the habit of being

In a beautiful loft with infinitely tall windows overlooking the mountains, books and art overflowing every corner, I confronted the life I would like more than my own. At every turn, every glance, my eyes beamed, then filled with tears. I said these pretty, articulate things, then my voice turned to nothing and I looked at the floor, thinking what a contradiction, what a farce.

I am looking to science for art, looking to love for art, looking to skin and computers and subway cars for art, but I am afraid now to look for the art that is simply art, the art which was created to be nothing else.

There is always a struggle between wanting the creative life and wanting the one which brings success and achievement. The idea that one can have both is too much to handle. I could not ever aim so high, and yet.

I fear poverty, and still I seek it out. I see the options I have which would give me money, knowing with money comes freedom, and I know that I am capable, and yet I stop myself before trying. It is too great a sacrifice ever to give away one tiny moment in the present in hopes of some vague and beautiful security to come in the future. The problem is that though I won’t sell my precious moments, my beloved now, I squander them fruitlessly anyway.

* * *

An her exhibition, I met The Artist and now it is as if she belongs to me. At least, I have her copy of Madame Bovary.

Upon her arrival, her face, no longer a mystery, seemed suddenly as if it never were, as if I had always known every detail about the blueness of her eyes, the tens of yellows of her hair, the way her cheekbones are sharp but soft. The way her photographs echo the timid, tiny, intensity of her voice.

We slept in the gallery owner’s bed. That first night after her long trip over the ocean, she was exhausted and fell asleep, or said nothing, as I slipped out of the shower and under the covers. I could not stop thinking how surreal it is, the way things will come surprisingly together after years of not quite, not yet. She flung her arm across me unconsciously, used to her husband being there. I flung my own, knowingly, and when she rolled over in the morning, the light coming in from the mountains revealed the tattoo on the small of her back.

It had been so long since I felt like such a man, even with my eyes leaking tears of chardonnay like clockwork. Maybe this is what a pretty blonde will do? I felt driven by senseless urges - to protect, to shelter.

We spoke of the past with our eyes welling up, again, and again.

I mimicked her voice without meaning to, and felt it increased my sex appeal dramatically, for suddenly I was surrounded with boys and did not know what to do with them all. I wanted nothing to do with them all. (I could give them only my ruined self, only the possibility of my reformation.) They were nothing but a blur and she was my only focus. It was like being fourteen all over again and I was, perhaps, ridiculous.

The talk of Botox frightened me a lot. The talk of art frightened me a little. The giggling made my heart race away; I felt lost. I was so struck by my mutability. I hid with her, we whispered our tragedies, we hugged and assured one another - you are so beautiful, you are so talented.

I squeezed her thumb under a mound of unspread sheet and comforter, or we floated alone on the giant floor, in the midst of an oriental rug. We offered no explanations for why these things we discussed had happened.

“Everyone says they understand, but they don’t really.”

“I do.”

“I know.”

One story lead to another and they were all different but just alike. It became one in the morning, two in the morning. We told each other these things about ourselves that we already partway knew.

(I don’t know how long it had been since I told any of this stuff to another girl. It is so different when it is a girl, and not some man who will try to heal what ails you with his penis.)

It was dark, but her hair was still, as ever, luminous. The whispering was because the whole rest of the world is sleeping and we didn’t want to wake them up. The whispering was because we were still ashamed. We told not only our feelings but the feelings we had because of our feelings - the subfeelings were usually guilt. Some things are always secrets.

It was all so frighteningly real, so perfect, so something: The way she loves now. The way she loved then. The way she has been so many of the places I have been.

I started staring at children when I was pregnant, and didn’t stop when I wasn’t anymore.

On the R train, there is a little girl with very light brown hair and skin. She’s propably three years old, and has her ears pierced, and her hair, in a ponytail, is longer than mine. She is twirling around the pole you hold on so you don’t fall over when the train leaves the station, and she is screaming. I can hear her through my earphones, and she keeps on twirling, and does not look back at me. It is unusual for them not to look at me. Her father looks at me instead.

The girl’s mother has a floppy straw hat on. I used to have the same hat. She is bending over to look at the map of the subway system on the side of the car. I can see her panty lines through her thin cotton dress, but that has nothing to do with my nausea.

I don’t like the little girl because she is too loud, and this is the most unhealthy I’ve felt in months. I shouldn’t be reminded of myself, of my unkindness, like this.

* * *

The naked girls in the changing room at Jivamukti have uncommonly beautiful bodies. I stare at the wall so as not to stare at them. Two my back, one says, “you dropped your bra.”

How quickly one forgets ordinary pleasures when one’s lover is away. Lacking the affair, the mind is one’s only company.

One’s own mind has such very high standards, wanting all this complicated thinking, figuring out, dissecting to entertain it. For this labor, there is no reward but momentary distraction from loneliness. The ego never loves in return, will never comfort in times of discouragement, disappointment, and frustration.

* * *

He has the smoothest, tiniest, most fine feet and hands. Through all his living, he has retained the gentle touch of a curious child. When he touches me, there is a complete absence of friction.

His palms and my curves are like liquids pouring in tandem. Though running from separate faucets, the streams reach for one another, mix, and become one potion.

* * *

Is it that the morning light is less lovely when there is other no long cool back to absorb it as it comes in through my window? Is it not always there, every morning, even as I am alone? Why will I not appreciate it then? My skin, also, means nothing to me, in the absence of being touched.

They are joys I do not have to think about that he brings me, along with coffee and cookies and wine.

* * *

The mind of a lover is like the mind of a grown up child. Sloppy drunken conversation is as elevated as any intellectual discourse. Silly games become fun again. It takes so little to bring about a smile. Happiness no longer seems a far-off and impossible ideal.

At night, the breeze from my open window rolls over me and I cannot stop thinking. It’s as though I have not thought in three years and my mind is playing catch-up. I fall asleep in the bed of my creative youth and wake each morning, early, though there is noplace yet to be. I am anxious and excited. This is the city of my undoing, which I fail to understand.

I’ve left a studio for a laboratory and I embrace it so. I am starved for science, for study, for focus. Here, I am studying perception.

Spark plugs long dead in my head are being replaced. First, I realize the numbness, the frost that has fallen, and it seems I am back here to shake myself out of it, as children shake snow-covered tree limbs.

I don’t know when it was that I stopped talking about the Catastrophe, when I stopped thinking about it, when I simplified it so far that it did not even seem real anymore. Still, five minutes spent reviewing the minute details of two years ago send me shaking and questioning who I am. I cannot pretend to be my pre-traumatic self, even here, even with all the change, the capacity for false starting over, the return of so many feaures that composed my life Before.

I never expected anyone else to understand what happened to me and my first love, as our fantasy crashed into a desert of obsession, manipulation, intense isolation. I lived out my very nightmares in attempt to resurrect our dream. Only my mother, who was most hurt by it, seems to show any comprehesion of the state I was in. It is because I do not fully comprehend it myself that I do not seem to be able to get over it, but instead push it under the rug so that I cannot dwell on it anymore.

I separated myself from that misery so that I could carry on, regain composure, but somehow in the process I cut myself away from all the heightened senses which created such a strong experience in the first place. “What happened to your sincerity?” I was asked, after all that time on the road.

“What happened to your art?” I ask myself now, both afraid to dig up the old gnarly roots, and afraid not to.

Meanwhile, my mother has dreamt that I had a child. A baby girl who was long and who talked at three months. The best dream ever, she says. I put my two middle fingers in the baby’s mouth and a wave of happiness shot through my mother which lasted far into the next morning. When she told me about this, I almost cried, but smiled instead.