the habit of being

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.