. I had been watching my mom run her business for years, I couldn’t share a booth with her and not make some sales! I’m guessing it was refreshing to see a small, scrappy tomboy pushing her favorite-color football pencils rather than your typical paper cup of lemonade. The business folded shortly after, as I moved on to more important things like socializing, but I made all my money back, plus some, like a proper Forbes under 10.

  Regardless of my own thriving football pencil corporation, it was incredible to see that drive and creativity from my mom’s work come to fruition—to watch her process of finding those objects, building the boxes with her hands in our basement, and then selling them to people who were most likely going to give them to someone else as gifts. It wasn’t making her rich, but it brought so much joy to her and her customers—to have a thing she made from nothing except her hands and heart move through the world like that. I am continually trying to find that in my own work. Watching her allowed me to see how objects can and should have significance, about the importance of paying attention to detail. That the small things matter: the materials, the service, the setup, the follow-through, the face-to-face, and most important, the drive you had to make the thing in the first place. The better she got, and the more she found her voice through pottery, the more confident she became. She took risks and tried new things, always reinventing her creativity, always curious. The boxes became hand mirrors, which became sculptures; she started doing collages and murals on the walls of our basement with found objects. And now of course…the shells. There’s always something else to be excited about.