the habit of being

Today I taped up this box of some of James’ stuff I’d had sitting on the table waiting to mail for a week. It’s been sitting there since the last time I talked to him, which was longer ago than we ever went without talking in the entire five and a half years we knew each other. There’s this tiny little sketch pad in there where he drew pictures of me lying on our bed, and where I left him a note saying that he was late coming home and I was kindof worried but that I was going to work and would be back by such and such time, love Katharine. His socks and all his bathroom stuff. His contact lens case. The USB cable for his digital camera, which he’d asked for on instant messenger before we stopped talking, because he hadn’t uploaded the last batch of pictures he’d taken of me and wanted to get them off of there before someone in his family got curious about what was on the camera. I’d said he had more nude photographs of me on his computer than he would ever need or want, so why didn’t he just delete them.

I guess you only get to take the last picture once. My last pictures of him were on that camera too, and I’m never going to see them again. And I’m never going to see him again. And though I can understand us breaking up (we killed each other on a daily basis - there are certain things a relationship just can’t survive), but how can you can love a person that much and one day just have them completely out of your life, without really even wanting to let them back in? I never really believed it was possible, in all those years I never thought it would happen, and the more trauma we went through together, the more unlikely it seemed that we’d ever be separate. One day you’re coming home to the same face you’ve come home to every day, the same person who’s heard every single one of your stories and knows your entire history and all your favorite books and all your moods and your touches and the shadows that you make, the way that you move, your voice, your skin, your smell, all the different ways you can moan, the faces you make when you cry, your scream, your blood, your love.. and the next day, it’s just you, and you can’t decide what’s worse - never wanting to go through anything like that again, or wanting to go through all that again more than anything else in the world, with someone else.

I do not think myself ambitious, yet I want to write words that are considered art. As if it is not even enough to be a Writer.

I will get started on this, maybe tomorrow or the next day.

This will be the first thing I have ever published that he will never read, and that is the first step.

When I was pregnant with his child, and we were stranded together and cut off from everything else, we lay next to one another in the dark. He said to me, without any trace of emotion in his voice, that if I chose to keep the baby and one day tracked him down in his perfect life with the woman he loved, trying to get child support, that he would hate me and never forgive me.

If anyone ever got it into their mind to ask me what the worst thing anyone had ever said to me was, I wouldn’t have the slightest hesitation in answering the question.

The really awful thing isn’t that I had to have such things said to me, near daily, for months, whilst I sat around saying I was so sorry and betraying my family and my friends and myself. The awful thing is that even after it was all over, and no one was stranded anymore, I chose to have him in my life.

This will be the first thing I have ever published that he will never read, and that still makes me very, very sad.

* * *

In my new life, I’m going to try to be subtle. I’ll be the kind of girl who writes herself notes and ultimata on pastel colored post-its. I’ll read mostly Tolstoy I’ve already read and I’ll write in my notebook again, or get a whole new one and start over. I won’t expect anything from any one except myself, and if I catch myself starting to expect something, I’ll always have a pink post-it right there to remind me not to.

I’ll also have a note that says no one understands me or loves me like my mother does. Nobody else has that sense of humor but us, and no one else can laugh as much about how my 13 year old brother ironed his jeans for a school dance and how I can’t even think about dancing without getting the whole body equivalent of the face you make when you’re getting your picture taken. Nobody else fully appreciates the endless jokes that can be made about my great grandmother, who has given my mother the same pair of ugly cheap bedroom slippers for Christmas every year since she was 20. Or about the time my grandmother made me corn flakes with watermelon on top. Or the time my grandfather made me try on a swimsuit at a department store and walk out INTO THE STORE in it to show the salesgirl and then I wouldn’t speak to him for the whole rest of the day. Practically all I will ever do in my new life is talk to my mom and laugh.

* * *

I’m reading about a pilgrim, which makes me think of just how awful my whole road trip was, especially compared to how these things usually turn out, when undertaken with the right intention. Like other favorite pilgrims of mine, she speaks of prayer without ceasing, and also about finding inner peace and being to true to your calling. I’d be easily inclined to say that my calling is to write, if only I had some inkling of how I could be of service by doing it.

In my new life, I’ll try to write something uplifting.

I eat a breakfast of tootsie rolls and leftover Thai food, sitting on the floor with my computer and a smattering of tootsie wrappers, cd cases, books I’ve tried to start reading, what few dishes I still have. It’s been three days since the moving van disappeared, and I can’t say I’m dealing well. I’ve been on the phone with people I haven’t spoken to in ages, people I’ve never spoken to at all. I’ve downloaded three file-sharing programs and actually learned how to use two of them, one of which is nothing but a black screen you type commands into. Trying to fill the void, which seems to fill up the entire apartment, constraining me to this one spot on the floor I’ve been sitting in pretty much every moment I’ve been at home since he left.

