the habit of being

The best place to write is in a bookstore, where you can just keep picking up things until you get inspired.

The worst place is right here, right now. I thought I was ready, but obviously I am not.

- - -

She’s sitting on green tight-spun carpet with a blue-beaded rosary round her neck, a present from her oldest friend, to match pleated skirts and an upbringing completely devoid of religion, save that one scary trip to Vacation Bible School.

She fingers the miniatute crucified Jesus hanging between her breasts, huddled next to a wooden chair in the Art section, black boots and a red volume of surrealist love poems to match her hair. She leans her head on the arm of his chair.

His black dress shoes are white in the crevices, white from salt in the snow. His corderoys are old, mid nineties, an earth tone, many more at home in the closet.
His hair is long, dark, and wavy, falling in his face as he looks to the book in his lap, something about how advertising is evil.

The last time his hair was cut, he was in a handicapped bathroom in a Diamond Shamrock station, with a chef’s knife and a girl, that girl on the floor, to clean up the ends. He cut hers too, up to her chin, and they both washed their hair in the sink, and no one knocked.

He stabbed her, twenty to the stomach and five to the heart, with the chef’s knife, so sharp, Henckles, 8 inches, stainless steal, on sale for seventy dollars.

No, he didn’t. Maybe he wanted to, maybe she wanted him to. Maybe it’d be better, but then who would write her surrealist love poem, the one that will define her?

She is alone. He’s left her with his fingerless gloves and a broken umbrella, sitting under the chair. Souvinirs. She hugs herself to the smooth wooden chair, her back to the end of bookshelf, Crafts and Hobbies.

The gloves weren’t even his! They were her mother’s, who sent them to her in the City, where she walked down the narrow streets with rubbed-dry eyes and cheeks, where she betrayed him. She let him borrow the gloves and he left them under the chair, damp from the snow outside.

She’d like to go back.

The green carpet is not just green. It has many threads - olive and forrest, and the color of the peeling hallway paint in the old house in the country, a creamy lime, before they repainted, if they ever did.

Childhood. A game of spades or go fish in front of the gas heater in the kitchen. Light it with an Aim-n-Flame. The red plastic tiles, peeling up around the edges of the heater, sticky black stuff underneith. A tin can with macaroni glued on, spray painted silver to make a pencil holder. She made it in school.

A skinny cat named Blue (she told him, giggling, last night) who’d shown up on the woodpiling platform outside her parents window and then disappeared after they’d adopted her, after their male cat had fallen in love.

And they looked everywhere, but she was so skinny, maybe she died. The little brother was so sad; he’d named her Blue, because she was blue.

The girl laughed out the story, in bed, last night or the night before, but she was not drunk. She’d just seen a movie, and that’s almost the same.

Not as good a story as Miriam’s about the owl in the freezer.

How he talked to Miriam! How happy and and excited he way, and she lay next to him as he talked to Miriam at night. She tried to assert her quiet sensual presence, pretty nightgown and long legs.

She had no words, no ideas, not like Miriam with her plans and her diagrams, her little book of things-thought-of. Her Ethiopian ear spoon holder around her neck, and her clear skin and short hair.

Miriam’s layers and ideas. Japan and a fantasy wedding in the jungle. Adventures, with red fingers from the hairdye and big moons on her nails, hands always moving, gesturing, excitement, frantically brilliant. Surrealism and books to read and oatmeal soap and a labyrinth to build in the snow.

The girl stared at Miriam and listened to her say things, and took her picture, a blurry girl changing clothes. How to be like her? How to make him talk?

She wants to be like Miriam. She must make a project. She must be excited. She must read.

Her idea is to recreate her father in words, to write a love poem, get high and write all night long. She must preserve the past. She must photograph the present.

She must capture the relationship, between the girl on green carpet and the man who has returned to the chair, to the umbrella and the gloves.

No no, forget the boyfriend, write about something else for once, no more sex, no more heartbreak. The father, find the father; he’s a more similar soul.

- - -

“I took a lickin’ the other night,” said her father, “and ended up with 1 broken rib and three more bruised ones. I’m sore as hell and it’s weird to feel your bones movin’ in you, but, needless to say, this incident forces me to start livin’ right again. It’s a paradox, you know. Sometimes what seems so wrong and painful at the time ends up being beneficial. To your health.”

