Performance Review

I have been working at the bookstore for one whole year. Well a year and a few weeks. During that year, my progress as a bookseller has been documented for....the 2009 Bookseller Performance Review which I received today. Oh yeah! I get a .25 raise.

I cannot keep telling you how different I feel. I don't feel more like an adult, I don't feel entirely unlike the girl who started this journal 4 years ago. I feel exactly the same and yet altered. This year has been incredibly rough. I graduated thinking that I would land my dream job in publishing, that the path would be an easy one, that I would have everything together (in my little angst ridden way) but that was not the case.

The death of my nephew a year ago has been harder than I thought. He was just a year old, and by all accounts he was a being not yet developed, but it doesn't make his death any easier to handle. I had no time to grieve for the nephew I will never get to know, I had no chance to experience his life with him, to see him become someone more than just a baby. Some months after his death my mom told me that she couldn't look at herself in the mirror anymore. That she would pass mirrors without even glancing in it, because she wasn't prepared to face herself after the tragedy. She wasn't able to look at herself and realize that she was no longer a grandmother, that she no longer has a grandson to buy books for, and clothes for and all the other little things grandma like to do. She didn't know who would be staring back at her if she caught herself off guard one day in the mirror, when she wasn't trying to keep it together. When she wasn't trying to be all composed. I didn't admit it then, but I too was having (and still have) the same problem.

I am completely aware of who I am, I feel myself get sad, happy, depressed, and comfortable but I have not been able to look in the mirror for a very long time, for a whole year in fact. When I brush my teeth, ruffle my hair, wash my hands I avoid eye contact with the person ready to stare back at me. I don't know what it is, I don't know what I expect to see but I am not ready for it. I still cry on the walk home some days. If it's late outside, and I am the only one on the street, tears start falling. I whisper to a god I don't particularly believe in (all the time) and I cry for my mom for not having a grandson anymore, I cry for my brother for not having a son, and sometimes I cry for him. For not being alive anymore, for not being able to get to know us as much as I didn't know I wanted to know him.

And maybe that's why I don't like starring into mirrors anymore. Because I know what I will see, I know that I will not be able to hide from myself as much as I can hide from everyone else.

This inability to physically face myself is weird because in the year that I have been here, including my gig at the bookstore and at the production job, the year that I have made and lost friends, everyone keeps complementing me on things like my personality, youthfulness, and face. This has been the year of Performance Reviews, where I am getting high marks all around and yet....I do not see it.

During the review my manager sat me in the office and went over a two page performance report. Most of it was generic stuff, but on the second page she had to write up a summary about me. In it she called me 'outgoing and bubbly" and that my personality was contagious. She added that customers and fellow booksellers LOVE ME and that it was a pleasure to have me on the staff. After she read what she had to write up she wanted to tell me that they really do enjoy me being there. That no one has a bad thing to say about me, and that I brighten up people's day. This was coming from the manager I have not felt like I've completely gotten to know. She is a hard ass and sometimes can be a bitch, and I don't particularly talk to her a lot. But she was so sincere telling me all of this stuff and I could feel myself wanting to cry again, because I don't know who that girl is. I don't know who she was talking about because I haven't faced that girl in a long time. I mean i am that girl, in every way shape or form but I don't see her (maybe because I am not looking into the mirror to do so), I don't feel her, I don't know who she is.

I want to come to terms with myself, I want to come to terms with Danny's death, I want to fully accept who I am so I can stop hiding from myself and stop giving myself a bad performance review when everyone else says I am doing okay. Maybe I am.

I think of this only, because a couple of months I sort of fell for a guy. Not in the art boy kind of way. I feel like I must reiterate this because my crush on art boy was fanciful at best. I mean I was, as I often am, madly deeply in love with him. He was cute, dorky, and a goalie. He was approachable, though I never approached him, and he was above all very nice. But for some reason I could never get past starring at him from a distance. I never had a full conversation with him that lasted longer than five minutes. From a distance I admired him while he sort of new of my existence.

