the habit of being

What do you think it means? I think there are just these strobe lights that flash inside me and sometime the lights hit the page and words appear. Sometimes I can tell I should be writing by the rhythm of my thoughts, and a lot of times I don’t do it anyway.

I want to say I love him and instead I say live in the present, it’s not healthy being the way he is. I want to say thank you but I keep thinking birth control pills have a sweet aftertaste, but why aren’t we fucking enough to make it worth the expense? I think it’s me.

I had my first strictly Freudian dream. I was trying to put on a yellow gorilla suit and all my teeth fell out. This isn’t like me; I don’t have symbolic nightmares. I have dreams you can’t tell are dreams until you wake up, and sometimes you still aren’t sure. My nightmares are arguments, fights, scenes, tears. I wake up glad I’m not alone afterall, glad I wasn’t really abandoned over that one. It’s not an alternate reality, it’s just technacolor anxiety, it’s the way I thought the day might go. I was sitting in the car with my teeth in my hands and my mother was driving me to my childhood dentist, Dr. Sally, and I kept hoping it might be a dream and hoping it might be a dream and trying to open my already open eyes on another level somehow, until I woke up and my hand was bleeding, unexplainably.

I was waiting at the bus stop this morning, and a woman stopped her car and offered me a ride. She took me to Dupont Circle and I passed up all the oportunities I had to tell her I used to be a hitch-hiker. She said she was in favor of adventure in life. I said “mmhmm,” but I didn’t really mean it. I said I came to Washington because I wanted to see another place; and because I had a friend who lived here.

My father emailed me and said he wasn’t doing too swell, and this probably means he’s on crack. I said remember people care and drinking is Not a Good Idea. I said read a good book, write a poem, pray. My stepfather emailed me and said if I’m impressed by the popcorn feature on that microwave I should check out the Advantium, which does this that and the other, and maybe one day he’ll be able to buy me one of those, when I have my own house. He said my future was bright and he loved me. Asked if I had any timetable on going back to school.

We went out to eat, at a Vietnamese place. I had vegetable fried rice. I haven’t eaten meat since I finished the soup my mom spent $40 to express mail me.

I was supposed to make cookies but I didn’t. I had this plan to do one nice thing for him every day. The first day I lit 50 tea candles and made dinner. After that, I don’t know. I keep hoping I’m nice without noticing it. I think I used to be.

I think this is all afflicted.

I can be honest with you when I’m alone and a pen and you’re gone and a slip of paper. Otherwise, I can only get close when I’ve been crying for an hour and my face is so stingy from the salt I may as well speak.

I can be honest with myself when I’m walking home in the cold from yoga practice and hot tea. My hands are purple and my mind is clear. The mental teeter-totter of dispair and ecstasy is still.

The list of things I choose not to think about on a daily basis grows long and shocks me. I’m afraid of forgetting who I am, though I don’t want to encourage the notion that I am only the sum of the sufferings I have faced. I don’t cry about the baby that wasn’t, anymore. I don’t see my history when I look at my breasts, at my stomach. I don’t morph them full again in my mind. I don’t feel empty in the soft places, only in the hollow beneath my ribs, only in the marrow, in the skull.

I don’t think of asphalt whenever I look at carpet. I don’t think of cruelty whenever I look into his eyes. Only in my dreams is he still that person today. Only in my deeper spots I have wed myself to an antihero. I still permit the perversion of his image as I pervert everyone to their lowest selves, eventually, and I grow less and less capable of forgiveness. This hardness scares me. I prefer hurt to hate. He hurts me constantly if he hurt me the first time. My bones are made hards by my refusing to forgive. I keep the dark times. I keep the violence inside me and I project it all on him.

I strive to free myself; this is my mantra. Inhale let. Exhale go. Inhale forgive. Exhale you. On the walk home I am content.

To me, the lives of the people I love are only the most intoxicating fairy tales. My most beloved are always cast as heroes in a sunsetless chaotic flash, always walking through webs, always brilliantly feeling, making the choices that must be made, going on, powerlessly. I can see myself in the same light as I am walking home. I am only doing the best that I can do. I am only living a life.

