the habit of being

Today M. brought me home early in the morning, after our one-cookie-each and French press coffee in the Cowboy Cup. Despite myself, I fell into the tub without writing, and then into bed in my towel, and I slept another three or four hours, dreaming dreams I promised myself I’d remember so I could tell him, but then forgot anyway.

I called my mother around noon, and she tells me that they may take an apartment in a renovated hotel in the middle of Frederick, MD. It is too small and too expensive, but we have always dreamed of living in a hotel, and I am happy for her. She talks about the park down the street, and school districts and restaurants and windows. They’ve already found a buyer for the house in Georgia, and there is so much to get rid of to move into an apartment, so much of my childhood I’ll never see again.

Jen and I went to an Indian restaurant for lunch and split the check. She went home to write a paper while I went shopping in the freezing rain. I bought cheap underwear and expensive foundation. Now I’m sitting in a bookstore cafe reading literary smut across from a stranger who is studying economics. I consider buying a dessert, and ponder how in the span of one month, my sex life has changed completely.

I feel very much like a virgin, who has been recently woken up. In so many ways this is ridiculous, because before I met M., I had already done everything. I had done so much that there was very little left to do. But without a new perversion to explore, I found, finally, pleasure instead. I cannot scream loud enough that I was wrong about everything. I knew nothing at all. Sex really is not violence. It does not have to be. It seems that everything before was only profanity, vulgarity, thinly-masked anger disguised as passion. I could never accept that now, knowing otherwise. I have become somebody else. I was a girl who had gone numb to everything but pain, but now I have found far better reasons to cry.

I would like to fall in love in a way that does not leave me hating the rest of my life.
I would like to drop everything and run away with you.
I’m sorry that I already know what a terrible idea that is.
I’m not sorry that you would never let it happen.
I want to get married and have babies with someone I love much more than I want anything else, despite my IQ, the way I was raised, and various other factors.
I will never be an overachiever outside of a classroom.
I think I have forgotten how to write since I met you.

. . .

With you, life is full of domestic possibility, and I am growing tired of writing about myself.
Silently, we can have our coffee in the morning, our Belgian beer at night, our lavender sorbet and our trips to the bakery.
We can have all this and tell no one.
I can tell my old stories to you and let them all die to the page.
We can rate girls’ names and countries to visit on an impossible scale.
You can tell me how beautiful I am while I idealize your ex-wife.
I have given up fucking for this silly-sounding thing they call “making love” and I am worried I’ll never be able to go back.
Nights alone seem absurd.
The record will always be flipped.
Your mother plays songs on answering machine messages.
I leave my hairpins on your bedside table.
I look through photos of your past lives.
I trace love letters on your back with the tip my finger while you fall asleep.

. . .

We come back from spending more money than it should be possible to spend in an Ethiopian restaurant and seeing a German movie with an open ending to sit on opposite ends of your couch for hours, asking each other questions from a 1981 version of Trivial Pursuit.

. . .

You lay beside me in bed, breathing weary sleep - recovering, still, from a cold that started up shortly after we met. You told me about this cold on Christmas Day, while I hid in the bathroom of my grandfather’s house in Georgia, and you were three hours behind in Seattle…

. . .

The young couple lays asleep, draped all across one another, unaware that they are basking in the utter appropriatenes of their relationship, their lives, the way they already look almost related but put their education first anyway.
From the world of the inappropriate, I stare and envy, wondering how much they realize what they have.
How much I miss being able to look at myself and believe that I am doing things the way they should be done. How much I miss having nothing to hide.
Two brown heads and a pink pillowcase. It’s only a matter of time.