the habit of being

For future reference:

Cosmopolitans and appletinis. A 40-hour workweek. Paying the $100 overdue DSL bill. Catching up on my student loans. After a three week hiatus, diving back into my practice with daily yoga classes, sore and happy. Falafel sandwiches with Abaseh. Submitting the petition for retroactive withdrawal from Spring 02 NYU classes. Being accepted. A birthday party. A baby shower. A play, and dinner after with the actors. Deciding to sign another year lease. Being In Charge. Sneaking out of posh Dupont Circle condos at three in the morning. Walking home, unafraid. Not being worried about having enough to pay my rent. Another negative pregnancy test. Cheap pedicures next week? Tickets for Bjork in Brooklyn? Jivamukti while I’m there? Each breath as a new beginning? The Pillow Book, and a reinactment with Rilke and a green sharpie. Poetry fading into my skin for days. An hour and a half laughing on the phone with my mother, just trying to say goodbye. A day that could be any day and every day. Presents to buy. A letter in the mail with no return address, postmarked California: $15 and a note saying “You are so beautiful. Thank you for being a miracle.” No idea who sent it. Lying together on my floor. Sleeping together on my bed. Waking up rested and happy. I’ll call you. I’ll call you. I’ll call you. Email me! Finding someone as still as I am. Finding somewhere to go on Fourth of July weekend? More books to read. More complications. More fullness. Forgetting the sponges, but remembering the diet Coke. Open a savings account! A postcard from my grandparents in Alaska. Letters from my father; I still need to reply. A cupcake from my boss. The champagne we never drank. He photographed me in front of a yellow building, and left his camera in my bag. This Might Be Something Serious. I haven’t worn this much eye makeup since I was fifteen. Telling the Condensed Whole Story to a yoga teacher in the dim light of the Tranquil Space office (a shoe-free environment). Telling it over tofu to a 35 year old man. Telling it to the ceiling of my basement apartment, where I’ll be living for another year. Telling it to you. Making lists in the Special List Notebook. Five hours of sleep for thirteen hours of work. Knowing everyone in the room. Unreal.

Sometimes I am still surprised by how smutty (erotic?) my writing tends to be. I wrote pages and pages on my first kiss and I just never really changed. The loss of my virginity spawned a piece I’d think of as my best for years. My travel journals are full of accounts - sex under the needle tree in Arizona, sex under the overpass in El Paso, under the train tracks in St. Louis, in storm after storm after storm. With everything that was going on in my life then, and not even having an audience to seduce, I still wrote frequently about sex. I make all sorts of resolutions not to write this stuff anymore, but hardly ever succeed for long. Sometimes I wonder if it’s some sort of addiction.

An old friend/lover recently complained to me about discovering that some of his ex-girlfriends kept online slutumentaries . He was shocked and appalled. I tell myself he didn’t mean me - I was never a girlfriend afterall - and he probably didn’t mean me, but what’s the difference between me and some trashy LiveJournaller really? Diction? Is it any less gross for me - at only seventeen, only eighteen, only twenty - to be writing about what seemingly should be so private, because I make an effort to make the writing good?

When I was in college, my mother stumbled on something I had posted online, said I sounded like a jaded whore and sent me straight to a therapist. I had probably had sex five times in my whole life at that point. She thought my boyfriend had done it to me somehow, given me this sick and affected desire to sound exotic. I didn’t write anything at all for months after that. I knew that, to a degree, she was right. I was just gross.

I grew up in an online culture that embraced this grossness, this openness. Young girls posted their rape stories and gained cults of sympathetic worshippers. Sexual experience, good or bad, had a lot to do with what made someone interesting. Writing all about your sex, your abuse, your whole young fucked-up life made you real, raw, authentic, cool.

I was chatting about sadomashocism to online friends before I had come anywhere near a naked man. My budding sexuality was, quite literally, a form of online written expression for me, through years of a long distance relationship conducted primarily through instant messenger.

Most people have innate boundaries about online expression that I just don’t have. Most people have some understanding of the privacy issues involved.

People still compliment me, frequently, on my “honesty”, but I wouldn’t want my mother reading a huge portion of what I’ve written over the years, and I don’t like having to feel low about my writing, about having to make rules about what to write about, trying to figure out what makes me a word-slut and what’s pulp non-fiction and what’s okay.

