the habit of being

My room? Safe. My art? Wow. (Pay no mind to the blue sheet hanging in the hall. You see, the bathroom door fell off it’s hinges. It’s very posh, I think, like a beaded curtain or cucumber incense cones. Maybe we could take off all the doors that way. All but mine because I need a lock.) V. looks at my pictures and decides I am not just the girl with long hair from honors English. Comfortable yet? Are you? Are you? Here, let my roll out my soul for a futon. Black and white pictures on the walls and scarves hanging over the closet door. The messy drafting table, the broken tassel. Antique bed, saints calendar, Gone with the Wind poster, hardwood floors, peacock feathers. I try to look at it like someone seeing it all from a neutral perspective. Yes, this girl is righteous. Indeed, the child knows space.

My father’s apartment is the same. Same black and white photos, same floors, same squares, same space. But he decorates the tall tall walls with hammers. Hammers everywhere. (Jesus was a carpenter and so was he, my daddy.) He calls my mother and I for a ride to a bar, only he doesn’t tell us that. We drop him off at a Gate station because this was his direction. He says he doesn’t even have 60 cents to buy stamps. We stopped out rummy came for this. In the back seat, I’m trying to hide behind my dusty blue camisole. Shrink, I tell my body, but she won’t listen. He’s running with the dogs, he says. He’s fucking himself up. Doesn’t even ask that we pardon his French. (When I was little I told him it wasn’t French, it was bad English. He said he guessed I was right and laughed.) A pile of sticks and chemicals, a mind that was once filled with philosophy now a tattered tortured rag and I don’t know whether he’s a wreck or he’s a wreck. This is my blood, these are my roots. This is my art. Will my life follow his. He tells me to type up his resume without dates because everything is so scattered. Didn’t I say I was nonlinear? Didn’t I, just a few months ago? I’m getting his nose too, his knees, and his walk. Vagabond. Bum. Free-spirit? Broken. He used to eat dirt. Said he couldn’t get enough.

This morning I opened a checking account. Soon I’ll have my own ATM card. I feel like a fish. The tacky temporary checks are too much to handle. I sat and tried to be adult with the man who didn’t know what he was doing. My pocketbook is big, my wallet is long. I look like a college girl with funds. I worry that the signature I signed is not my real one. Too much pressure to make it typical. In their computer, I’m Kat, he says. There’s another account for me as the beneficiary of Virginia, but the social security number has two digits reversed. Empty, anyway. An old error.

The three of us ate outside, in the breeze. We chattered and talked and discussed even. All the nearly-important things. We agreed the great books would be written again if burned, and yes, we are progressing. Love ruins future plans. Boys are silly with issues and none. I drink my unsweetened tea quickly and they don’t sip their waters. First one has a job, so one can save up enough money to be a starving artist. Media, media. How to revolutionize so the real meaning isn’t skirted. I am a girl with a thought process. I suppose I didn’t even know. Beauty is private moments and skinny-dipping in the river and other things here and there. We talk, we eat, we bond. Then we just go for a ride. It’s my music playing in their car and it’s magic. Ani is singing a song I heard live. I am alert and fulfilled and I want to kiss someone. We’re riding around a cemetery and “Past the Mission” by Tori Amos is on now. I almost say stop the car because I want to run I want to yell I want to say “look here! I have found people who can talk to me!” to the sky in the dark of it all. I close my eyes. E. runs her fingers through my hair, short as it is. It’s nice, it’s nice. I notice V.’s Botticelli features in the mirror and on we go. I ask for a copy of the mixed tape when they drop me off at home.

My mother and I played three games of Scrabble today. I made apricot and I’m proud. James stayed up until midnight waiting for me but I wasn’t online. I’m a horrid thing. I make him worry he doesn’t mean the world to me. He waits and I know he’s tired of waiting. I should have called him days ago, but now it’s 2:30 in the morning and I don’t want to wake him up. I like the idea of calling just to whisper a few words he won’t remember in the morning, but I think of the sound of a ringing phone and am dissuaded. Oh what is wrong with me? Every impulse says make him know the euphoria he brings me, all but the one that says I don’t know how. I want to see his hands again, so intense and poised, they are hands that do things. I want the luxury of not thinking. I want the colors, the magnetic field, the way we can own one another. Involvement? Oh for such memories I never want to send another message. The letters, they are microscopic, I have to squint too hard to read them.

