the habit of being

She dances around the room, half naked and half drunk. Washing machine, vacuum cleaner, Janis Joplin screaming. Spring cleaning and rum, a grey bra and white panties (her mother’s and much too large, taken by mistake). Packing peanuts on the floor, pony tail holders on the floor, a bowl full of dirty crusty silverwear on the bed, filling and filling. The laundry is all tossed away into a towering pile in the kitchen, out of site, waiting for a vacant spot in the washer. Sheets and blankets all tossed away, pillowcases, the drawn-on jeans she wears everyday, a size 5 that fit better in the winter, when she was never hungry. And his clothes.

Smelly candles are lit to take away the scent of filth, with the fan on high the and the dehumidifier purring away. There’s no AC in the basement and she’s burning up and gyrating and twirling and bending down to pick up the packing peanuts one at a time, smooshing them into on big syrofoam blob in her palm. Bobby pins and coins and beads are indiscriminately either picked out of the carpet and set in her empty Easter basket or run over with the vacuum with murderous abandon.

“Take it, take another little piece of my heart,” she screams at the top of her lungs, slam dunking the peanuts into trash bag #3. She tears apart boxes to put out into the recycling bin, throws a string of mardi gras beads around her neck, and heads into the bathroom to watch herself dance in the smeary mirror. Two more hours till he gets home.

She remembers to call someone she mustn’t forget to call, leaves a spirited message on a machine, and dives backwards onto the bare matressed bed, letting out an 8-count yogic exhale. There’s an open bag of organic pecans on the bedside table, which is a file cabinet really, with a stuffed emu and a sticky dildo and a pair of conservative scratched men’s eyeglasses. A treasure chest full of pennies.

Trying to sober up on a bartlett pear, she accidentally eats the little sticker with the produce code on it. She sits down to calm herself in fornt of the computer and looks at the black and white nude photographs of her peers, beat up looking blonde girls with pretty eyes and hard nipples. Feminists are the new porn stars. She’d love to join the ranks, but the digital camera won’t turn on and she’s having a fat couple of months and her roots and getting darker while her hair is getting lighter and she’s only been hit a couple times anyway.

. . .

( The capturing of moments is both easy and impossible. What is accomplished through this documentation of the daily melt, the grind of second upon second in a real world devoid of symbolism? I am going to be one of those eternal journal writers who never publishes a thing, never finds a form, never gets over herself. I am going to be a great sleepy self-absorbed nothing waiting for someone to love her, as ever I have been. I only ever wanted to be loved. It is the same with everyone. It is obvious and witless and need not be said in so many words. In so many words it can never be said. )

. . .

There is an old man in the copy shop, from Afghanistan. He is sarcastic and lonely, and once he took the bracelet off my wrist and examined it under a huge magnifying glass. I go in serveral times a week making my pastel copies for the yoga studio. I go in sad and I go in tired and he will say “what is the matter with you?” He has asked me this many times. “Where is your energy?”

I make excuses.

He scolds me for leaving the pink paper in the copier trays, and picks on me for not being able use the fancy color machine. He asks me my name, even though he already knows, and he laughs and puts an arm around my shoulder. There is a sign on the wall that says “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute and emergency on my part” and framed documents in Arabic calligraphy, and a poster with a sad looking woman under a capitalized FREE AFGHANISTAN.

The man at the copy shop speaks five or six languages, and his prices are the cheapest in town. He has a glass elephant on his desk, and tells stories of the humor, love, and loss among his copy-making clients. He is there every day, and he’s one of my favorite people in this whole city.

I want to ask him if he still has family in Afghanistan, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea.

. . .

James might move in with a guy who makes really good eggplant dip.

And I really do think maybe sex is the worst thing for writing.

He asks me if I hate him, because I make faces, squint my eyes. He asks me if I hate him, because I speak in raw tones and always sigh. I reply vaguely that I do not know what it means to hate, because I am afraid that I do and it disgusts me.