(You may only be singing in the shower now, but underneath I feel your most cruel moment, your iciest words whisper to me in the night. )

I drank white wine in the midst of people I knew and people I did not know. It was a party at the yoga studio and I was a hostess. Kirtan singers sat in the corner on a blanket. I tried out the hand cymbals. They were hard to hold. I watched advanced students moving in yoga asanas in slow motion, but it was not the alcohol, it was the control. And you showed up late and hugged me. We ran around picking up the candles and blowing them out, crumbing up the rose petals and throwing them away. I introduced you to the people I knew. We sat down on the couch and did not make out. We walked home in the cold and it was not the same but it was nice.

I want drugs desperately, with a passion similar to my more ligitimate yearnings. I want stillness. I want to get stoned. I want contentment. I want chemical alteration of the light. I want self-realization. I want valium. No one will give me drugs and I don’t know whom to ask. I know it is a bad idea, anyway. I work on it. They taught me I was a drug addict in the making from a very early age. I think of my father. He’s always been very attractive to me. I imagine him in a Jack Kerouac novel, only less cliche. He did a better job in that role than I did. I imagine him as Henry Miller. I want to hear his stories now, I want to take back all the letters I never mailed him when he was in jail and desperate for love. I want to take back my disinterest and my shallow anger, the tears I cried at 7 but couldn’t at 17. I want to know who he is, because I am like him and because I am not like him. Because he could fill in the blanks, if he is not too far gone.

I haven’t written. I was to start a journal of my vinyasa yoga practice, but after the first attempt, which was interrupted by a telephone call, I didn’t continue. I took notes as my teacher demonstrated the correct adjustments for various asanas; I underlined sentences that resonated with me, from my various texts. I taught my eleven minutes of sitting poses and hip openers, flushed, and was complimented, but I did not begin writing down my yoga practice. It mixes things up to much. Asana practice is a way to leave words behind, a method of living in the present moment. Writing is about destruction of the present moment, leaving it, forgetting it even. Glorification of some imaginary moment, some moment in the past or in the mind. Writing is thinking. Asana is non-thinking. I cannot think about not thinking. (No, silly, that is all you can do.)

A girl called me the most flexible person she had ever seen, and implied that this meant something about me, as a person and not simply an embodiment. I don’t understand. People work and sweat for strength; they try. I am still weak but I was born supple and long. It has never pained me to sit in the lotus posture. It does not mean the same thing to me as it does to the person who worked for years to open up their hips. My hips were always open. There is nothing to be proud of in my flexibility. I didn’t do it on purpose. It was a gift. It is all the worse for me to be vain about it. But what is it this girl sees in my body that she thinks is me?

Reading texts about yoga. Or “yoga philosophy” as yoga has come to mean “exercise class” these days. I feel good as am I am reading. I believe every word, and I want to follow this plan toward samadhi. The yamas, the niyamas. I resolve to dedicate myself. I will not eat animal products. I will not let my ego control me. I will be truthful and nonviolent and unattached. I will be meditative and humble. Steady, unjudgmental. And I put down the book and find myself me. The same selfish me as always. Crying because I have been ignored, because I am not treated the way I would like to be treated. Crying because I have these selfish emotions. Crying further because I realize the selfishness of them. Because I wish to control things. Because I am unenlightened. Because I do not know the self behind my ego. Because I truly cherish my personality, which is an illusion. And my mother made me soup, with meat in it. And my boyfriend tells me I should be careful, I should “find my own path” in this silly voice.

But maybe “finding my path” is worth worrying about, after all. Maybe it is the only thing to worry about. Maybe it doesn’t just happen. Maybe I just need some rules. Maybe I just need something beautiful and orderly. Maybe I will always do everything for all the wrong reasons, but maybe that is better than not doing anything at all.

I have no counter to put the microwave oven I received yesterday in the mail on, so it just sits on the dinner table, which is never used anyway. We eat our dinner sitting on the twin bed we share, watching a pirated movie on the small computer screen on the other side of the room.

Tonight, though, he took me out, to a small French restaurant with water colored flowers in frames on the wall, and a mural of a street in Paris. There were mostly Asians working there, but they spoke French beautifully. I had mushrooms and shrimp and sorbet. It was all very pretty and moderately expensive. Very expensive for us. It was part of my Christmas gift. Normally he never takes me out and it makes me angry and full of self-pity, despite the fact that we cannot really afford it. He saves his money for Italy and a bicycle.

