Picture this, as it should be:
You are a hot, young thirty-something, and you’ve got stories in in The Paris Review, Granta, and you’re smoothing out a poem slated for publication in The New Yorker in a couple months. You show your work-in-progress to your closest friends and everyone loves it! They love it! There’s a gorgeous girl living in Botafogo and she wants to take you samba dancing, wants to take you to Leme and later you walk to Poli Suco in Ipanema for açaí with passion fruit. Wait till they see you dance! You say you’re never leaving Rio; you’re here to live like Elizabeth Bishop and Lota. But baby, you’re also a ski bro. Your Botafogo girl will have to wait. You can do Southern Hemisphere Summer because there’s Jackson four hours south of home, and when you ride you go fast, and you do trees and yurt hikes, and you wear blue beanies and shred all day because you’re from Idaho and that’s what Idaho girls do.
Or picture this as it is:
After 15+ years on-and-off SSRIs, your brain chemistry has changed and no longer tolerates a handful of drugs, so you’ve opted for nothing. You are still awkward and have a tendency to fawn when you’re socially anxious—you get so nice it’s uncomfortable, you’ve been told—and when you turn 34, you are in Buenos Aires pulling an all-nighter to sew together disparate pieces of your novel that you’ve rewritten twice in the last year. You have several illnesses including the beginning of viral arthritis, and you translate the gory details by holding your phone up to the pharmacist’s window because your Spanish is much worse than you thought. When you are eating dinner alone, you send a picture to your family and your dad asks if that’s red wine in the stemmed glass. It is Diet Coke. You have not had wine in more than three years, but it seems like an appropriate question. There are several moments this last winter that have left you deeply and privately humiliated, and to top it off, you still don’t know how to ski.
This winter, you’d spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of girl you want to be versus the kind of girl you are, and what you can say now, back in the states roughly two months after leaving Buenos Aires, is that you were having a very bad time.
It’s a little bit like Autobiography of Red, your friend Zamin says, except in retrospect, you went to Buenos Aires to have a breakdown.
You wonder if this obsession with identity is a bit of a late-capitalist plot. How best to package yourself in a way that is understandable, digestible, easily understood? Is this, in fact, a question of outward presentation or is it about authenticity?
Quite frankly, you bore yourself.
And so last month, you rented some skis and drove up to the ski hill for the first time in 25 years, and you stood near the lift at the blue sign, and a man named Cliff, who speaks to you like you’re seven, says “Hey, are you here for the group lesson?”
You are, and you are the only one who shows up for the group lesson. It’s just you and Cliff for the next two hours. Cliff has been coaching at the mountain for about as long as you’ve been away. “You think you can handle that hill?” he asks, pointing to the bunny hill. You say what you said to the hairdresser in Buenos Aires before he dyed your hair blonde: “I’m putting my faith in your very capable hands. Let’s just do whatever you think is best.”
You have never been on the magic carpet but up you go as the conveyor belt drops you at the top of a very subtle incline. You have not skied in a very long time, mostly because you spent all of your youth hating it. Hated the way you were bad at it and how cautious you were. You did not like being scared or seeing your siblings at the bottom of the hill, those two who were not scared, your parents yelling bend you knees! Look downhill, skis together! You didn’t like the long drive up to the mountain, the twists and turns and the Dramamine you had to pop in your mouth halfway just to throw it back up in a Kleenex box. You didn’t like cold toes or chapped cheeks, and you’ve never been very good at fast speeds. It’s a bad feeling not keeping up.
It is not prohibitively expensive on your old-school ski hill, thank god, or at least not yet. There’s biscuits and gravy for less than $6 at the lodge, and that’s something you can believe in. Skiing down the bunny hill, you are surprised by muscle memory, the way you steer your hips, shift your weight, and Cliff asks if you’re ready to graduate to the real chairlift, and you say, I’m in.
The rest of the morning, you ski green circles and the cat track. You’re no genius but you’ve got parallel turns mostly under control. Down in the valley, there is a thick cover of clouds, but you’re above it now, and you think, I like this. You are enjoying yourself even though you are a beginner again, even though you’re proving something to yourself—what? That it’s so much easier when no one is watching. You are maybe not as bad as you think you are—not good, Christ, let’s not get carried away, but you’re not a lost cause. Some things are not too late for you.
Soon, hopefully, you will graduate. The last seven years of your academic career are finally drawing to a close, and since you were eighteen, you have either been in school or the service industry, and there’s still so much you don’t know. About love and life and writing. About winter sports and how to make friends as an adult. How to be, if not happy, then at least content?
You decide to start outside, always outside, in the mountains.
Picture this:
You start your turn at the top of the hill, drag your pole around and look through the flat light. You shift your weight downhill, shins pressed into the tongue of your boot. The skis get in line. When you get down the mountain, you say you’ll spend your savings on boots and a discount pair of skis. Get a season pass. Outside, you lay in the spring snow and shape your body so its ready for resurrection. Say, forgive me. Say, I mean it this time. Inside, there is no greater pleasure than putting on real shoes and learning how to walk again. No more heel, toe, heel, toe. You are headed off into the backcountry, some wild unknown, and hopefully landing a job with great health insurance. You are an outside girl. You are a girl who says, I told you so and Goodbye.You are out of bounds. You, girl, are no good yet. The snow, it smells like iron. It tastes like gold.