This doesn’t even seem like the same place anymore, and that girl I used to be has been replaced with a manic post-breakup cliche. I talk to my mother a lot, and Jennifer sends me emails saying I can be so much more than just someone’s girlfriend. I genuinely want to Just Fuck Someone Else, and I genuinely want to call him up and beg him to come back, and I genuinely want to sit on the floor all day long and just cry about it, until I can’t anymore and then maybe it will be out of my system. I am not just writing a story about some fictitious and not-very-interesting character who’s just lost her boyfriend of five years; I actually feel that crazy.

I’m listening to, alternately, Sheryl Crow’s If It Makes You Happy and Tool’s Sober.

I haven’t started doing any of the things I’ve been putting off doing until he left.

. . .

I asked my mother what people did when they were alone and she said they ate chocolate and read and got careers. I’ve eaten a whole pint of chocolate ice cream, plus the tootsie rolls, but I’ve started four different books only to abandon them without even bothering to put them back on the shelf, and I really don’t think I’m cut out for a career. I don’t think I could work 40 hours a week without having a nervous breakdown.

The bothersome thing is, I don’t think I ever wanted a career. I never had any real idea of what I wanted to do in college other than read books and learn stuff. Back then James thought I was well worth supporting, so I think I mostly envisioned my future self sitting at home writing all day and being loved. Which probably has a lot to do with my mother thinking he was such a bad influence.

And maybe the whole reason I made him leave was because he refused to do that, or pretend he ever wanted to do that, anymore. I resented him even making me pay for my own groceries. I think I honestly have no desire to be independent. I never even learned how to drive. I’ve basically been setting myself up my whole life to need to be taken care of.

So what - I’m supposed to be this big liberated empowered modern woman feminist or whatever and all I really want to do is be in love and get married and have a baby? I’m not even twenty.

I’m good in school and artistically talented (my mom said the plumber came to work on the shower and saw my drawings on the wall and said if he could do that he sure as hell wouldn’t be fixing pipes for a living..but what am I doing with it.. absolutely nothing) and I can write and I’m relatively pretty and, despite the fact the I pretty much threw my whole life away for a guy, I still have a family that loves me and, in short, have a whole lot doing for me, I am sitting on my floor half drunk crying because the guy I spent all the energy I could have been using to do something with my life obsessing over has finally gotten out of the way.

This is all so, so wrong. What happened to me?

Is there a way to revert back to the person I was before I turned 16?

I woke up hot and sticky at 3 or 4 in the morning.

Full of chocolate and a sad movie and still tipsy from before I fell asleep, I was dying, melting away with a throbbing head. I got out of bed and stood in front of the fan, whose head slowly was turning right and left. I walked back and forth following it, and already the naked man had invaded my side of the bed. I’d never get back in. Those pokey knees. He’d thrown the blanket off and was snoring a little, shiny in his whiteness, asleep.

It was a jungle in there, a furnace, a crematorium, a whorehouse - dark and sweltering.

I drank tap water from the kitchen faucet; my cheek nearly resting on a pile of dirty dishes. We’d had tofu stir fry for dinner, with baby bok choy and not enough rice. And the tofu had all turned to moosh so it looked like vomit, but it tasted okay and I ate it all and watched the sad movie. It was kindof funny too, that movie. We walked to CVS for ice cream and vanilla Coke, looking in windows and leaning on trees. I remember saying I didn’t want to fuck him, and he said I did, but I can’t remember why it came up.

I was lying in bed when he told me a woman had seen us as I was trying to choose an ice cream flavor. He’d drawn a smiley face in the condensation of the refridgerator. He had his arm around me and the woman had smiled at us. We looked happy. We’ve been looking happy for years, maybe, except a few times. My boss said to me, when I told her we were breaking up, that it seemed like we had such a nice little relationship.

I made the fan stop shaking its head no, and pointed it straight at the bed. I pushed him out of the way enough that I could lie on my back with my feet on the pillow, head nearest the fan, at the end of the bed. I never got cool. I woke him up, kindof, and said I had no room, and he moved over about a millimeter and fell right back asleep. I went to sleep too.

. . .

I have cobalt blue paint on my foot from painting a hallway at the yoga studio.

I put masking tape all around the molding and the door frames and up the stairs. I unscrewed the screws and took down the little panels around the light switches. I got up on a ladder and painted the edges with a brush, trying not to get any on the ceiling, and there were these hallway lights you can’t turn off in my face. I wore one of my homeless shirts; James had written “nomad” on the back of the collar in capital letters with a black sign marker. It now has cobalt blue specks on it. Kevin taught me to make v-shapes with the paint roller, and told me about a boyfriend he’d had who sung him U2 songs in bed.

The next day he told me I’d done a good job with the paint roller - that usually dark colors need a lot more touch-up work.

. . .

I’m turning twenty in nineteen days and today I wrote a get-well card to my great-grandmother, who broke her hip.