the habit of being

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