I am a giant plate. Some finger traces around and around and around and around the edges. Sometimes the friction sings out.

I look up at the red curve, it’s not marble, it’s not real light. The dots glistening and it become blurred as I stare too long, I’m looking, I don’t see. Vision is a needless sense and my mind goes for walks. I shower in the morning to wash and I shower at night to think. I close my eyes as I sit up in the tub, the water streaming down in red. I lean over and place one hand on each side of the drain, it’s too clear. I know a camera lens would leave traces of noise, when it’s so silent and so smooth. I wish I could capture this picture that’s already been taken. I want to see it from above. See my body bending over too far, like today at work when I showed them all I could almost put my feet behind my head? Leaning in, leaning in. Could it suck me down? That’s too typical. The holes are too few and too small. I’m more jigsaw than this. The black strings around my neck won’t hold me together for long. I wonder if it’s not my unfortunate tan lines keeping my pieces from falling off to the floor. The skin falls, the hair falls, an eyelash even. My guts are still intact, my fingers won’t be hacked off today.

We talked in small words and short phrases about sex and rape fantasies. We have them, we like them, they’re ancient. Is this what we’re fighting? Oh no. I want the black fringe lingerie, see through undies and all. I want comfort. That’s basic, that’s pit. To want to be taken, is it so wrong? When it breaks me to shards I’ll see. A crack down the spine might do me good, if I’m so afraid of exposure. I won’t dance for you, I can’t. But I want to. I want it all. If just one fantasy came true, would it be this one? The one that will kill all the rest and make me flat as pie. Perhaps my legs would lengthen further, I always wanted to be a string. A string can be a feminist if it tries, if it ties. I’ve had them for years. They’ve had me. Won’t you try a bite? I’ll still have my pretty things, my girls. I want you mad.

Birthdays and baklava for my muse in a grey world where they give tennis bracelets to farm girls on pilgrimage to Italy. All my love this day, and I’ll keep telling you the dirty benefits of being eighteen. The drawing I’ll finish some time. The card I’ll send from Tennessee, Central Time.

I have hope for my freckles that fade and my hair that gets shorter, but blemishes won’t ever die out. An old woman with soft wispy white hair held back in combs said she remembered taking me to a pond with my father when I was a tiny tiny thing. She recognized me because I looked like Virginia in summer. She left then and brought back scones for the office (I was at work). Excellent, and I ate them cold, brought two home in my pocket wrapped in tissue. The sad thing is I can’t even remember her name. Nobility eludes me.

E. called me and we talked for an hour at least. So refreshing and she’s so like-minded and I’ll miss her so when she goes. V. likes Annie Leibovitz and we have the nicest things in common too. Where was I when all this happened? Where was I when I stopped being alone here? They entice me with visions of chilling and spilling our guts for miles all around and a river, but what can I do, is it real? Where’s the portal? Where’s the wall? We’re all on a road trip to the edge and I tell her don’t ever stop, not even when you get there. We speak of immoral things that aren’t and friendships that can be dispelled like mist. Questions you love to answer but you never have time. I got off the phone giddy, I did. How did I become so dependent on communication with things that aren’t me? It’s not my style. Miss Introspection and the wonder weeks behind. Start and stop I can do, but to let passengers in, it’s not easy.

I don’t know how I’ll write fiction when my stories are all washed up. I have three sentence tales mostly, and brevity isn’t so fine a treasure these days. I have a little book I want to write little poems in, but instead I write little quotes, thinking I’ll take it out and flip through when I’m low to be lifted. I know it will just sit almost empty like all my little books. The words fly out when I sigh and come back in when I sleep. My arms are by then too limp to record.

This isn’t what I do. I don’t make you sad so soon. I don’t ruin beauty. I don’t trash up the world with my dander and floozy whims. My face is sharper now; so is my scene.

. . .