We lie around naked in the aftermath of our love, making uncomfortable jokes in the squalor of our bed, and I fear that I may truly hate him for this and every orgasm I never had. So many small and all-encompassing things are these worries that plague me night after night as I tear myself apart while he soundly sleeps, so close by that I feel every rise and fall of his breath and chest. It has been this way for so long.

I have much I would like to say but simply cannot. His body is still like home to me, his heart the softest pillow for my head.

And in the aftermath of it all, when I will no longer let him touch me, out of nowhere he will become so kind. Everything I thought I knew yesterday or last week is replaced again by the things I thought I knew four years ago, and how I toss and turn this way, trying to make it all fit together. I know I cannot hate him. Why must I act this way? Why can’t I lower my voice and speak so that he may understand, so that we might find peace with one another?

Forgivenesses as epic as this one promise such relief, a great sighing surrender held so far at bay. Oceans and eons separate me from this forgiveness, this sanity, the relinquishment of my undying expectations. I would rather claim this prize than the heart of any other man, any come-again love there might be waiting. I would give it now, this forgiveness I seek, were it not for the heat that rises, blanketing the sides of my face, tangling me again in the same old dirty sheets. I struggle to escape the blankets and then am instantly so cold.

The tears come straight from my thickest bones, in great heaving sobs, as my heart beats frantically and I can barely catch my breath. I am so red and so confused.

I have given myself nothing but him to hold onto, and he will be leaving soon. I will be all alone, sitting in bookstores and in beds, reading poetry only so that I might write prose.

I am afraid.

It is so hard to be a person,
to look at all the other people going
up and down the escalator and up and down
the street - the faces
blank, beautiful, and dull.

It is so hard to look into the eyes
that look into your eyes
in passing - ambivalent and apart,
when you cannot see the suffering.

And you wonder if maybe
you are the only one.

My mother tells me that my father is in jail again. Six counts of robbery in 2 weeks, since he last got out on bail. Among others, he robbed my mother’s house twice, making off with her pocketbook and my stepfather’s case of beer.

“I think there should be some sort of drug that makes alcoholics get really ill if they drink,” I say.

“There is,” she says, “a pill, but you can just stop taking it anytime. There’s no anti-crack pill.”

I can’t believe they even have crack in my hometown. It seems like you should have to at least go to Savannah, maybe even Atlanta, for anything stronger than pot. Part of the reason my father was able to rob my mother’s house twice is because we never lock our doors.

According to my mother, Miss Diane, the woman whose in-home day care center I stayed in as a child, knows all about the Statesboro crack scene. She and her husband own the rundown place my dad lived for a while. Apparently, my father’s “crack friend,” Sheryl, gives old men blow jobs for beer. ONE beer. Miss Diane - freckly, bosomy, daycare lady who came to visit my single mother at home to ease her fears about having someone else take care of me while she worked - told my mother this.

“Maybe they’ll send him to treatment again?” I ask.

“Maybe.”

We change the subject to our family cat-history:

Bob who sat under my mom’s hair and ate my throw-up off the floor when I was tiny.

Piffy who waited for my bus after school.

Blue, Piffy’s scrawny stray mistress.

Spike who was bitten by a rabid raccoon.

Peli, the Russian Blue we adopted too old - she straved herself to death.

Isaac, a kitten we gave away to the mother of a girl I knew in middle school. In highschool the woman was getting married to a man who didn’t like cats and gave him back, crying, to us. After I left for college, they got divorced and we gave him back to her.

The three kittens my little brother stuffed into a tennis ball can, the one he accidentally drowned in the tub, and the one whose ear he cut a triangle out of trying to give it a haircut.

Hershey, the Himalayan matron of our many litters, coveted throughout town for their long hair and colorpoints. (People called us to ask when the next batch was due.)

Scout, who had a rare blood disease as a kitten and underwent 3 transfusions. As an adult, she got pregnant and had one kitten in the middle of the kitchen floor and then just walked off and left it there. One of our other cats adopted it, and then Scout decided she wanted it back so they took turns stealing it back and forth and hiding it.

