the habit of being

I was hiding behind my plastic blue street vendor glasses, trying to distance myself from the beginning and middle of the day. They were kindof smeary, and I had to take them off to write. I never could be that girl, created in New York with a thin red leather collar, for long, and I certainly couldn’t be her for the writing I wanted to do.

I have this stuff I want to write down - my grandmother’s funeral, things like that. The whole time I was home, seeing these things and feeling these things, having these sad hilarious conversations, I was looking for a chance to write some of it down. But see, I was just too busy living it, and crying and laughing and holding hands. I’d left my journal at my desk at work. There was no paper, no pen, anywhere. I mean, they were everywhere, but not in my hands. I’d go to bed at night exhausted in Betty’s Egyptian cotton pajamas with her name on the tag, and I’d half-sleep, just under the surface, still listening to everything. I couldn’t ever find any time to write and nothing ever got written.

I try to do it now, but the feeling is gone, the details are dying by the second and here it is next weekend, the weekend after that, some random Tuesday, and I’m writing about writing it, meta-writing it, because the other options are gone, and those sentences I might have lived in for years may as well have never existed in my head. Did they ever exist? Was there ever a string of words in me without an “I”? Could I have portrayed my mother’s love, my grandfather’s guilt, the veins that run through our family like the veins on her brittle porcelain dead white hands?

And besides that, I’ve become increasingly aware that there are these people out there that write about the South - that Southern literature didn’t just die with Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Some of these people are inevitably doing it all wrong, and I’m just sitting around with this distinctly Southern history, a Southern upbringing in a Southern family, and a Southern way of thinking that turns on automatically when I get home. My voice patterns change and I talk Southern and I think Southern and that’s my real self. If there is in me a Southern identity, shouldn’t I be thinking about that more, and writing not just about my dead grandmother, but about a whole misunderstood culture? Because maybe, if I could think straight, I could?

For a week, I dropped so much of the affectation I’d built up around me in the life I’ve made, I stepped off a plane to serve my mother, to be present for her. For the first time I can remember I stopped thinking about my issues, about my ex-boyfriend and ex-pregnancy and ex-scholarship, and my life was only about me in so much as how I was a part of her, and how she was a part of Betty, and we were all the same. No beautiful pain and sexual suffering, no New York and Washington and everyplace in between, just a lineage I was born into, a story I had no part in writing but every part in protecting from the world.

I’m part of something that was there before me. I’m connected to people in ways I’ll never have to explain. I have a home. I had forgotten all these things, only to find them in a time of death and grief. I came home on a plane with a Dior handbag full of mascara-stained tissues and a lingering feeling of knowing where I come from. Almost immediately, I wanted to go back.

My parents are moving in January, out of my hometown and out of Georgia and out of the South. With Betty gone, my mother wants to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. They’re painting things that haven’t been painted the entire time we lived there, in the house we moved into the weekend I got my first menstrual period at age 12. Two hours down the road, my grandfather is self-medicating himself into oblivion. I’m putting masks back on by the day, and the rawness is scabbing over with the funeral-shoe blisters.