Fake Palindromes

I once wrote that I wanted to be fucked like a lustrous, lingering palindrome.

I couldn't tell you what that meant, precisely. But a stranger I met (briefly) at a Philadelphia poetry reading tried to interpret it. Then a friend I would end up  dating (less briefly, but still briefly) responded to this interpretation.

I am a palindrome, or at least my name is. I can be lustrous and lingering at times, I guess, though never before my morning coffee. So maybe I just wanted the "fuck me" part.

I think of palindromes today because it's 01/02/2010. The start of a new decade, a new space to circle forwards at a backwards pace.

After several beautiful New Year's Eve-nings, I am reminded that the best moments sink in when time feels meaningless.

Which brings me to an email I received from a stranger. The stranger was surprised that my name was real and not made up. "Hannah is a palindrome and Miet is an anagram for 'time.' It's too perfect," she said.

My magical thinking has yet to form a theory as to what the anagram means, but I'm open to your interpretations. You don't even have to want to fuck me like a lustrous, lingering, palindrome to take a stab at it.

As you know, I have no resolutions, yet my dreams are doing the foxtrot full speed up mountains with no plans of slowing down. I will refrain from sharing every rock, but here are a few of my deepest desires for the decade. I hope you will also share yours.

I will speak. Sometimes into microphones.

Lauren once suggested I read stories at The Moth and fear immediately began its rapid circulation through my body. This is what happens when someone mentions something I really want to do, but am also not quite sure I can do. I am deathly afraid of microphones.

However, I have been working up my nerve in small steps. Smaller poetry readings to not-so-small ones.

We'll see.

Mornings without mourning.


I recently woke up on a bed in Brooklyn next to my married friends. They were having passionate morning sex under the covers, breathing each other's air. They were almost silent. Somehow, the silence made it even more beautiful.

I usually refrain from wanting things I cannot achieve with my own hands.  I refrain from building an ideal human out of clay and searching for him in faces on street. I refrain from finding pieces of things that break my heart - a line of poetry here, a dark smile there - and pretending that it's real love, not just heartbeats.

But I knew that morning what I wanted. It was simple. I wanted morning sex.

Really good morning sex. The kind that's just as instinctual as it is intimate. The kind before your brian starts thinking in sentences. Even before coffee. The kind that makes you feel smaller and bigger than everything in the world, together.

I would like to find this one day.

For now, my dreams are smaller. I am trying to be a better morning person. To stay awake when the insomnia is real, and not an excuse to read a novel cover to cover, or ride the waves of the internet until sunrise. At least not every night.

I am allowing myself to be less hard, to shed just a little bit more of my cracking shell.

Big things in small steps.

I started working on my book again. It overwhelmed me for months, the thought of it, the outline in my mind. The subject matter, the length. Being alone in my head for so long, drowning out sound.

But things are different. I see more clearly. Smaller stories, that feed into the whole. I think this blog helped me see through the fog.

I also think the very things I feared are the things I'm ready to embrace.

Yes and yes.

I will climb mountains, when someone offers me a rope. I will travel, when I have wings to fly. I will meet you, and you, and especially you. We will talk about nothing for hours. My stomach will be unafraid. It will say yes. and yes. and yes. and Oh, yes.


Some lonely night we can get together. And I'm gonna tie your wrists with leather. And drill a tiny hole into your head.