the habit of being

I am sitting on a broken chair watching Mexican-American ranchers try to stretch a rubber belt around some gears that turn on a cement mixer. They�re speaking Spanish. I pick up a few words. An old house is being fixed up.

A severely battered type-writer sits on the ground behind me. There is a pink bathtub in the yard on the opposite side of the house, with a little plant growing up through the drain.
James just helped move a 94-pound bag of cement from the back of the pickup truck into the house. Near this place there are cattle of all colors, antelope, buffalo, goats, and horses grazing in huge fields. One of the ranchers is going to take us to Albuquerque. He has a cowboy hat and a rifle and fancy leather boots.

�Do you want to see where the water comes out?� he asks.

There are plateaus in New Mexico and in Colorado. I remember �plateau� as a vocabulary word in an elementary school geography lesson, a social studies class. I had a sneaking suspicion that these funny things did not exist outside diagrams, where they were only used to demonstrate what funny land shapes they could conjure up with funny names to memorize. I�m from where the ground is flat.

It’s early morning, by sleepy I-25 South, surely one of the most seldom-used stretches of highway in the country. The cars don�t come and when they do come they don�t stop and long do we sit by the side of the road, waiting. The scene includes mountains with trees but no tree line. There�s an RV park on the other side of the freeway, piles of construction junk further down. Green Interstate signs and well known logos. Texaco. McDonalds. I use our black umbrella as a parasol. Sitting girl, dirty clothes, head scarf, road. He reads. He holds the sign. SOUTH TO ALBUQUERQUE. A dog is barking. The bark crosses the freeway from the RV park, sits on my shade umbrella. I see myself, a funny sight, an enchanting one.

He asks me �when was the last time you remember having fun?� This is an accusation. Fun? �I like playing checkers,� I say. We play pennies against nickels on a hand-drawn board. It is a weak answer. I wish I had said, �when was the last time we had sex?� This is an accusation.

I dreamt of tearing open chickens and speaking to people knew that there were people called Katharine and James but did not know that we were those people. They told me that James cared for me so much more than for anything else, and that real James who stood next to me snickered.

When my mother was pregnant with me, she dreamt she gave birth to a kitten instead of a girl, and upon bringing it home from the hospital she accidentally left it in a dresser drawer, and it died. I haven�t dreamt of children or of cats, only of becoming more and more pregnant, and huge. I tried to talk to him about it, but I couldn�t find the words, I just say I wish I could get it over with, the abortion, and I am scared I will just wait and wait until I won�t let it happen.

He says he knows and hold my hand and it is terribly insincere. He says �it must be hard for you.� Traveling like this, with the emotions and the hormones running amok. I want to say �you have no idea;� I want to tell him all about it. I cannot. I say I am tired, I am dizzy, I am sick, I am hungry, I am afraid. Today was the last day I could�ve gotten the pill. We have $65; we need $300 or $400. The signage blitz isn�t working. We�re in the middle of nowhere, trying to get to Albuquerque, and we�re running around in circles.

�Do you have a better idea?� he asks. No. �Do you want to try something else?� No.

I want to rest. I want to sleep in. I want to eat something that isn�t fast food, that isn�t peanut butter sandwiches. I want to get away from the sun. I want to wipe out the red, the orange, the yellow. These New Mexico colors are everywhere, on the ground in the sky. My skin is splattered with this paint and I am tan and I am fire and I am burning and I feel like I�m going to vomit up a sun-baked baby.

To write, I take down the umbrella. The sun squints my eyes, muddles my thoughts. My nose is stinging. My arms are stinging. Sweat drips slowly down my neck. Next to me are a small pelt and a smear that used to be an animal. If I never moved, that might be me. On an entrance ramp, I saw a near-mummified dog, a grotesque rug, like the sheep and the lions with the heads still on, looking at the parlor floor.

I�m sitting on a rolled up sleeping bag. He�s sitting on his pack. A jeep just passed us, talk radio spilling out the windows. If I stood up, I would fall down. A sign says there�s a Holiday Inn at the next exit. I want.

Our water is tinted with Hawaiian Punch, from the soda fountain where we filled up our bottles. It tastes bad and I don�t want to drink it but I�m so thirsty and my piss says I�m not drinking enough.

The gutter is not such a horrible place to be; last night we camped in it without much trouble, our sleeping bags on opposite sides of the concrete trench between a fence and a sound barrier. I woke up with a sore back and a long way to walk, but slept well, despite the street lights. I don’t remember my dreams very often now, and remember none from last night, but the night before I dreamt of an apartment in Santa Fe with a St. John’s student roomate in the form of a dredlocked girl I’d seen earlier in Costco. I wonder if I am starting to genuinely want to get away from J., who hates my company so much of the time. For various reasons I find such a thing inconceivable, and I am grateful to him for staying with me, quite against his will, on the pretext of responsibility to help pay for the abortion.

