the habit of being

My mother and I explore a flea market, a junk store, not quite the 67 Antique Mall, but in that genre, a bit more on the rustic side. A barn, somewhere dimly lit and surrounded by fields (blonde grasses, sultry) such as I do not see in the “city.” Of course, these scenes do not take place here, in my backward town, but certainly in the South; there is a feeling of rusting buckets and exotic mosses. Inside, I examine a hat or a scarf (it’s always a hat or a scarf, I should live in the cold, or maybe go see the pretty Banana Republic boy again, he has a scarf too - it matches my socks, very blue). We discuss the price, I fondle the merchandise. It is not an uncommon thing, it has happened many times, we go to this store every morning, at the same time, 10ish, it is a life on repeat, though the lighting does seem a bit too like that of a western movie. From my handbag, I extract some sort of planner-calendar, and instead of appointments it is full of little love letters, only a sentence or two per date (March 15. Your fingertips are my tightrope. I notice neither “The funny thing is..” or “You’re beautiful.”) ; I flip through and smile.

The same day and later. There is a man, a vagabond, his hair is dark and scruffy, he plays the same role every day in the repeating dream-life I have with my mother, the flea market saleswomen, the scarf (or is it a hat?), jaundiced field, etc. He is the one we are trying to save, because he is very much a hurt puppy biting its own ear off - actually, he cuts himself with a razor, being more typical, only he is not 16 and he doesn’t wear black clothing or listen to Bauhaus, so it isn’t exactly the same same same. He is someone you would imagine to think about existentialism and angels, to close the blinds in his apartment exceedingly slowly and watch the light play in horizontal lines across off-white walls with no posters no mirrors no art. Stares straight in your eyes and slices his arm when you come near him, but the look on his face still cries help me in the most urgent of ways, so we try, my mother and I. Only, by the seventh or eighth repeat of this day (yes, it is still the same one, again and again), I have grown both tired of trying to help and quite terrified of the lost soldier (furious in a way - would it kill him to do it in a bathroom, the tub preferably, feed some romantic whims, maybe there are bronze lion feet to consider).

I turn on a stove with an empty pot on the back left burner every night as I wait for her to return, she is with him, feigning therapy, perhaps, and I am worried for her. She will not give up, and I think he may be a murderer or some misplaced Roman bandit. I stand by the door as she drives away through the sand, things are reddening in our house. On the floor is a piece of purplish cloth with a very “made in India” design, walking elephants (the last glass elephant stands alone on a broken foot) upon lines of varying thickness. Motion-blur squiggles snake about, I am feeling dizzy, I grip the handle of a broom, thoroughly petrified, still in the kitchen, watching an empty pot boil.

(I told her about it. She said the bleeding man was obviously my father, and that she’d rather watch someone have their head run over by a steam-roller than the single slightest self-inflicted cut. )

Late at night I realize I am repulsed by things, and that scares me. Late at night I realize I am really (truly, indeed) very lucky, and that scares me too.

Tonight the sky is red when these eyes look, though they do not, for the curtains are closed, and not quite sheer enough. Still, the whole world is red, soaked in it, drenched, but it is not blood, it will not reach out to my symbolic nature, it refuses to be so easy, so easily defined. ( Crimson? Out, out? No. Pigment only, and we all know what red means. ) My sentences are long and rambling, vine-like and sloppy, with a parasitoidism of commas and parentheses, random. To say things are random is to say we are at this time ignorant of the pattern those things adhere to. This is random, still. I want to say: Ecology bores me to death, all my lovely cells are hiding; I find I am simply put off by things larger than myself. Give me a fly. Give me viroids, prions, sub-atomic particles even. (A very pretty young lady once told me about anti-matter. Positrons, that sort of thing. I forget it, but I was intrigued. Gesture of hand passing above head : you’ve lost me.) A night, like other nights - a color for this night, all nights have colors. It is no phenomenon that another day has passed, streaked by, with my sitting aboard, somewhat dizzied from backward momentum. (Momentum is a lovely, lovely word. I should keep it for later.)