Heavy heavy disappointment from yesterday wanes a bit, but other problems remain.
1. I’ve got relationship strain coming from a couple different arenas. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
2. I haven’t even begun to pack for Sewanee, and still have five books I’m supposed to read before I get there.
3. Senior pictures are Thursday and I still can’t do the Real Smile.
4. I ate salsa so hot it actually made me sweat.
5. I’m probably not -really- a sex kitten at heart and it’s making me upset.
6. I’m the most ridiculous possessive jealous lousy girl in the world.

But. .
1. I have a bigger purse that I can put books in. It looks like a moccasin and I think only of her when I look at it.
2. I’m going to Atlanta this weekend and the Ritz Carlton and the Betsey Johnson store await.
3. E. and I are going out to dinner tomorrow night.
4. We have new chicken salad.
5. Ani DiFranco might be coming to Savannah.
6. I will see J. in a month or so, hopefully.

. . .

I can still feel your hands on my skin if I think hard enough. It’s hard not to imagine it was a dream. I’m afraid it might be becoming one. Help me.

Was it a cavern or a cave packed with ice from which this knife this dagger was thrust? It is colder than the sweat on my lip, colder than the wound now is hot. This freezing is beyond water, beyond ice. Is it liquid nitrogen or swamp fog from Antarctica? Where do things come from in such degrees and such losses? Against the skin of my thighs it traces circles, ellipses spiraling spiraling nearer to inside. Everything becomes numb almost almost hard as the tip draws in deeper. Without explosion, I know I’m being cut in two halves, exposing my lack of symmetry and it is like a seam being ripped out. I see the tiny pink laces in my mind as I look up up up to the white expanse of ceiling with those beads of hot oil and icicles forming. Was the axis always drawn? Was the line through the chest? (Could I see it in those x-rays I develop in the black black black. I forgot to turn the red light on and it’s pitch today, but I’m going through the motions. Why do I need my eyes?) A knife or a stream of ice water, it’s cutting me in two. I can feel it like a lightening bolt all the way to my scalp. I can visualize colors but this is none of them. Even white is too dark and clear is not real. When this is over, will I sprout new appendages like a worm and live forever on as two? (I am like a worm in some ways.) Will my guts and my air and my vertebrae just clink down on the tiles? Or will I be sewn back together in thick black thread, to leave me forever in a pattern of crosshatch x’s? Which part of my mind goes right and which left I cannot tell. I’m too cold and every hair is brittle and my nipples stand erect. Soon no longer a pair. My breathing is shallow and quick. I can think myself to a castle in a black velvet dress. It’s slowing, my heart. Ready for the blade. Oh don’t let my secrets out with the locusts and spiders. They would be minute and alone thrown for a loop all over this sweaty sticky room.

(I write this of ice of ice and cold and death and horrid things stupid horrid horrid things. It’s me alone in the bathroom with some phantom breaking breaking breaking. It’s terror and loneliness and cracks down the lines… brittle me brittle bones that creak and no heat, not like the warmth I feel with you. And I open this gift you’ve sent me - a recollection, a poem, a fairy tale (real!). Yet even there in all that heat lives the same ice. It’s all the more touching that I know that you know. You really really know. I am already naked. Did you know what I was thinking just then as you wrote those words (more beautiful than the ocean I saw for the first time with you)? I was afraid of my coldness and you remind me here that it went away those days. I’m sick for words I never said. I thought I would -show- you what I’m thinking and I tried, I tried. You gave me everything and I only run faster now. Have mercy, for you are blue and I am yellow. I know now. I hated complementary colors until I understood them. I could cry out for want of you. Before, I never even knew what it was like to be beauty, and now what can I say? What can I say that could tell it? How can I tell you that I owe you the world, when all the world melts away in light of involvement?)

. . .

Smallness of today:

My hair poofed, my eyes done, I let them tangle me into starched awkward poses. I gave the tense unsmile and went about my way. Was it worth the trouble? I got new makeup and black bras (small. yes, I am disappearing, I wasn’t kidding.) All the usual suspects were there. (Matt with a cell phone telling me I’d be fined $65 if I didn’t return my proofs. Classic.) Then to work, where I wrinkled my skirt. (L. said I should straighten my hair everyday. I like my funny curls.) I “nuked a scone.” Home for supper and another Scrabble win. I finally packed for Sewanee (lots of scarves, the Bible and the Bhagavad-gita, clothes, bathing suit, sarong, feather boa, Jennifer picture, beauty-items, Mozart’s Requiem and other vital CDs, sheets and towels, later Eliot). I haven’t read the books I’m supposed to read though. I’m terrible. These people expect me to be all responsible and I haven’t even done the one thing that asked me to do before I came. (I’m such a badass! Hehe.)