I am so reluctant to give up my spot as the most important person in his life, for in a way I retain that simply by being the only person in his life, and his only lover besides. Hate me as he will for it, he cannot deny my precidence, or at least I imagine he can’t. Such vulgar feelings must be what he calls the look of love when it’s crashed all to pieces, someething which makes my trip good source material for writing. Something I didn’t understand before, something new. But maybe I don’t want to be the author of another brokenhearted tearstained memoir. When I get away perhaps I’ll be able to write about something else. As it is, this is all I know.

We were given a ride here, to a Castle Rock outlet mall, by a young man with a strange name I can’t remember. A traveller and seller of gourmet mushrooms, with the rather affected stoner accent of someone who’s followed the Phish tour and listens to the String Cheese Incident, characteristic of the Ben & Robyn set. He used phrases like “serve the man” in reference to work, and swore about cops, saying how he’d like to pull right into the police parking spot with some sort of strange humorous vengeance. He used the term “bastards” a lot, in reference to cops and bands who didn’t play his city. He talked about beautiful places he’d been, Montana and Utah and various national parks, and I took an aversion to him mostly because I felt that J. likes him and I was in a bad mood. J. gave false reasons for why we didn’t make it to Utah, saying it had to do with forest fires when really we thought we’d get more money here.

I’ve gotten so used to these lies we tell people who pick us up that sometimes it feels like we really do transform into carefree wonderers trying to “see the country” whenever another human being’s presence enters our collective consciousness, which is usually fixated on how wrong our situation is and how impossible it is to break free. All the time we were staying with Ben and Robyn it seemed like our relationship was pretty much okay, not really because anything was different, but because they thought we were okay and it wasn’t hard to play the role. I’m sure that had a lot to do with the pot and the shock of seeing a relationship so bad it made ours seem alright by comparison, and also the fact that we weren’t spending 24 hours a day in the sole company of one another, which would have to be taxing for even sane couples. It things were always awful it would be much easier really, it’s the good moments that make such a wreck out of me when the bad ones come.

Truly it makes little use trying to dissect the situation, as her did with his fingers for Venn diagrams - after you did this, we should have been apart like this, but instead we’re together like ths, and now we can’t figure out the right way to get like this due to everything that happened when we were like this. I’m almost certain attaining a doctorate in the science of broken relationships wouldn’t do a thing to help anyone get out of one. Of course it’s all wrong. Of course it’d be better if we’d done A, B, C, D, E… Z. The true mark of fucked-up-ness in nonplatonic relationships isn’t the ignorant refusal to believe that things are bad, it’s the perfect clarity and misery that come with knowing fully well how bad things are, how much worse they’re going to get, and not doing anything about it.

I keep seeing people who look like people I used to know. A sexy girl just walked by in a short pleated skirt and a shirt with a cheesy illustration of a fairy on it. We have about three dollars, signage is horrible lately, in keeping with the idea that things always break the very moment you really need them to work. People are walking their dogs. J. isn’t here because I was about to cry and said I wanted to be alone, because I asked hm if he ever enjoyed being with me and he said “occasionally.”

After returning yesterday afternoon to our campsite from the park, we sat a while and read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland aloud to one another, and our respectibe novels - Herzog and War and Peace - to ourselves. We soon heard a certain thwacking noise, which was assumed to be someone cutting down trees, because we had awoken the previous morning to that noise, which closely resembled the one at hand. Through the cluster of trees and bushes surrounding our campsite, which consisted of books strewn about and peanut butter and bread on the matted down grasses and leaves, we spied an old man with a golf club. The thwacks had been his swings, and he was now retrieving his balls. The balls we’d already found around the lot must’ve been his.

We got entirely silent as he drew closer and closer to our spot, and I was downright afraid, though I knew that even if he owned the property we were camped on, there wasn’t much he could do save asking us to leave. The property wasn’t posted and was unkempt. If he did spy us there and asked us our business, he might even invite us home with him for the night. All the same I felt dreadfully like I don’t something wrong, and looked round at every noise with wide distressed eyes. At one point the sound of the footsteps seemed to be coming from two directions, and my heart was beating rapidly as J. laid on his back and I sat huddled near him, hiding my head by looking down, as a child who sneaks into the kitchen late at night for cookie holds a pillow over his face, thinking that if he cannot see his family in the den, they will not see him either.

We did not say hello to the man with the golf club, and we do not know if he ever saw us or not, though it seems he must have, the rustling steps came so close. As for the other set of trampling feet, they belonged to a small creature with at least the top half of its body bright white - either a skunk or a cat or something else.

