Yesterday a few of us caravanned to The Art Shanty Projects on Medicine Lake. It was twelve degrees and nobody wore warm enough socks — only because after a certain point, warm enough simply doesn’t exist.

Enjoyed: hot dogs and coffee, the giant manipulable robot, Billy Joel and “Thriller” in the Dance Shanty, ice bikes on skates and skis, cold letterpressing with the MCBA, and watching all of the basketball players fall, at some point.

I have no idea who the girls, pictured above, are; but we had a pretty excellent time together in the twirling shanty until we all wanted to hurl. Earlier, Will was holding someone’s child on his shoulders so she could reach the robot’s arms. People passed out tweeted newspapers in the dance party, passed donuts to the artists in the letterpress house. “Would you like your naughty fortune read?” someone asked me. “Would you like to know how we built this?”

“Yes!” I replied, over and over.

What is it about the unbearable cold, that makes us all so eager to connect with one another, strangers?

First, I needed to ask a question, before I could get any answers. I thought about that for a moment. “. . . Where should I live?” I asked her.

She placed her pajamaed arms on the coffee table and examined the cards.

“This one says you should never live in a palace, or a castle,” she said. “And this card says . . . don’t trust anyone. And this one says you should remember to take a bath and use shampoo. And this one says, just go someplace, and when you get there, tell someone.”

Sarah had acquired a new pair of sparkly gold shoes, so she invited us all to join her at Mancini’s, an old steak restaurant in St. Paul dripping with heavy red curtains and watered down cocktails. Suits were involved, and a big band tapping their feet on a stage glittering with christmas lights and bows, trumpeting out “Little Sister.” I’d busted out some faux furs and a silk dress I’d found at a thrift store for ten bucks. I’ve only recently decided that I’m old enough to wear lipstick, so whenever the opportunity presents itself I get really excited.

“Can you taste any vodka in my vodka cranberry?” Joanna asked. “I’m pretty sure this is just Juicy Juice.”

“You should . . . send that back,” someone confirmed.

While we waited at the bar, an older man tapped me on the shoulder. “I’d really love it if you danced with me, just one dance,” he said.

“I dance with anyone!” I said, taking his hand.

He swirled me around, told me I’d put a spell on him. He said I had those angel devil eyes. At the end of the night, he patted my back. “I know you have a boyfriend, but I just put my business card in your dress,” he said. “And if that ever changes, call me.”

My spindly arms twisted and grasped my halterline in alarm. “That is a smooth move!” I cried.

There was a moment, when I was standing in the flickering green light in front of one of the coffins (someone trapped inside), that I turned my head a certain way, and peered out from the eyeslits in my giant pig mask, and I was overcome with not so much déjà vu as pure memory: I had dreamt this, I thought, just maybe six months before.

I had woken up from the dream thinking “where could that have taken place? What was I doing, standing in front of that coffin, why couldn’t I see quite right?” but what had really stuck with me was how the dream had ended. Something was happening outside of the basement, something awful that I had no power to stop while I stood in front of that coffin, and I would not find out what that was until all of this was over.

Slideshow of full album: here.

“We’re extraordinarily rich. We’re the top one percent you see, and we’re quite pleased with how things are going, so. We just thought we’d let you know. Thanks.”

“Yes! We support everything that’s happening! Long live capitalism!”

“We are staunch supporters of capitalism.”

We were standing in the median dividing the West End from a Leeann Chin; Maggie was taking her turn blindfolded and wandering the median with her poster, and I stood jovially at the edge with my “Feudalism Works (Even If I Don’t)” sign. We were speaking entirely in our “wealthy” voices (which just got progressively more British as the evening progressed). Oh I do love things! It’s so marvelous to own so many of them! Thank you for the bailout, the investments are going splendidly!

The woman in the crosswalk’s head cocked like a dalmatian’s. “Capitalism?”

“Yes! We’ve done so well by it.”

“Capitalism.”

“Tip top! Is that a thing we say? Tip top!”

“What’s capitalism?” she asked.

“HA!” I broke.

Then, “oh, wait, I’m sorry, are you serious?”

“Whatever, I have to go. I’ll look that one up when I get home. You guys have fun.”

I turned and stared at Maggie, who was now teetering on the edge of the curb as traffic rushed by, the chiffon blindfold around her eyes beginning to slip. “Well this is one of the nuttier things I’ve ever done,” I said.

Was what it said, for no discernible reason, on the Uptown’s marquee tonight as I left yoga class. A cold rain had just passed, and the sky was melting down the buildings like a slurpee. I love this city.

I’ve noticed that, both in exercise and in life, generally, the best motto I can find so far has been “but, it’s easy.” Most of the work is in overcoming my own resistance. I can’t do that, it’s too hard, I hate this, I should slow down, this is too much.

But, it’s easy. And suddenly you just float up.

When I moved home to Minneapolis, one of my best friends was about to leave.