M. called and we decided to go on a walk tomorrow night. I have high hopes of making our friendship “real” so to speak. Having an Actual Conversation and all that jazz. I’ll probably be too nervous to say a thing. I’m inhumanly ridiculous.

And worlds collided. Still I grow.

. . .

New plan: to write poetry with imagery related to backs arched in ecstasy or something less pure. Oh, I can see that shape and it gives me chills. I want to be that shape. I want to break into a million pieces out of some deep electric intensity, not a stark white numbness. I want to crack open those icebergs for you.

My life is so teeming with symbols, yet they don’t really stand for anything solid. While in the shower I said to myself maybe these tokens of mine are the thoughts floating down that river as I sit by and watch, instead of dead cows and the like. But no, glass doesn’t float, and I’d rather not have sponges for lifestamps. I want them gossamer and lace, or tiny and fragile like snowflakes. (Snowflakes in a moving river provide the irony necessary for an accurate portrayal of my circuit system, but I’m thinking synthetics would be more likely. Plastic, trying so hard to appear breakable, but we all know the rocks just bounce off, leaving a bent or scrape at most.)

I’m always out to suck the grace out of things. I want to desperately to believe that it doesn’t stay in me, to decay and atrophy in that heated hell of self-deprecation and vanity. On occasion perhaps I do give off something in return, a psychic ribbon or a featherweight pearl, but it happens without premeditation and I’ve never once in my life tried to give back, to really give back. I repeat a word or phrase over and over in my head while I ride in the car with a loved one and hope they can feel it from behind. Why not turn around and say, “yes, I know, I know, I’ve always known”? Why keep driving while I squint my eyes for more push? Let me think I have some control, that I can send out my pigeons in a waking state, that I can project on cue. I want to feel I am worth all that I take in, but I know it won’t come to pass.

Today the wrath of academia took shape and I mourned for my dreams of superiority and snob college. I want to go to snob college as bad as Odysseus wants to get home, and I’ve been scourged today for my sickness. The SAT did a number on me and I still am a bit in denial. We’ll just push the envelope away and pretend it never came. I’ll go out with my girls and eat ice cream, mint chocolate chip for old times sake. I’ll tell them how being touched is my favorite thing, like it isn’t obvious. (Ellen gave me many hugs because she is amazing sweet. When we went on our picnic I gave her a unicorn book and I’m so glad I did. She’s got magic. Maybe she got it in Ireland. The clock on her wall ticks and tocks and cuckoos all night long. I know because I was awake. I was too amazed to sleep.) I won’t cry anymore. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. I’m smart. I’ve always been smart. Too smart even and I won’t let this make me stupid in my own eyes. I won’t believe numbers over testimonies. I have wonders in my life. I have a yellow sarong from Costa Rica hand delivered by a boy I’ve known my whole life. I have enough to make me gluttonous and full of fantasy. I wouldn’t know how lucky I am if I didn’t have a brain between my ears.

Jennifer is leaving this online forum of ours for months, months. It’s a terror but I know we’ll get by. In my head I can hear Sylvia Plath on tape and J. reciting along and everything is overpowering and too strong for words. She understands Sylvia’s rhythm, I’ve seen it in her paragraphs, I’ve seen it in her eyes. I wonder who I will write to now, if she’s not around to read these false journal entries of mine. (Don’t be so blunt, Katharine. Cryptic is in this season, it will make you intriguing. No, no, no. Think of Salinger. Think of Hesse. But Winterson rides in with her blindfolds and exotic oils and I think I’d rather have dancing princesses and web-footed boatmen in my life than Zen.) We said we’d go on a journey together through the West breaking hearts along the way. She’ll take the cowboys and I’ll have the girls, because most days I hate guys, I do. I hate them for not being glamorous, for not making me want to but my hands on them, for not knowing about beauty. But J. and I, we shall take our blue blanket and my tear-stained hat and roam the plains for years until our toenails are long and we’re black from the sun. We’ll stop to seduce the masses with our longness and cute smirks that say take me away. We’d make it- she’s got the touch me eyes and my lips can wear paint well. We’ll join up again when all is done and lean on one another saying nothing in that very talkative manner. It’s quite the appealing fantasy, but I know it wouldn’t work. I’d kick her cowboys. I’m not as nice as you’d like to believe.

