the habit of being

I didn’t startle when he leaned over me in the dark and said “hey.” I opened my eyes and smiled and hugged him to me.

It took a minute to figure out that he wasn’t really supposed to be there. We were in my apartment, not his. It was the middle of the night. I hadn’t let him in.

“I went out tonight,” he said, though I could taste it on his breath. “I want you to come home with me. I want to make you coffee in the morning.”

“What time is it?” I asked, “I have to be at work at 9:30.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll take you. Come home with me.”

I rubbed my eyes and got out from under the covers, gathered up things to put in my bag - keys, phone, a dress for work. It took a long time because he kept interrupting me to give me another hug and to ask again if I’d come with him.

Of course I would. It was the third night in a row.

I need a new notebook because all my old ones have too many pages written on them. I’m pretty sure my handwriting doesn’t even look like that anymore. It’s been too long to be sure.

The new apartment used to belong to artists who did things involving pretty and/or naked girls, which is all it takes to make art decent. The kitchen floor is pink and Jenny and I will get our own rooms and windows. There’s a grocery store down the street with fifty-four cent water. It’s kindof a long way from the subway but the rent is cheap and the neighborhood isn’t scary and there’s plenty of baklava. I can’t believe I’m actually moving back to New York. Some of our books are already boxed up.

On the way home from apartment-searching, my 5:00 bus had no leg room. The girl in front of me was tiny but put her seat back anyway making it even worse. Rain dripped through the emergency exit on the ceiling to the arm of the girl sitting next to me. At 9:30, outside Baltimore, I looked out the window and saw a red glowing tire bounce down the highway and hit a car. It turned out to be from our bus and we were trapped in the middle of the Interstate for 3 hours while no one told us anything except that it wasn’t safe to get out and it wasn’t safe to have anyone come pick us up. I got home at two in the morning.

I want to get a job in the visual perception lab I worked for back in 2001. I never really particularly understood the science but it didn’t matter as long as I was smart. Sometimes we talked about beauty and there was good Indian food at the lab meetings once a week.

At the lab, there are Rothko paintings and huge letters on the walls. Jivamukti is right around the corner. Please let it work out. My last day at the studio is next Friday and I will be unemployeed for a month except for dog-sitting.

The Man with the Blue Shirt and Cigarettes walked up to my table at Wendy’s, where I was making a friendship bracelet from embroidery floss. I was dressed in my usual thin ragged hippy skirt and dirty red tank top. James was in the bathroom.

“Hey, do you need a job?”

“No, we’re just travelling, but thanks.”

“You need money?”

“We’re okay.”

“‘Cuz I could give you a job.”

I didn’t catch on. I didn’t want to be mean.

“What kind of a job?”

He sat down in James’ chair.

“It’ll just take fifteen minutes.”

“I’m not interested.”

Staring at the thread in my hands.

“I’ll give you $50.”

“I’m not interested.”

Staring at the floor.

I must’ve said it three times before he finally said OK and walked off.

James passed him on his way out, coming back from the bathroom.

“Don’t leave,” I told him, as soon as he reached the table.

* * *

A couple weeks into our relationship, I popped the question.

“So, how many women have you slept with, anyway?”

“I have no idea. Twenty, maybe?”

“Twenty?”

“Yeah, well, for a long time it was only one. But there was brief period afterwards when I had a lot of one-night things.”

“I’ve only slept with five people.”

“That’s five more than I had when I was your age.”

“Good point.”

The mosquitoes are in my apartment. They bite me while I sleep. I have to cover up with something to help keep them off me, but all I have is a comforter, which is way too hot. There’s no AC, so we keep the fan on all the time. Mark calls me at home and always asks where I am. He says, over the phone, the fan makes it sound like I’m standing outside, next to a freeway. It does sound kindof like that. Believe me, I know what that sounds like.

I also sleep with a big white stuffed dog. I got it at the Pottery Barn outlet in Leesburg, VA. It was originally $99, but I got it for $30. He looks just like my landlord’s neurotic Havanese, Pete, except bigger. I changed his name from Dreyfus (on the tag), to Big Pete. I give him to Jennifer sometimes, when she’s sad.

I still have a lot of stuffed animals. I brought Amanda the Panda back from Mark’s apartment today, where she got olive oil on her feet, red wine on her nose, and tears on her back. I put one of my bangles from Alison and Vince’s wedding around her neck. We got her at the Smithsonian National Zoo gift shop in April.

Uma the Emu has a fuzzy yellow slap-bracelet for a scarf. She’s falling off of James’ coffee table onto his brown beanbag, both of which he left here when he moved out last May. The coffee table is strewn with New Yorkers, fashion magazines, old cups of coffee I didn’t have time to finish before going to work, travel journals I’ve been meaning to type up, CDs out of their cases that I’ve been putting on my iPod.