At times today I have thought to myself, “Katharine, you are alive.” There is a nice inner laugh following such declarations; they strike me as heavy and hilarious. Once, I said “Katharine, you are in love,” because it had never before occurred to be to use those exact words (they seem reserved for shooting stars, girls who sigh like willow trees, people in black and white with just enough contrast at every given moment to seem philosophical and French). To this my little post-synaptic response was only “yes.” Like all internal dialogue, it was filled with drama and overtruth. Of course, I have always been in love. I may not have always been alive, and that is what makes them weigh down on my chest, those silent words, causing me to giggle a bit insecurely, a bit too much like someone must be watching.

The Whole Story is …. confusion. What’s to be done when one finds oneself sitting atop a neon sign flashing in all capital letters TURNING POINT? I am a mass of questions, and this month I will be first-person to the end, for at times even my life is with meaning.

My space, which hovers around me like a needy lover or a lapdog without a home (where oh where have the pretty words gone?) seems to have morphed, transposed, mutated into a size both too large and too small - I see the air (wave particles of light reflect refract oh my, how the sun does make prism colors on the snow) around me as turgid plant cells, filled with emptiness, space, instead of water, h2o. These more regular honeycombs press hard against me, against one another, jostling for domain perhaps (one MIGHT say) yet each compartment is itself a tiny house, cramped, and I envision myself all tangled in my legs (god they are long), wrists bent back in funny not awkward angles (what strange things you do with your hands!). In each, I try to press outward with those hands, knees, hips, all strung together, to exert my presence, inside, or break free. Little red Katharines like disks in Drosophila eyes - trying to be both within my body (still foreign, but less) and in my sphere of influence all at once, I am everyone, nowhere, continuous, fractals of me. The sphere is everywhere I can see and some places I cannot, I am disoriented in the bigness of it all (no other hips, no other hands) while still mangled, twisted, into and upon myself, in those floating, pushing, shoving balloons. You see the the dilemma, which is real.

My room itself, immaculately organized by my mother in fits of worry I am sure, in actually quite cottage-like with shades and shadows of the man who would give his daughters treasure maps and leaves then refuse to take his drugs and get manic to the point of imprisonment, seems as immense these days as some French palace or dungeon (thank you, Dumas), perhaps the Atlantic, waving at the moon (chasing it down watery bleu corn fields, I know, I know, gravity but no end to the search). We may attribute, quite easily, the amazement of my mind, my pores, at such whitespace (where is another word for empty, I won’t use void, no) once familiar and filled with my own scent (Boudoir?) and the final vibrations of a sentence passing through, uttered to my mother or to Mozart streaming in or to some other player in this off-key little opera, in my little acceptable Southern drawl, to my having been close to one who would call me beautiful in multiplicity for days.

Yes, this really happened, in the living air, and now I cannot stand to be alone in my hull, my unfilled shell, by myself in my LIFE. Yes, this really happened, as sure as I spent those days in a rush - In a rush I am surrounded in you, being polite to your family, folding my clothes, getting snow in my boots, watching you watch me put on my makeup, explaining how we kiss like a symphony, wearing fishnet stockings into a charming hotel (Alas, I worried about looking professional, and gosh was it funny when we couldn’t get the door open, and yes, it was oh so “with fervor,” happy new year!), looking through your boxes and boxes of old things at the farm, completely enraptured, criticizing your tacky christmas tree with its ornaments you made before I was born, wearing your hat, sleeping in your arms, riding through all those odd little Christmas-card towns. Yes, as sure as from this I had to walk away and to appear unharmed when faced with the reality of its being over, with hardly any proof that it was no fairy tale. Only a pearl necklace and some odd pictures of a shadowy figure examining a gun next to a window with lace curtains and light flooding in. The world will not acknowledge what has taken place, no one else knows everything has changed - and it has nothing to do with sex.