Not nice, modest, aesthetic, aggressive, naive, creative, wordy, quiet, cryptic, sensual, silly, brilliant, afraid. Yesterday at work I had to stand out on the porch with a senile old lady and it was so scary. I felt so sorry for her, just like a child. But I didn’t know what to say. It’s hot out here. She wants in and she just spent 15 minutes begging to go out. She wants to go to the bathroom. The wheelchair won’t fit. She’s wearing a diaper. She doesn’t know. She thinks she’s peeing all over herself and there’s nothing I can do. She’s crazy and I want to be away from her because she’s an annoyance and a bother but everyone else feels that way too. A pity of a child and those women laugh at her illogical answers. What do they know about cause and effect? You’re next.

I like my girls sharp.
>I’m getting sharper.
Me too, me too.

He’s sleeping and I’m writing and no one said goodnight. I worry for everything when everything is perfect in its way. I wish I could say I’m sorry enough. Can I give all my trust? Can I manage without? All the questions mean nothing in light of finding myself smothered in an aura not my own. Blue and yellow. I don’t even remember which was me to begin with. I can flap my wings in green. I can sing my songs in green. I can fast, I can grow, I can enlighten. An artist or a mystic? I’ll be a quilt, I’ll be a trap. (I never wanted so badly to be pinned down. It’s only fragmented from a distance.) I can’t believe no one else knew it would happen. I’ve anticipated for months and years. Now I have to live with the flashbacks, that strange almost-sick-almost-pleasure-struck feeling, until I can finish what I started

Months fly by like albatross on wheels and my life is changing like Georgian rain falls - so calm but so heavy (an anvil before the sound catches up). Vibrant scenes pass around me and through me unrecorded and I fear I’ve lost the most pivotal point in my life by not writing all this time. Sometimes I think I haven’t lived a moment until I’ve scrawled it down, because my recollections are biased and incomplete with time, but I scream to you from the apex of this tree I cling to through the storm - I have seen things I never imagined. Everything has been magnified and my heart has exploded time and again. I am a new thing today.

My eyes have changed lenses and I wear a new scarf. (It was the only nice one in a rack all cheap and not-so-silky. How we laughed at buying something in the dingiest store in the mall. Then we pretended to shop and I tried on ridiculous things. You warned me, but what do I know. I’m a sucker for the Bohemian peasant look I could never pull off. They say I look best in a white tailored shirt and pleated skirt so prim and fine. I just imagine that someone may think I’m a naughty French schoolgirl on vacation from Paris. Chic and European is my new thing, haven’t you heard? Though I’d rather have crumpled hair than Vidal Sassoon any day. But that one day in the mall it was grand. How we skipped together arm in arm like the Yellow Brick Road was right there. Why did those munchkins frown at us so? I’ll do my perfect Scarlet O’Hara, but I must say your cheap border state imitation is so much more endearing. I find myself unable to stop clinging to you even now. But I’ll force myself to write of other things, because I know you hate me for turning everything here into a letter to you, while the real letters so seldom come.) I have hidden in pretty churches on wet days in big cities. I have screamed “Amazing Grace” while running down the beach in pitch darkness. I’ve sat in a coffee shop for consecutive Fridays listening to the folk singing boyfriend of some pretty girl I know. I’ve studied until I couldn’t see straight and I could do nothing but cry. I’ve huddled under a blue bargain blanket in a field armed with nothing but bubbles and Cadbury creme eggs and the most beautiful girl in the world at 3 AM. I’ve painted canvases about truth and wrote speeches about the joys of American History. I’ve been kissed in the Atlantic Ocean and at a gas station. I got accepted to a young writers conference in Sewanee, Tennessee (I leave Saturday). I read the Gospels. I saw my father for the first time in two years. I learned what it’s like to be so filled with the energy of another person you never want to eat. I went on a breakfast picnic behind a cemetery dressed all in white lace. I discovered my passion for frying squash and green tomatoes. I bought a bikini. I got my hair cut. I ate a clam. I floated. I floated. I floated.