I’ve had my iPod for less than a month and I cannot imagine life without it. It’s one of the little pink ones. It has songs by Electrelane, Cowboy Junkies, Dar Williams, The Clean, Stereolab, Johnny Cash, PJ Harvey, The Aislers Set, Belle & Sebastian, Marti Jones, Patti Smith, Yo La Tengo, Aimee Mann, Eminem, Bonnie Raitt, Garbage, Janis Joplin, Nick Cave, Tool, Rocketship, Sisters of Mercy, Tom Petty, Bjork, Tori Amos, Eric Clapton, The Smiths, Rickie Lee Jones, and others. It also has “The Dance,” by Garth Brooks, which is about my mother and her first husband. Really.

Last night I took four valium before I went over to Mark’s place, to keep from being a bitch and a nervous wreck, because I hadn’t seen him in a week and wasn’t happy about it. I prompty fell asleep the wrong way around on the bed, because I’d been up until 3 am the night before editing a story. In the morning, he said I sure had been tired, that I’d been talking really slowly. At first, he’d almost thought I was on drugs, but, then, where would I get them?

I cried all morning, and told him things I’d never told him before, things I started writing here after I deleted his account in February. I told him I was scared he’d be alone forever because of Tonya, even though he still has so much life left, even though he is so good. He told me to stop. I apologized for all my expectations, but he just wiped my eyes and corrected me: they’re not expectations, they’re desires.

He took me to Chevy Chase to get good Belgian beer to take to Siobhan’s house-warming party tonight, and to Sirius Coffee Company to get the good Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. And then he brought me back here, to my hot freeway of an apartment, with a new batch of CD’s to download.

My mother is afraid to leave her apartment. Well, at least, she doesn’t want to. She’d rather not.

She makes her to-do lists, and derides herself if she doesn’t “do right.” Doing right includes getting out of bed in the morning, walking the dog, going grocery shopping.

She confided in me, when she hadn’t left the building for a week. But it’s not that she’s miserable.

“I’m not sad all the time. I’m just sad about going places. When you’re here, and we’re all home, I’m real happy.”

“But only when you’re here,” she added after a pause, and then laughed.

I’m only there once a week, at most - on Sundays. She has not only to get up and get out, but to drive a whole hour to the city to pick me up, and drive a whole hour back with me, because I never learned how to drive myself. She does this, however hard it must be, and then we talk, and we joke, adding “fuckin’” in the middle of multisyllable words, drinking strong gin and tonics when “cocktail hour” chimes at 5. I beat everyone at Monopoly, and we watch Six Feet Under on HBO. I get more tip-fuckin’-sy at my parents’ place than most places I go out at night.

She drives me back on Monday morning, in time for work, after I insist that calling in sick isn’t an option.

. . .

My impending move terrifies me. I spend half my spare time reading job listings, the other half scoping out available housing. I’ve applied to be a receptionist at a Midtown doctor’s office, an organizer of an Upper East Side penthouse/walker of Labradors, an assistant to an East Village “peace activist.” I replied to a posting by a woman saying she’d give a free room in SoHo to someone “hip” who’d help her manage a newly-opened juice bar. I never hear anything back.

An announcement was made in the studio newsletter, and people keep coming up to me and asking when I’m leaving, what I’ll be doing in New York. I don’t have a very good answer. I say I used to live there, that I plan to go back to school eventually. Sometimes the subject switches over to September Eleventh and I’m off the hook.

The only time I ever fully stop worrying about moving is when I’m with Mark. We can take long naps together, in the middle of the day. I can stay away from my computer. I can say, quite simply and honestly, that I’m happiest when we’re together. But then he says he’ll miss me, and I joke with him about coming along, then I cry silently, because I know it’ll never happen. My getting him to leave DC is on par with my getting hit by lightning. He’s been here too long. He has too many memories. He actually said, out loud, that he can’t live without her.

I worry about credit checks, high rent, commuting a long way, my lack of a college degree, leaving the only community of friends I’ve ever had, not being able to see my mother every week. I worry about going backwards rather than forwards, trying to reclaim a past I can never have again and winding up with a future I don’t want. I worry that the Adult Astoria Experience is nothing like the Naive Greenwich Village Experience.

Still, I’m glad to be leaving the apartment James and I shared from October 2002 until May 2003, the apartment whose walls heard me screaming “fuck you” and “you are SUCH an asshole” in the middle of the night, the apartment I called in sick from and lay in bed all day in, the apartment we watched movies by the dozen in, to keep from having to talk. I’m glad of this, no matter how cheap and convenient that apartment is, no matter how used to my routine I’ve become.

I tell myself the move will keep me from getting too comfortable. That the reason it worries me so much, even though I know I can’t stay here forever, is because I can easily see myself wanting to stay in the same place for years and years, no matter how illogical, as long as I can create a perfectly molded cave that I can curl up in and feel supported on all sides.

I associate moving around constantly with the worst kind of mental instability and sadness I’ve ever experienced. People are so surprised, after hearing all my travel stories, that nothing scares me more now than uncertainty about where I’m going to sleep.

I’m just like my mother, just like Mark. One day I’ll need to get out, for my own good, and I’ll find that the comfy cave has become part of me, that leaving entails carrying a mountain on my shoulders.