I feel like I have never seen so much snow fall.

- - -

In Michigan, that one trip, when it was on the ground in piles: It was so cold, and I didn’t bring anything with me but short skirts, because I wanted to look pretty, and his mother asked if I went to a school where I wasn’t allowed to wear pants. And his mother got mad at him for sleeping with me, because I was underaged, so he shoveled the driveway to make up for it. After that, I just called Michigan the “Place Where It Snows,” a surreal land where girls fly in as virgins and come home with pearl necklaces and hating their homes, where it hasn’t snowed in 10 years.

- - -

The storm started the day after Valentines Day, the 15th of February, our fifth anniversary.

A few days earlier, he came home from work and said he had a surprise for me. I said “is it chocolate,” and he said “no, it’s not chocolate.” He handed me a bottle. It was St. John’s Wort.

Then, two days before my period, we had the PMS relationship talk. I was crying; he’d said something about how I’d put my CDs in the same box as his, how I shouldn’t do that, because they might get mixed up, because it might cause problems later on. I thought having your CDs get mixed up was the whole point of living with someone. I think these things, when it’s been a while since the last PMS relationship talk.

In typical fashion, for messes like ours, he asked what was wrong, barely even looking up from his computer screen, and I cried more and said nothing. He asked again and, instead of answering the question, which I desperately wanted to answer, I asked why he wanted to know. I don’t remember his answer, but it wasn’t a good one, and I said so, and he said he was sick of all the pointless right and wrong answer shit, sick of listening to me crying, sick of my disappearing into my own little world. It is like the script from a bad movie. There is the logical, unattached, and seemingly cold boy, the overemotional sensitive girl who contradicts herself over and over, the overwhelming atmosphere of futility and wasted emotion. I find myself looking at the scene that way, like someone who sees it in a theatre rather than someone who was actually there, who actually knows the history behind this argument and the depth of the characters, who can play such vivid roles when not trapped in this soap opera set.

- - -

I’ve walked everywhere in the snow, to CVS for skittles and deep conditioner. I bought new boots for the snow and watched people skiing down the sidewalks. Two feet of snow. Cars buried in snow. I hurt my leg trudging through it; I stopped at the studio on the way home from the church (the old studio) and contemplated getting drunk on leftover wine from the Open House and sliding around the hardwood floors in my socks, because it was late and I had a key and I have pink hair, but I didn’t do it. I walked the rest of the way home and my leg hurt and my eyes burned and an old man asked me if he could buy me a nightcap, said a fortune teller told him he’d meet a redhead for drinks. I politely declined.

- - -

There was some storming away and yelling before I said, finally, “we can’t talk. that’s what’s wrong.” He was lying face down on the bed. It’s not his priority, he said, to fix this. It would take all his energy and he doesn’t have it to give. (”I know that sounds awful.” he said. “Yeah, it does. It sounds really, really awful,” I said.”) He wants to go to Europe. He came here because he had a vision of how his life could be and he thought I could fit into it. That’s all. He didn’t make any promises. He thought I understood. He has said all this so many times. I make myself forget it. I deny it. I can’t live my life day by day reminding myself that I am just a roommate who fucks, because this means I am being used and this means I am stupid. This means when he says he loves me, he means something I don’t understand. This means that the fact that we’ve been together for five whole years is completely meaningless, we might as well have just met, in terms of “commitment,” which I’m beginning to see are the terms that matter most to me. The really sad part about it is that if we’d just met, we’d actually be much better off. We wouldn’t be resenting each other for the past; we wouldn’t be so afraid of one another, we wouldn’t know how badly we could hurt one another.

He said he didn’t see how I could see us being together much longer. I said I saw nothing. I cried and said how can you say this and how can you say that and I said I just wanted to make it better. I just wanted something real. I just wanted to give him something and to get something from him. I said I needed that. Even if it’s not love, there has to be something. Some point. Tears and smeary make-up. A Lifetime original movie star - sitting in a rocking chair from Michigan telling the sloppy truth. He said this and I said that, he said the longer we live together, the more obvious it becomes that I just don’t really like him very much, that we just don’t have the same interests.

