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.