the habit of being

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.