I woke up this morning desperate to be alone, after bad dreams and being tangled in the blanket. The bed is so small. The apartment is so small. I have no space of my own and I don’t know how to operate in shared space. I let the apartment get filthy. It is not my floor so I cannot clean it. Nothing is mine. When he is gone sometimes I can pretend I have my own space. I thought he’d be working today but I was wrong. I lay next to him in bed and thought of gathering up materials to write and leaving the messy apartment before he even woke up. Instead I just said I was in a bad mood, and he was nice to me all day. He needed new pants, so we went shopping.

I got dressed. It was the first time in days I’d really gotten dressed. I wore a short plaid pleated skirt and a black shirt with a low lacy neckline and black stockings and red lips and mascara. I looked at myself in every mirror. I was beautiful. Much more beautiful than he was, and overly aware of it. This is not normal for me. I don’t accept compliments easily. It was just my mood; I needed a reason to resent him. I’d wanted to be alone and he was being too nice.

I said the same things about most of the pants he tried on, and tried on pants myself, because it was cold and my skirt was very short. I am mostly impressed by the sizes I can wear. I am still not used to sixes and fours, smalls, extra smalls. There is skinny and then there is really skinny. I am significantly underweight. It is great fun. I have a lot of ugly pride in the sizes I can wear, in the space I don’t take up. I like my breasts tiny, though I pretend not to.

I made him buy socks. His are treadbare and full of holes still, from when we were travelling. I don’t like to see it. I don’t like to be reminded that I was there too, wretched and dirty. I would almost rather be the kind of girl who looks at herself in mirrors, who knows she is capable of attracting others and counts that ability as a serious merit. He said he didn’t care much for pleated skirts, and I said, well, I’ll just have to look good for other people. I was merciless, in my mind, though he may not have noticed. I can only really be mean in my head, and I don’t like the look of it. It makes me want to vomit.

The sorbet was served in three little scoops, on a thin sculpted cookie bowl, and the plate was decorated in raspberry syrup flourishes and powered sugar. I ate the smallest bites possible. He looked at me and said I looked nice. We didn’t have a conversation. The food was very good and I thanked him as we walked home in the cold. He put his arm around me.

We walked through the door and everything was a mess. I took a shower. I didn’t want to have sex and I hid under a blanket but he touched me wonderfully until I did want to do and I did. I asked him to turn on some pornography. We’d never done that. He came much more quickly than usual. He is a good lover. He got on the computer and I started reading.

The microwave was a gift from my stepfather, who works for General Electric. I need to call him and thank him. He’s very nice to me, but he wants to beat up my boyfriend. He said if he ever found out that James verbally or physically abused me, he’d take a week off work. He asked me if James had ever hit me and I said no. My mother said “I don’t think that’s the kindof power he’s into” in the most hateful voice I’d ever heard.

My father emailed me the prayer he says. “Lord, please help me to stay sober today. Please direct my thinking, away from anger, resentment and self-pity.” He said he was working regular and doing alright and how were things with me.

I told him about the microwave and the French restaurant, and that I was going to quit my job at the bookstore and work at the yoga studio, and that there was this college in the woods of Colorado.

I told James his cooking was bland and it made him cry. Literally, there were tears in his eyes. He tried to laugh it off. I felt awful. I forget how human he is. He is more human than most people. Sometimes I still believe it when he tells me he loves me, even if he is just killing time with me until he can go to Italy. Even if he just wants to have sex. If I get pregnant again, I am going to hit him as hard as I can over and over until he makes me stop. It was yesterday. I made dinner, zucchini and peppers and asparagus. I didn’t make enough. We had cookies.

I see things that should disgust me, would have disgusted me, and find that they are not so different from myself.

- - - -

“Where did the sincerity go?” my mother asked, in tears. “What happened to the sincerity?”

“You had no business being where I’ve been. People are fragile, Katharine.”

“I’m scared of what mighta happened to the sincerity,” she whispered.

- - - -

I remind myself that I am not a whore, that I have never been a whore. Not then, not before, not ever.

I have seen them, on New York street corners. I have seen them, in truck stop parking lots. “Lot lizards,” they called them.

- - - -

An image of contemporary sexuality: me, on the bed, the sheets falling off, legs splayed, the pocket rocket, the rabbit pearl, the knock-off K-W jelly. My boyfriend’s porn on the computer screen.

I write this with the intention of putting it where someone else will see. I have been doing this for years. Since I was young, very young.

- - - -

I didn’t bring back many books. All his books take up all the shelves. I picked only a few. I did not realize until I opened the boxes: Lolita, Therese and Isabelle, The Lover. Anais Nin, Colette. These books are all about sex. Almost every title I chose.