All my written words have been used on emails to Jennifer and ICQ messages to James and little notes to Ellen and I did write quite a bit in Marlon’s yearbook. It’s so odd that I’d stop keeping a journal right before everything got so very, very… lucid?

Of days recent I’ve felt like I controlled the world, but coming home from Tybee today I cried for my poor immoral soul. The way I look at religion is absolutely revolting, I’m sure of it. I don’t want to be a nun now because they have to wear tacky clothes and take care of screaming drooling children, instead of living in castles and praying and meditating and taking vows of silence. I embody more deadly sins than one, but I think perhaps shallowness should be added to the list, dooming me for hell in total. I like Catholicism for its aesthetic qualities (sainthood and martyrdom and incense and rituals and the whole Mary factor are absolutely enticing) and I must admit my main motivation for reading the Bible was the fact that seeing Jennifer sing in the choir at her church, eyes uplifted and so full of hope or something more lush, was arguably one of the most moving experiences in my life. But since James brought up bodhisattvas I’ve found myself digging out my old copy of the Bhagavad-gita and scoping out buddhanet.com and it all seems so much more along the lines of my own thinking and I have to come to the conclusion yet again that I’m not the type who can stick to one doctrine and believe all others are false and sinful. Yet I feel so wrong to hold religion in the same category I would an Emily Dickinson poem or the typical yellow rose with dew. What to do? Nothing, I suppose.

. . .

I’m going to Mexico to become a belly dancer. A Spanish princess is coming along for the ride because after two years of study and a 100 average on my last report card, I unfortunately don’t understand much of the language past “Yo quiero Taco Bell.” I’m not exactly sure why Mexico is the place to go to learn this invaluable skill, but Miss Lourdes says they have good classes and who am I to dissent. I watched “Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love” about a week ago and I’m still quite floored. I wanted so much that night to write about pretty Indian women who do amazing things with their eyes but I somehow couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’m so out of practice and it shows here, I know, but I simply must get back into the writing frame of mind before I go to Sewanee. Put up with me while I ramble, my love. . .

My chest is suddenly flatter from not eating I suppose, because movement seems almost impossible. I wonder if I was right in letting you make me feel like a child nuzzled up with a security blanket wound round his wrist, one finger in the mouth. It smells like home. Where is the passion? My passion is not for you, it’s for your love. Oh I’m afraid I’m afraid of hurting you. You make me feel like you have reason for the things you say, the things you reveal in your eyes that are always looking. I am intoxicated with feeling wanted. So much so that that in itself is what I want most. I know I am shortchanging you and I fear there is nothing I can do to reverse it. Not now, not after all this time I’ve felt like the one in over her head. It’s so refreshing and I can’t pull my head back from the fountain.

I drink grapefruit juice and tonic water because I am an alcoholic at heart. She, my mother, argues with me when I say I am not a good person. She act like she doesn’t remember the times I have lied. She doesn’t remember she called me a viper. She doesn’t remember where “art and artifice” came from. Some days I hate her for understanding everything. The needle pinches more and pinch the farther in it goes. In one vein and out the other. I liked Charity’s “vagina painting”, it looked like veins to me. I suppose it’s all the same, like impaling damselflies and other symbology of eras past and gone from me.

I knew a shell for fourteen years and now he’s waking up and I want to be there for the discovery. I wonder what I’m allowed to view after all this time hiding myself as well. It’s funny how staple day to day things can suddenly been full of meaning overnight, like a carnation in a glass of ink. I’m so sorry you were a thing to me, like your car or our history. I never let you in my glass world, though you were always behind the walls, a bit distorted with the glare.

The yous change so frequently and I wonder why I cannot just talk. Second person has definitely never been in style