the habit of being

If you drink in the same house with others, but you don’t speak to any of them, is it the same as drinking alone? Does that make it wrong? Perhaps I should forgo the tonic run in favor of the keyboard - my original plan for the evening anyway, before I went to sleep at five in the afternoon, listening to thunder crashes and wishing the rest of the world might sleep too. I roused myself at nine, and reminded myself that after three hours and nearly $200 at the salon yesterday, I have very nearly the hair I have always wanted, and that should make a great difference in my life somehow, shouldn’t it? I also bought one of Kundera’s novels I’ve never read and The Artist’s Way at the charity used book sale for a buck each. Not that I don’t already have a pile of half-read and need-to-read books next to the bed, and the Japanese brush painting kit, and the 150 very small sheets of origami paper, the inch and a half thick September Vogue, the diary entries I haven’t typed up, the books to bind, and other projects contingent on my being home and planless and awake and not too depressed or uninspired to do something other than sit around thinking about how I don’t write enough/well enough/anything meaningful and how I still don’t really know what I want to do with my life, last some vague New York epiphany about how I could just keep studying the things I’m “studying” now (writing, yoga, Buddhism, etc) in college.

Monday night was Sex and the City, passed notes, Greek salad, and looking at teenage ice skating photos. Tuesday night was a non-corporate coffee shop, a massage, an attempt to spice up my sex life, reading Yoga Journal in the morning. Wednesday night was the Tori Amos concert, the third I’ve had tickets to and the first I’ve actually been able to attend. I know we’re not supposed to like her anymore, but I knew the words to every song she played, and sat there drenched and happy, feeling like a genuine long-time fan, quietly singing along. Thursday night I ate some sad egg noodles with Prego sauce, hormonal and pissy, my 1920’s finger waves mostly destroyed by a sweaty yoga 3 class all of an hour after I left the hairdresser, and felt better almost immediately after getting the hell out of his apartment around eleven, though I neither explained myself nor had much desire to have him understand my many and varied discontents. Tonight I slept, drank some raspberry vodka, was decidedly antisocial. Tomorrow, there’s sushi and a lesbian club. Such is life after returning from New York. The coming weeks promise long hours at the studio, and hopefully some much needed frugality after the insane spending I’ve indulged in these last few. I record these mundane things because someday they will interest me greatly?

Manhattan is outside my window again. I feel like I walked off the pseudo Chinatown bus into a past life. Off the subway at Columbia and into the arms of a girl I went to highschool with. A girl I haven’t seen in years. A city I haven’t seen in years. The rush is the same, only tinted with the slightest nausea. I could have lived here all this time, I keep reminding myself, protected by the skyscrapers and the hurry. I had my favorite pizza at Rockefeller Center (Two Boots “Earth Mother with Cheese”), and spent hours looking at notebooks and stationary at my favorite Japanese bookstore (Kinokuniya).

I got off the subway at 8th and Broadway and walked around in a daze - all these places I used to walk by everyday, places I hadn’t thought of in so long. I half-expected to run into someone I knew at every corner I turned. I didn’t, of course; I never knew very many people. I wondered into the NYU bookstore, and into the Psychology building, where I used to work. I took the elevator right up to the old lab, got hugged, left again. I took my first class at the Jivamukti Yoga Center, and came back for the lab meeting sweaty, astounded, and in love.

Marialuisa said I seemed different, older. “I’ve been around,” I said. (Sometimes I think to be an adult is too be a disgrace to all that childhood symbolizes.) She all but offered me a full time job, back at the lab, and Denis bought me dinner, something I hadn’t allowed two years before. There was red wine and tiramisu, and it was a struggle not to tell too much of the story. Working full time for them, I could take classes at NYU part time for free. Of course, there is the slight problem that I still know next to nothing about psychophysics and visual perception, and I’m not exactly cut out to be a research scientist, even if I can hold my own in the company of five PhD’s at an expensive Italian restaurant and in a lab meeting. The Pelli lab is a long, long way from Tranquil Space. So much thinking, so little pink. Maybe next year though. Jivamukti is right around the corner.

I have an interview at the New School tomorrrow. I’ve spent so much money today. It is so easy to pretend this is still my life, that these choices are still open to me somehow. But there’s no way it could be so easy. Life is such a bag of tricks.

Today I bought an origami book for my brother, little notebooks for my mother, a Jivamukti tee for R; I have a closet of a room at Columbia, a group of co-workers in the Village, my old NYUcard in my bag, mascara I’m actually wearing, a 3-day old pedicure, a new Manhattan street map, a very nice pen made for Japanese calligraphy, not to mention the invite to Japan…

A year ago today I was homeless, writing a fifteen page journal entry about a day at Planned Parenthood.

You’re reduced to dinner conversation these days, the sad soliloquies other men will put up with in order to make me feel closer to them. I talk about idealism, about “I was so young,” about intensity and fragility and obsession. I can’t look anyone in the face while I try to put into words how much I loved you, how much we hurt each other. I do not expect anyone to understand.

Every few weeks I’ll get to urge to contact you, thinking this time it’ll be different, this time we’ll be able to say something, this time it won’t matter that everything is already said and done, all those years packed up into bite-sized soundbytes I can use as excuses for my behavior now, recovery stories and confessions.

For a while I thought I might not ever be able to forgive you, but now it seems like you’re the only person I’ve ever been able to forgive, and at what price? For every tear stained sentence there were pages I could never bring myself to write. As hard as it’s all been, I feel like I’ve gotten off easy - losing you should’ve torn me up more than it did. Bimonthly yearnings to brag to you on my supposed happiness, my sanity, and my excessive lifestyle are nothing really. Wanting to know how you are isn’t much. Still, I can’t let go of this image of us, years from now, eating dessert together, protected enough to stand it, and then walking off again into our separate lives.