Interests. Mine: writing, yoga, bookmaking, website-making, being an artist, emotions. His: going to Europe, Italy, bicycle touring, healthy eating and exercise, Literati, movies. We used to talk about the same things. We used to talk. We used to talk about Us, which was #1 on both our interests lists. Our favorite subjects: Us and Being In Love. Now, we call that stuff “baggage” and we wish it’d get lost at the airport.

- - -

On the anniversary, the first day of the storm, I dyed my hair pink. It was supposed to be red, the bathroom looked like the scene of a murder when I was done. It seemed red enough then, the excess dye dripping down my back and staining the tiles in the shower, pooling at my feet. Now my hair’s blonde on the ends and bright bright pink on top and still pretty brown in the back. I look like a heroin addict. I look like a punk. I painted my fingernails glittery silver. Looking like this makes me feel younger than I have in years, and I am much too young to be saying things like that. I keep looking at myself in the mirror and feeling shocked. It isn’t pretty. It’s very silly and I want to fix it when Commander Salamander opens again and I can get more dye, but it is interesting, and I got dressed up in my fishnets and my feather boa just to have sex. I want to put on a million necklaces and dance.

When I was younger, I’d draw pictures of flowers and write “flower” next to them. I’d do the same with cats and skinny girls.

- - -

We didn’t come up with a solution. We lay together on the bed and laughed about having “theme days” where we only talked about certain things, and my plan of doing one “explicitly nice thing” for him, every day. We felt better for having voiced our opinions and grievances. We felt closer. We had sex, and the next day everything felt okay, like the weight was lifted, just in time for Valentines Day, just in time for the day after Valentines Day, our fifth anniversary. I bought him books about Italy and a little pocket-sized Moleskine journal like the one Hemingway carried. I wrapped it all in red and white tissue paper, with The Executioner’s Song and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We made dinner together, we watched My So-Called Life. In the kitchen, he said “it’s so nice when things are good.” I started my period and the holidays came and then the storm. He brought me flowers and semisweet chocolate bricks we melted in the Everyday Pan and then dipped fresh strawberries and blackberries and even bananas in. And things began to settle again. Lightness does not sustain itself.

The snow just gets trampled on and turned into nasty brown slush, stepped on too much, by people like me.

Across from her, warm, in a wobbly chair at a small table with a red tulip and a white water pitcher, I feel Not Alone. She’s wearing that sweater I gave her for Christmas; she says she didn’t plan that, but it looks nice. She’s kindof distracted and sad, but so am I, and I feel Not Alone. It is not only that I sense the similarity in the the two of us, skinny girls who cry, the things we feel, but that I feel the sameness of all people. We bring this up randomly in conversation - the alikeness, the humanity. Differing histories, differing experience; same love, same suffering. We have all briefly felt like characters in a fable. It just comes up, sometimes, when we talk. We repeat it, offhandedly. We have all loved and we have all hurt.

I have such compassion for her, such unaffected love. In these confused days, it makes me glad just to see this in myself, relieved that I am not all sour, resentful, and self-pitying. It is a good thing, to have another head on my shoulder, another life on my mind, instead of my own. I can say simply that I would like for her to be happy, her happiness brings me joy. I feel that I could never tire of listening to her; her ideas delight me, her sadness touches me. The words bring me closer to an understanding which is not only the understanding of her life and her confusion, but somehow her thoughts and feelings have meaning also in the context of my own life experience, from this place I sit in to observe. I do not have trouble seeing the roots, the core emotions, and I do not strain to empathize, to appreciate a being separate from myself yet made of the same fabric.

The confusion, the complexity, the strangeness, awkwardness, anxiety, sympathy and desire to do good. It is easy to see the beauty of a person, even in troubles and worries. There is beauty simply in the Way She Is, in imperfection and paranoia and kindness. This is the beauty of a human life, of mundane madness and common craziness and melodrama that feels like the world to Atlas and the rock to Sisyphus and just getting up in the morning to me and you. The awful tearful passionate suicidal horrible screaming lustful mournful death-loving bliss of sexual relationships, of being in love. The waves and smiles and sighs and glances and hair twirls and stumbles and unexpected gifts and trips and crying jags and pills and insecurities and kisses and roses and lost mothers and lost daughters and lost lovers and lost credit cards and lost keys and lost friends and bad hair days and bad poems and bad letters and psychiatrists and alcohol and mumbled I love yous and hair dye and boyfriends and sidewalks and street corners and bookstores and drug addicts and preachers and abortions and necklaces. All of it. This is us. This is everyone. Everyone is us.