And then when I started working for Lenny, I met that IT Guy, the one who talked me off of that freezing roof, the one who bought me a donut the second time I met him because I forgot my money in my jacket upstairs, and I kept talking about wanting to eat something sweet. The first day I met him, I hated his guts. He was sort of hard to read and he brushed me off as if I was just a seat filler. But soon after the roof incident, we had a common thing to talk about. He worked in the office some days and when he would we'd spend hours talking and this is not an exaggeration. While I have been unable to 'see' myself in a very long time, I felt completely comfortable around him. I did not stumble over words like I did with Art boy, I did not find myself lacking words to say like I did with Music Boy, and I didn't feel like an ugly duckling like I have around...well every boy.

But I haven't looked at myself in the mirror for a while. I do not see the loss of a few extra pounds that everyone points out, I do not see the nice color of my eyes, or the brightness of my smile. I am not aware of the person I am changing into, or the physical changes that should not make me feel awkward and self conscious anymore. I am coming into myself, though I am the only one not noticing this right off that back.

Anytime IT Guy was in the office he would make it a point to stop by my desk and talk to me. He'd come off the elevator, put his stuff away and then stay with me in the hallway until he was pulled away to answer a computer question from someone on the floor. He always initiated the conversations, while I'd sit nervously wondering why he wanted to talk to me, but I realize now that he wanted to know who I was, he wanted to listen to what I said (well as much as any boy can listen to a girl talk), and I think he dug me. And towards the end of the internship I started to dig him back, seriously.

There was one day, when no one was in the office except Lenny, IT Guy and I. Lenny was editing some footage in his office and IT GUY (whose name is Simon, yes I was called him Adam for the sake of privacy but now I don't have to worry about him or anyone from there stumbling across my dear journal) and I convened in the lobby. For three hours we talked about everything, inches away from each others face. I don't know how it happened, how we had gone with sitting across from each other legs crossed and spaced to heads almost touching, deep in conversation, eye contact locked in some weird understanding of each other. I have never felt like that before, like he was starring at me and seeing this person he enjoyed being around. And we were just at the point where he was telling me about his dad (because every guy I have ever liked always has some issue with their dad. I don't know why) , that he [Simon] was beat up a few years back by some kids in Harlem. He was walking down the street with his ex-girlfriend and when he passed this teenagers on the street he knew something was wrong. The next moment he was attacked from behind, knocked to the ground and beaten up while his girlfriend watched from the side (of course he had to tell me that he got in at least one punch that landed. One is better than none)

His dad is a doctor. So after the incident he went to him, not for medical reasons, but just to vent about the incident. His father, was unsympathetic, sort of nonchalant and distance as he's always been. It was then, listening to this story wondering why a boy like that would be confining in a girl like me. A girl who can't even look herself in the mirror, a girl who has skated on performing functions that resemble a human being but who sometimes wonder if the facade will hold up, that I felt okay. I mean our faces were so close yet entirely comfortable, I could smell his body spray, and feel his leg against mine, and I felt interesting for once, I realized how okay I felt in front of someone again (something I have not felt in a long time), and it was then that we both realized that if we just leaned in a little closer....

And then Lenny walked into the fucking lobby. We pulled away like two kids with their hand in the candy jar. Lenny just wanted to tell me that I could leave early because there was no sense me staying late on a holiday (Good Friday I think). I quickly said goodbye to Simon, and got on the elevator and crashed against the door. It was then that I could sort of see my image, distorted a little, in the steel doors and I wondered then like, I wonder now (after almost kissing a boy. A boy who is actually 32 ) if I am 'performing' this life well, if the face and person I present to the world is someone I could be proud of, if it's someone that I will end up liking as much as everyone else seems to.

And the moment I am able to look at myself in the mirror again, will be the moment I hope it all makes sense. When I start to feel whole again when I can give myself high marks suitable for a hefty raise.