“I got accepted!” she said one day. “Grad school, getting my masters in teaching for special needs. California. Then maybe I’ll move back to Israel.”

“. . . Yay!” we chorused. “That’s so . . . great, for you.”

Last week I found out she was visiting. In a couple of days, were we free Saturday? Did we want to meet at the State Fair, or afterwards?

“I HOPE YOU LIKE THE HAUNTED HOUSE,” I wrote back. “AND ALSO BABY ALPACAS.”

Adelia and I planned on meeting up with her around 2, and just staying a couple of hours. On our shuttle ride from the parking lot she told me about her own graduate school work: a paper she was writing about Walter Benjamin. “Basically the modern city and society is our downfall,” she said, as the bus warbled around another curve. I gripped the seat in front of us and focused on non-barfing exhales. “We have too much demanding our attention, just walking down the street: so many strangers we approach and pass, red lights, stop signs. We are constantly on alert for our own survival. And with the loss of craftsmanship, we lose the habit of telling stories. We no longer have the luxury to daydream.”

“Sooo, he wrote this in the ’20s?”

We stepped off the bus and into the masses.

It took us a few hours just to meet up with Jamie, due to the cellphone service/textsuck black hole that generally surrounds any area containing cows. We stoically watched a greyhound adoption presentation, twice, and remained unconvinced. I was attempting a gluten-free diet as of a few weeks prior, and I pulled out a list of the booths that would serve me. “Too bad everything’s deep fried here, even the fruit,” I said. We decided to get out of the Pet Center and meet Megan by the entrance. “I need coffee,” Adelia said, “and some breakfast, and a different eyeglass prescription, and a lot less ragweed, and fewer people around me, and where’s Jamie, and agh agh agh.”

Things weren’t looking up. “Meet me by the hammocks,” Jamie’s text bleeped.

It’s funny how mood, and with it, reality, can change in the span of twenty minutes. We got coffee. We swung on the hammocks, hiding within their billowing cotton like toddlers in a clothesline and pointing at the stuffed parrots overhead, until politely commanded off. We could see Jamie, but she couldn’t see us. “Tee hee,” we said. “There you are!” she cried. “Hooray!”

“Hooray!” we said.

And we stayed another four hours, creeping through the haunted house, gnawing cupcakes (they’re better with gluten, guys), patting animals on the head, taking ghost pepper challenges and screaming through the sky on the flying chairs. Because that’s the way we roll.

The next day, she was halfway across the continent again.

Full album: here.

Then we came back to Minneapolis and went to a creepy antique store/barn off the highway and Janaka got a creepy bunny mask and we took some creepy bunny pictures in Tiny Tim’s cemetery.

Full album: here.

He was beautiful: his hair was long and feathered. He was the fifth boy I wanted to kiss, the second boy I actually kissed, and the first whom I loved kissing. His smile took up half of his head and his teeth were whitewashed bricks. The first time we noticed one another we were at a playground near someone’s parents’ house. I had just jumped off a slide and landed inelegantly in a pile of wood chips. He said to me, “Adrianne, you look kind of like an egg.”

Then he grabbed my scarf and ran. My friend said to me, “I think he likes you.”

“Hmmwhat?” I said. “Who?” I watched him running across the field, my white wool scarf billowing behind him like some kind of ridiculous fantasy. My heart barged into my throat, where it remained for days.

Three months later:
He would break up with me in the school auditorium (a Teen Magazine quiz I’d taken just days before had asked: “How important is it to be a good girlfriend?” “Pfft!” I’d scoffed, confusing indifference with feminism, and circling not at all). I wouldn’t cry until the doors had closed behind me.

The first boy who’d kissed me would look up from his copy of Inherit The Wind. “What’s wrong!” he’d cry, running to me.

Four years from then:
I’d be visiting home on winter break from college and we’d go to the same New Year’s party — to ignore one another as we mixed drinks in the kitchen, then dance together near the DJ, and then pull one another deliriously toward a hallway. I’d giggle as he threw my shirt on the floor. “Why do you keep laughing?” he’d ask. “We just went farther in five minutes than we ever went in three months of dating,” I’d reply, still tittering. He frowned.

“What? . . . Isn’t that kind of crazy? I’m just sayin’.”

Twenty minutes from then:
I hit my fist into the top of his head as hard as I could, stood up in disgust, knocked on Melissa’s bedroom door, and asked her to drive me home.

“. . . Adrianne? It’s late.”

“I know, I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I can’t sleep next to that guy. Doesn’t feel right.”

She wandered through the dark of her room, pulling on layers of clothing, while I stood a few feet away from his already slumbering form. He was still snuggled on the floor, dimly outlined against the blankets by a streetlamp’s light shifting through the venetian blinds. All grey and softness. I couldn’t tell if I wanted to punch him in the head again or hold him like a velveteen rabbit. We tip-toed around him and out the door: that was the last time I saw him.