It’s not even so much that I’m worried about what other people might think of me. If I weren’t so sure that my writing on this is at least partially motivated by some odd pride I have in my sexual experience and ability, then it probably wouldn’t bother me so much. I don’t think the average person would think of hitting the 40’s in the purity test before hitting legal drinking age as a major accomplishment. It might not be proper by any definition of the word, but I seriously do.

And maybe that makes me adventurous and uninhibited and liberated and Comfortable With My Sexuality. But maybe it just makes me kindof slutty and gross. And maybe my Writing Self, always so concerned with beauty and blah and blah, doesn’t want to acknowledge that sometimes, and it gets me really concerned.

There’s already a pen on the table when I get there, dumping five thin books of poetry, a pita, and some expensive tea. First I read Yeats, then Marilyn Hacker. I always save Cummings for last. Maybe I won’t get that far this time; maybe I won’t need that much help.

I’m gonna write, I tell myself, I know it. And, despite myself, I’m probably gonna to write about you. Maybe I’d rather write about a tree or a curtain, but I’m probably gonna to write about you. Your thighs are thick and your hands are small; you’ll just have to forgive me for writing about you. You won’t be the first and you won’t be the last, and you’ll have to forgive that too. (I can’t help it.)

. . .

Over a slim volume, in the first house past the trees, you tell me about a girl you knew - a girl you liked and who liked you. You introduced her to an artist and he dated her a couple years. It made you kindof sad. He cheated on her with a poet; you were sorry. And there, in my hands, the poet’s book, dedicated in italics to the artist, the very first poem about their cheating. The story makes the text feel so surreal, and the strange thing isn’t so much that you knew a girl who won a prize and published a book - talked to her, ate lunch with her - but that she, the Author, was only a small character; it was the other girl you liked.

Reading the poems, I understand the artist boy; I would have cheated too.

(Oh, that someday someone might hold a sheet of worded paper between two fingers and say of me “I knew her.”)

. . .

Things to remember: a cat named Kitties, Christina’s World, so many cups of hot herbal tea, too much sangria(!), the Greek cafe, the serpentine walls, fat un-centered cucumber rolls with too much seaweed, Lot of Her Sister, a computer named Feynman, the academical village, music by Morphine, Russian coasters, The Idiot’s Guide to Dating, a poem on an index card on a green dental floss string, a 175 gram frisbee, legal pads full of impressive-looking math, Father’s Day, a lottery ticket, Fresca, September 11th poem, No Commitment, pistachio ice cream, rerouted letters, a square puzzle, artists who work at Radio Shack, Bonnard, Derrida, an orange-haired girl in a mural, it’s Still More Happy than Sad.

Aftons are few and far between, but even my body is a poor substitute for Bjork’s voice.

There is a certain way in which neon liquor store signs are my sirens.

From way on up the road they’ll start beckoning, promising cheap neon beer and Bottles and Bottles and brown paper bags, and I can feel my chromosomes tugging. Sometimes I’ll point them out, count them one by one, in my head or to Someone. There’s one and there’s one and there’s one - all the same, strange-garbed lighthouses in the concrete ocean of City. These are the ports of call. If I could drink the chemical light from the signs themselves, I would, carefully. I’d suck the glow out like steamed milk through a straw, silencing the street song forever.

They won’t even let me inside, but there are such nights I’d be happy just to curl up in the doorway and look at them - all the colors and numbers and kinds. Rows and rows of Bottles. The ugly flourescent lights. The ugly tile floors. The way the walls never look clean. The big gawky black-on-white prices. Cigarettes. My father’s bony hands. I think about my father, drying out in Treatment. My father, drying up in jail. I wonder what I will ever do when I am twenty-one.

Remember: the poetry of these times is not lost simply because you are not a good enough writer to capture it.

It is a hard thing to sit and watch someone ignore all warnings and fall in love with you, knowing there is not really anything you can do about it. How is it possible to be so powerful and so powerless all at once?

. . .

Things My Mother Told Me:

1. How to know if it’s okay: Ask yourself, do I need to hurt anyone I love (including myself) to make this person happy?

2. If you take care of yourself, check in frequently to see that you are fine, and do not go crazy, you will not make him go crazy either.

3. When not very many people get you, it is only more precious when someone does.