the habit of being

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.