Andy, whom we gave to my great grandmother when I was still a child and who still lives with her to this day.

Franny, the Siamese who bit me all the time…

I don’t feel a writing feeling. I am only angry and sad, in the dullest way. I couldn’t throw a thing or cry with any real heart. I couldn’t yell. It is silent and sickly, like cheating and STDs. I write spiteful letters and don’t send them. I spy on the people I love, and wonder how they could expect anything different from me. I am so static and sick of observing myself in the act of decay, sick of observing myself at all. Sick of observing my sickness. Do we create the people that we are? Does every moment matter?

- - -

After years of emotional manipulation, I am kicking my boyfriend out of our apartment. He reminds me that I am kicking him out of a daily basis, so it’s hard to pretend that I’m not really.

After his leaving was decided, we spent two or three days in a daze. I was constantly looking at him and touching him softly as I started to cry. We were very sad and very nice to one another. I looked forward to coming home and hugged him whenever I could. We were out walking and he picked a flower for me and put his head on my shoulder. It was the best we’d gotten along in ages. I almost believed things had changed.

Now that period has ended and things are back to the way they were, except that he is always making jokes about the other guys I might end up with and looking for apartments online. I’m half ambivalent and half mortified, and mostly I’d just like to think of something else. This is the way the relationship ends. Certainly not with a bang. I’d hoped it’d be more poetic. The tears are mostly melodramatic and I should rejoice the opportunity to end a five year terrorism of my emotions.

I’m afraid of being even lonelier than I am now. If I cannot have him, I hope I will have myself again.

. . .

There’s an armchair with a rip down the it vinyl seat upholstery sitting in the middle of my room. Across the arms a long mop handle is balanced, with a set of four Whole Foods bags nestled inside one another on each end, filled with free-weights.

I told him not to get a weight bench because they’re big and ugly and would take up half the room. Now that he’s moving out, I guess I won’t have to trip over barbells in the middle of the night anymore.

. . .

I was sitting on the floor with my laptop, looking over his shoulder onto his computer screen, and he wrote “sad panda” in Notepad, then cut and pasted it into the middle of his screen, backspaced and changed it to “sad person” and then started anagramming the letters, changing and moving them one at a time, to make other words. He did this for a long time.

Usually, though, he’s just playing Yahoo! Literati. He says he does it when he wants to escape. Sometimes he calls girls he meets there gorgeous and I cry about it for days.

. . .

Still, there is so much anger, seeping. I want to get out of the suffocating fog of his presence. I want to escape from the self that he knows. We neither know why we didn’t leave on this day or that one, on days worse than this or days better. We don’t know why it is now, just as Spring is trying to come. He is cruel and I am relentless.

Sometimes the only proof I need that we don’t love each other is the fact that we’re still together.

Sometimes all I need to feel better is to just get away from him.

. . .

I taught myself to love. He had nothing to do with it, really. I watched my own emotions and I projected them onto a man. He seemed to see all these things I couldn’t see, and I admired it and I loved him. I wouldn’t learn until much later that he would never see the things I did. He would never feel the way I felt. We were so alike, because we were alive and needy. We were different enough to foster fantasy and obsession, but never the same enough to understand. We were never kind enough to forgive.

Sometimes being with him is the loneliest feeling in the world.

. . .

I think I may have had a miscarriage last month, and I don’t really care.

. . .

It’s not that he is an asshole, it is that I make him an asshole. It is how I ruin him and he ruins me, and, most of all, how none of it would be possible if we hadn’t been in love once.

I couldn’t always feel better just by getting away from him. For a long time he could do that and I couldn’t, and I hated him for it and thought it meant he didn’t care. Even now, when I can do it, it’s extremely hard. It’s so hard to walk away and feel better. It’s easier to just stay there and cry and yell, because at least you know you care. You feel like it still matters, all the hurt we made and all the time we spent. It feels like such a waste when all you really have to do to feel better is just walk out the door. That’s usually what I’m crying about in the first place.