the habit of being

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.