“Nothing is as clear as black and white” whispers the conscience of our hectic world as day falls to night again and again, yet in our yellow studio with its watery flowers and mutant deer and vaginal ears of corn, in a cramped little world of suitcases and socks and cat hair all over the place, on our tiny air mattress, it actually is that clear - we know I am black and you are white and together we are beauty. It is enough, entirely enough, and for once things are genuinely okay. Andante. I sit next to you, holding your hand, and your mother frowns at me as if I’ve stolen something from her and it’s all the worse because I’m only seventeen. (She thought I was eighteen, but no, only seventeen, it rings in my ears these days, seventeen seventeen. I wonder if my hands move like those of a seventeen year old and my heart beats in a seventeenish way. Lolita wasn’t a nymphet anymore by the time she turned seventeen; she was all washed up, so to speak. Did you really call me that, or did I imagine it?. Lolita. Seventeen. I have crude ideas about seventeen; seventeen is such a pornographic age. Falsely poetic, I am imagining “do I love like a seventeen year old, do I breathe like a seventeen year old, do I uncurl my spine like a seventeen year old” when all I really mean is “do I fuck like a seventeen year old”… and it has nothing to do with sex, yet I wonder, being silly, ridiculous, and unkind. Maestoso?)

Folly, folly, the making of images in my head, in my hand (between fingers, tracing down, down), on paper (brisk, stark, white), in air (mine). I relate to the sun and think always of the oddness in people, the beauty, of my head belonging always on your bare shoulder. Splice together the good lines, but I can think of nothing else. How did I feel? How did I really feel? I want to know myself, what it is like, to be me, and to be near someone I love, to be in a new adventure story with every breath, to be in a strange place yet not afraid. It is so urgent on my mind to know, exactly, what it was like, all of it. I don’t trust myself even to keep my own memories, for fear they will tarnish or yellow or simply fly away, while I sit here again in my room and my senses fall back into a state of atrophy, the plug is pulled, yanked out to put it bluntly, and the little transparent filaments of the fiber optic ball will no longer glow pink and yellow and green when touched. I find myself quite frantic in light of my past which grows as every nanosecond races away. I have never been so terrified of forgetting. Where will all those words, kisses, glances, moments go? Will they simply melt away with the snow, or will you keep them locked up for me and promise to know what they all meant, in case I don’t? Allegro vivo.

Still I am slipping, with a pink scarf (#2) wound tightly around my neck for security, help in my short-haired endeavors into the the world of children walking to and fro, speaking yet saying nothing (pity those who do not get to speak to me of Important Things. ha!). And I have the gall to think them all sick, my relatives, my peers, only because they sicken me, I, who sees too much, in the voice of my sister asking me if she smells like pot before going to Christmas dinner, in the voice of my grandfather telling my other sister (lovely daughter of a ballerina) she “breathes sensuality,” in the voice of my teacher asking me to sit down before I’ll have to listen to a lecture on what pearls from a twenty-two year old man mean in the voice of a classmate. My father is truly sick, they say (I will always condemn), for his aesthetic tendencies are all he has, and it terrifies me for thinking the same things, for inventing all hours away, trying to be art. Art is intrinsic, like sitting in a chair reading a book, or nights and days on end staring into space (void, sigh) not seeing, until that moment, one instant when eyes open and see that work is done, you are finished, not you, I, I am finished, my sleep, my meditation, my moment of creation, my art has lived, and has touched you, yes, the real you, to be sure.

To the very end, he moves his hands as if their very positions each mean something, each freeze-frame a letter, a word, as they glide along my sides, over curves, in hollows, a Zen landscape in skin, he is narrating to me a tale, the tale of his life, the story of my own. Or he is reading the future in lines and folds not yet there. Intense and poised, I said. Beautiful, I said. I will have them, I said. I will worship them, I said. I will cry for them. For them, for you, it is all you, and I am so amazed. Your hands, with their signs, codes, enigmas. Your eyes, your throat, your chest, your heartbeat, your breath, oh the way you look at me. Cut this scene into little squares of a graph - a finger here, my thigh, your bones, bones, bones, and skin like a garment, so thin, of silk or acrylic blend, of agony, pain, tremors. You shake. I dizzy in your presence and want to lie down, lie down, down, kiss you, until it all stops, until we are in each other content, and that will always be enough.