The night was a stressful one which found us laying side by side talking of things we cannot talk about: our ever-impending separation nd the reasons for it. I cried, breaking an almost three-day no-tears streak, and it went on late into the night, until we fell asleep and were awakened by raindrops. So far it’s drizzled only a little every night we’ve spent in the Denver area, and the one night we decide not to put up our tent, it rained a good deal. So we gathered up our sleeping bags and put it up as fast as we could in the rain, putting the fly in backwards and upsidedown in our hurry.

This morning we awoke and had sex for only the second time since the discovery of my pregnancy. As we escape from one another in one another we are basely happy, which is a shade of happiness none the less, if not one that is greatly respected. I view sex as almos a saviour, a pleasure in the most barren desert of sighs, an artform when all others are denied.

Afterwards, I patched up the seat of my old jeans and J. went out and collected golf balls. He found enough to spell out the word THANKS in alternating letter-colors, with an explanation point on the end. He put this message on the ground in what seemed to be the entrance to the lot from the old man’s direction, and we packed up our things and left.

(in a park, under the shade)

Upon the start of a new journal, many things must be considered. First and foremost, the plan that shall make this body of musings and complaints fundamentally and unmistakably better, more meaningful, and decidedly more literary than all other works of its kind previously undertaken by this author. This brings about the central and ever-present topic of melodrama. It seems silly to condemn it, as I so often do, recognizing it as a weakness, when it is unavoidable. Of course, I do not really believe that, because it is my life, and one cannot honestly belittle one�s own life in such a manner, though one might try for purposes of humility. Still, I recognize that these things which excite me to tears and jubilation, the tears literal and the jubilation figurative, are often one and the same, rendering me fickle and, in a word, nineteen.

Being that as it may, and considering also that a blue damselfly landed on the edge of my notebook and a fat girl holding her son by the hand smiled at me just now, I will begin again as I always do, with the understanding that I may very well be manic-depressive like my father, and also that I intend to write something someday that overshadow this rather over-stimulated mass of pictures and stings I call my life.

Yesterday was the Fourth of July, and after we played Scrabble and I had read in a shaky voice a long account I�d written of a very bad day in June, my lover and I set out to find the fireworks.

We�re camped in a vacant lot surrounded by houses, some of which have barking dogs. Our tent is behind an uprooted tree stump, among skinny bushes. We did not bother to take it down, but simply followed our path out of the neglected area, past the white and orange golf balls and deer tracks on the ground, past the little white house with the garden where the old man lives, and out to the street.

Already there was booming to be heard in all directions, and many multicolored fireflies making circles above the tops of trees. We started getting excited, making high-pitched noises and pointing, hopping little hops and stamping our feet. We walked quickly down the road toward higher ground, hoping to gets a better look at the display. As usual, James walked much faster than I did, and it times he even broke into a run.

This child-like exuberance was nice, a cleansing thing that seemed to wipe away the depressing recitation in the tent and the general tide of our affairs, my unwanted pregnancy, the grumbling and silent resentments. We were walking, power-walking even, down unfamiliar streets in an unfamiliar town, but we fit perfectly, because it was a holiday and all we wanted to do was gawk at the pointillated kaleidoscope in the sky, with minds full of exclamations rather than trains of thought.

Sometimes there came a break in the trees, and he stopped and I caught up and we stood side by side looking up into the sky. Then he grew restless and moved on, and I followed, imagining that instead of passively observing the spectacle I was stalking it cunningly. But I got tired and sometimes couldn�t see a thing over the treetops, and I stepped in a mud puddle near the railroad tracks.

Next we stopped, it was in front of a little house. Just before, I�d whined that the view wasn�t going to get any better because we kept going and going. He retorted that I could stop and stay a place if I wanted. I sighed, thought about how Things Should Be, and kept walking. In front of the little house we stopped a while and emptied our minds with the glowing spheres and stars and smiles in the sky. He looked with longing toward the end of the street. I watched him walk off down the road without me. My eyes strayed back and forth from the fireworks to his shoulders, swaying back and forth and finally stopping at the next intersection down.

I stayed where I was as a matter of pride, in the spirit of Independence Day, but kept thinking how I should be watching this with an arm about my waist, someone to oohh and aahhh in unison with.

Some odd shadows on the roof of the house in front of me turned out to be people. I watched it with them, with the group of teenagers we passed on the way, with the old women at the ends of their driveways. They were all with the treetops and me. He who left me in search of the unobscured view watched it all alone. This is how I thought.

This is how the world is when centered so strangely around one interaction, and all the surroundings play a subordinate role to the unblinking tale of �us.� Everything is viewed in terms of that plot line.

That plot line I hope to diminish, so that I might see the world shine in again, unshaded.