We both had Caesar salad.

It’s 3 in the morning and I’m doing laundry and he’s sleeping in our little bed. I was there but then he asked me what I was thinking about and I said nothing, pause, and then I asked him what he was thinking about and he said Moving To New Mexico, longer pause, and then I said I wasn’t All That Tired, really, and he said “Shh.” So I started crying and he said what’s the matter, pause, what’s the matter? I’m just lonely, I said, and he whispered sorry. And I tried rolling over a few times, then just got up and went into the bathroom and put my jeans and my tee-shirt back on, and the dirty clothes were carpetting the hallway from the bathroom to the kitchen. It’s probably been a month, since we’ve done laundry. He’s never done it, the entire time we’ve lived here, though he tried while I was in Georgia for Christmas, only we were out of detergent so he just left the pile of clothes sitting in front of the washer. So I started getting the black things together and making piles. I stacked up all the dirty dishes in the sink and poured Comet all over the counter. There was this crystalline mound from where the white sugar was leaking. I scraped it off with the dull chef’s knife. I put some trash in a trashbag. There are trashbags just sitting open. An empty jar of sundried tomatoes in oil. Yogurt cups. Garlic skins. Little paper pouches that used to hold Annie’s Organic Mac and Cheese. I got Comet on the dishes; maybe we’ll get sick. My hands reek of it. All the Crud did not come off the counter, though I let it soak all the way through the first load.

- - -

I remember when every paragraph I wrote and every picture I took and every adjective I used was for him. I created myself for him and the self I imagined that he imagined was the self I most wanted to embody constantly, the self I most adored. She was magical. She was surreal. She was the channel through which I pored myself whole-heartedly, I gave myself without hesitation. It is not that she was not real. She was very real. I was very in love with her. I was in love with her and I was in love with him and I was so very much in love with him in love with her. It was everything. It was dragons and pearls.

While we were travelling, I wrote to get away from him. At first I read him my journals, and then things got so bad I could not stand the thought of it. It was surreal.

It is a struggle, even now, to use “him” instead of “you.” I feel that we are still intimate this way, in this dialogue I keep with myself and my “you.” I am still writing for him, about him, in reaction to him. This is the only time we talk. And he is asleep and it is now after 4 and I have been reading love letters entirely beyond my scope, remembering when I wrote that way, about forever and hope. About perfection and connection, about the future, about the past. Every second I wanted to show him, every movement.

He wrote me a love letter once, about the axis mundi. I look at him and I cannot imagine him saying such things to me now. What must he see in me? I was so open. Now I am quite terrified, shocked silent. If I am afraid to give my words, what can I give?

I walked to the studio. It was sunny on the snow and white everywhere and my cheeks were pink from crying.

I didn’t have a dollar for the bus. There was a ten clipped to his wallet and I wanted to borrow it and go get change at the Marvelous Market. He said he just wished I’d “prepared for this,” and that it annoyed him that his money became my money when he left it laying out.

I never prepared for this. I sat down on the bed and put my head in my hands and just sobbed. About bus money. I gave him his ten back and I walked to work crying.

There was a guy with headphones on the stoop. I said I worked at the yoga studio, and he said “is that leather?”

“It’s suede, yeah,” I said, fingering my coat.

“A yoga teacher? Wearing leather?”

“I’m not a yoga teacher.”

“Oh.”

The coat was my mother’s, and her mother’s. I never really thought about it. I had fake-meat tacos for lunch.

The guy on the stoop wasn’t Eric, the guy I was supposed to meet, to install the DSL. He didn’t tell me his name. I stood behind the iron gate and he sat in front of it, on the top step, holding a paper coffee cup. He had on a black hooded sweatshirt.

“Where do you come from?” he asked.

“Georgia, originally.”

He’d come from Denver, in January, but he has friends down south, a bass guitarist in Fort Lauderdale. Atlanta, he said, was expanding, with hand gestures, and then he said it was grotesque.

He asked if I knew what time it was.

“About 1:45.”

“Wow. I got up this morning at 7:45. Then went back to sleep, you know. I don’t have the slightest idea when I got back up.”

I wanted to say I understood. That my life had been like his. That my life was still like his.