the habit of being

I wake up some mornings frantic, unable to place the last time I used a tampon. Sometimes this sudden memory lapse happens in the middle of the afternoon. Always, two days later, I’m waiting in line at CVS with a pregnancy test in my hand, no matter how unlikely it is.

A girlfriend told me once, she was going through this same routine, trying to avoid looking the salesgirl in the face, and, out of the blue, the woman said “Good luck!” and gave her a big smile. She found then that she’d crossed a line. She’s now someone who looks like she could be a mother.

All I’ve ever gotten is an “Um. Do you want a bag for that?”

I’ve lost count of how many negative pregnancy tests I’ve had in the last two years. It’s a ritual for me, just a regular part of my sex life now, and invariably there’s disappointment mixed in with my relief.

They didn’t mention this in the “After Your Abortion” pamphlet.

. . .

I know that I am getting older, because I am able to go for longer and longer periods of time without expecting things from people, emotionally.

I’ll find myself crying with my arms around my knees, wanting someone to please do something about it, and it will seem like I’m acting out a scene from my youth. It’s a sort of nostalgia for neediness.

Somewhere along the line I started getting more interested in other people’s problems.

Still, “Why can’t anyone help me?” and “Why can’t I help anyone?” feel remarkably similar running through my head over and over.

. . .

I dream about war crimes now, but it still doesn’t seem like enough. I cannot keep away from this pornography. I even seek out the images they won’t show on TV. A man. A murder. A lonesome head. Unaccustomed to such acts, I think of the playing card Queen. Her court scorned and hooded. Maybe I am lucky that this scene is more surreal than I can process. A head without a body makes for only a fairy tale to me. But what more can such a media spectacle be? I think I’d rather have the prison sodomy pictures than this beheading. That I could at least begin to relate to. That would look more real.

. . .

I have too much hope for my words now. I cannot even birth a thoughtless paragraph. Before I knew meditation as a practice of watching thoughts come and letting them go by, I did this almost constantly with a pen in my hand. It was so easy, not knowing enough to try. I could put the nib to the line and the words would come up and go out so completely that I could barely remember them a few lines later. I wrote with such a fever and such aloofness that I did not recognize my own clauses the next day. Writing was an intoxicant this way, and yet it was calm. Thoughts got slurry, disjointed, metaphorical. One sentence did not necessarily have any obvious connection to the next. Images came to me which were not there during ordinary life. In those days, I thought of the written me as the “real” me, the unfiltered me, the authentic me.

Now I try to create such feelings with alcohol and love affairs, as I suppose I was always destined to do, but I find it was so much better have an addiction which produced something, even if only scribbles in a now-forgotten secret code.