But first, I was sixteen and he was fifteen, he had just grabbed my scarf a few days before, which I had spent filling a diary with declarations of his beautiful face, and now there was a party in a friend’s basement after we’d all gone sledding: our noses red with cold, bowls of chips on the coffee table, a movie on the TV, our friend Brendan sitting by the CD player and singing along. If man is five, if man is five, if man is five . . .

“Who is this?” I asked. “I love it.”

Everyone was distracted; musical instruments were brought out, Cheetos thrown. Melissa and Joel, married eleven years later, were possibly flirting. Nate was probably playing a keyboard or a bass or whatever he played. I’d loved him too, but earlier, and unrequited so whatever. What movie was on? I can’t picture it. I walked near the couch and the boy who called me an egg suddenly grabbed me around the waist and pulled me onto his lap.

And thus began a new happiness.

I’ve never been a person who touches other people. I didn’t hug my friends or cuddle with my family. My little sister used to try and snuggle up to me when we shared a bed as kids and I’d shove her away, pressing a jagged line into our sheets with my finger. “Do not cross this,” I’d say, “or I’ll kick you.” And as I grew up, it wasn’t that I didn’t want that natural touchiness my friends had with one another; I just felt like it was too late for me by then. I didn’t know how. I was a bundle of limbs and sharp angles. I didn’t have the right. To touch was to potentially invade, and I was nothing if not respectful of space.

But when the boy with the beautiful hair and whitewashed teeth reached out his slender arms and pulled me onto his lap, I melted into the couch.

In retrospect I was probably crushing him. He was like 5’2″. Still, he managed to surround me, fold me in. I was mute for the rest of the party, overcome with his closeness and warmth. He didn’t let go. Time stopped, everything was feeling. No other firsts would compare with that first time of being held.

Melissa drove me home and could tell I was trouble. I beamed and stared dreamily out of her car window.

“I just . . . don’t want you to get your hopes up so high,” she said. “It seems like this meant a lot to you, and maybe it was just . . . a passing thing for him.” Her eyes darted off the road to meet mine. “You know, I hear he’s kinda slutty.”

“I know, I know,” I insisted. “But I don’t care. We could never talk again. Anything terrible might happen tomorrow or months from now, we could date or break up or he could ignore me forever. It doesn’t undo tonight, nothing can.”

When I got home I opened my CD player and slipped in my Rufus Wainwright album. I lit all the candles in my bedroom (it was the late 90s, we had a lot of them) and I curled up on my bed and I made a line of pillows and I wrapped my arms around it. I felt overwhelmingly safe. The warmth of his arms remained in my elbows, and I thought it would never leave. Loved! Loving! Happy, happy, happy.

Sure, easy for us, then. I didn’t know the sting of loss; I couldn’t dread that yet. I hadn’t built a library of ways to be hurt, evasion strategies, plan b’s. No bridges had been built to preemptively cross. Just me, on my desert island, an ocean shroud all around, with its mysterious creatures lurking beneath.

The main thing was, back then present happiness wasn’t predicated on the assurance of future happiness.

Last night I was walking back to my boyfriend’s apartment from at party at 4 in the morning. It’s been snowing and sleeting and raining pretty much nonstop the entire month I’ve been here, and the streets were a labyrinth of rutted ice and deep puddles. The wind rattled in the trees. And then, everything was quiet. No cars on the road at that hour, no bicyclists, no other pedestrians. Just the ice and wet streets, the gentle chatter of my boots. The party had given a glimmer of a feeling: that envelopedness, that excitement of something new, the ocean all around. I thought about being sixteen and wedged between pillows.

Also other tendernesses, other surprise sweetnesses — other ways to have been suddenly held. None of them lasted forever; each had its tip-toe out scene, its sting or regret. But so far, none of those endings have been what has stuck. When I think of you, I think of how we met.

You’re leaning over the counter top, your sleeves covered in sawdust — “Actually,” you say, “I forgot to ask — do you want to grab dinner sometime or something?” You’re sitting on top of a bronze turtle at the zoo, one hand raised to the sky in victory; I snap the photo. I’m wearing taffeta and your sleeves are cut off: the bottle points to me. We’re laying on a conference room floor surrounded by popcorn kernels and our shoulders are connected by an electric current: I lend you my sweater for a pillow and afterwards it smells wonderfully of your hair. (I know this because I brought it to my own face, to inhale; I know this because I hoped it would.) Your hand is on my waist and you’re spinning me around the room, telling me this is how your parents met. We’re on your porch and it’s getting cold — I say “I’m going to just scootch next to you, if you don’t mind” and your hand naturally falls on my shoulder, like it had always been there. It still is.

Warm, assuring, close, whatever might happen later. We could live this way.

We’d resigned ourselves to it, another way to miss contact. Then I heard some rustling, your hands moving chords. “Wait!” you said. “I think I’ve figured it out.”

And suddenly there you were — green-eyed, bearded now, wearing some unreadable expression — hesitancy maybe, an unfamiliar shyness. “Oh!” I said, hands flying to my face. “I can see you, I can see you.”