(For now, you’re going to hike the Appalachian Trail, you say. I’m going to go back to New York, I say. You say you’re doing yoga now. I tried to drag you to class for six months, and now you’re doing yoga. Good, I say. We exchange Buddhist book titles. I say, it’s been a year since we stopped traveling, which really means, it’s been a year since the abortion. You say, it really sounds like you’re getting things together. You say, I’m happy for you.)

You come to me all nervous and shaky, full of this weird awkward energy that spills out in giggles and ummms and other inarticulatenesses. You apologize for coming, I so obviously didn’t want you to, saying you did it because you care. You say you feel guilty for not knowing how I felt, for not letting me act the way I needed to act. You had no idea what I was going through, you say with tears, honestly, in your eyes. With my near utter lack of sympathy, in light of your utter cluelessness, I can barely look you in the eye. I am stark, unfeeling save the desperate need not to have to deal with this.

I have pushed you away, so that you have come to this. You are weak and I don’t have the time or the energy to support you. I treat you the way I have been treated. Knowing this, I want out. In so many words (none), I tell you this. Still, you’ll counter with a surreal and poetic little story about French films and dreams and the sun - a story you won’t have anyone else to tell because no one else you know will find it beautiful in its silliness. I see that sort of beauty and find it bothersome. I see your shaky torrential emotion and find it irritating. I want you to get out of my room. I want you to take your untried unconditional love and get it away from me. I gave you a red journal with a bookmark and your first sexual experience - what else do you want from me?

The thought of your spastic unending embraces, your clingy body, heavy thighs, sprouty penis, and drowning eyes makes me feel sick. The thought of you sitting in your room writing poetry for me, rushing about in a daze unable to concentrate for the thought of me, the only girl you ever wanted, disgusts me. You are like a little child. You are a pansy.

You run to a shrink because you are so miserable and confused, not because I have all but abandoned you after a good month of acting the part of devoted girlfriend, without a word of honest explanation (I met someone who could fuck me somewhat decently), but because you think you’ve treated me badly. Perhaps in some way you have to really, what a joke! What do you know about treating someone badly. You lightweight! You girl! You couldn’t hurt me if your life depended on it; you don’t even know how to touch me.

You give me a book I’m sure I’ll love. You know what appeals to my aesthetic; you can pick the stories I’ll think are about me and thus appreciate. I am utterly and forever closed off from you and you are so lost you cannot see straight, trying to figure out what it is you’ve done. You wouldn’t heed my warnings, and look where it’s gotten you. Go away, little boy, hide your heart. Your innocence is lost on me; I am out of your league. Share your emotions with someone they can still touch.

I’ve just about read this week’s whole New Yorker, which I swiped from the landlord’s mail pile before my English major of a roommate could get at it. If I do read it all, it’ll be a first probably, even though I’ve had literary pretensions my whole life, lived in Manhattan, and even had a copy in the mailbox every week back in Statesboro, GA (the anti-New York). My mother also read the Times for years before she ever set foot in the City, a moment I suspect she treasured even more than I did. I only had to spend 18 years in Georgia before I got to go there. She had to spend four decades and raise me with the right sensibilities.

Incidentally, I’m spending four days there next week, and lay in bed for an hour trying to remember the names of the streets I used to walk on in the Village. This time, I’ll stay in a friend’s dorm room at Columbia.

College interviews are possible. Expensive yoga classes are definite. I need to pick up some special hairclips for my mother. I need to go to my favorite Japanese bookstore, my favorite falafel joint. I need to get a fake ID.

. . .

After you’ve realized the literary quality of your own life and the limitations therein, what is next?

We tried to hang the mirror and failed. Then, we watched the film based on Henry and June, and maybe I thought it would teach him something about me, like when I told him to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is like I have my own little canon which I hope might explain me somehow better than I can; beyond my own mass of writings, there are certain books I feel need to be read by people who are close to me. (To know what moves me is to know me. I see beauty therefore I am?) There are certain movies I’ve watched with all my lovers. (There is that poem, and how I thought it was ours but really it is mine. Funny how easily the joint experiences and metaphors become individual after the separation.) He said I want you badly and we had sex on the couch. I’ve been wearing these shells around my wrist from Harvard Square; there is an old message in my voice mail I haven’t yet deleted, from a noisy New York street. I try to tell him things sometimes, but he finds me mostly quiet. I rage silently at the prospect of being written off as less than what I am, which is of course inevitable. Sometimes it bothers me terribly that he has not scrambled to read every word of mine he has access to - any morsel that may may hold another key to how I think, how I feel, my history. These are the things I most want to be wanted. I brought blackberries and dark chocolate wafers. I refilled the ice trays; they were empty. I cried for some silly reason and he felt guilty. We went to work in the morning.

. . .

I read The Life of an Amorous Woman by Ihara Saikaku and I slept right through the party I was supposed to go to last night. All as well; I feared for my chances of getting home. I held a friend’s not quite day-old baby in the hospital. She squeaked a little but didn’t cry, opened and closed her little mouth, was beautiful and smelled good. I got an invitation to another friend’s wedding reception in the mail, on nice paper with elegant calligraphy. I spent almost as much money on food last month as I did on my rent. Granted, my rent is pretty cheap, but so is my pay, and I need to stop eating out so much. I stepped on a nail in the big house, and silenced a beeping alarm. I dreamt I was back at NYU. It’s been a year and a half.