the habit of being

I was supposed to go to a party. By supposed to, I mean I had planned to, not that anyone really would’ve missed me. This was a self-imposed supposed.

I walked a long way to get there. I could’ve taken the subway, but I didn’t know it. I stopped on the way and got a table for one. I had salad and water and a cute waitress with knots in her hair and that’s all. It was a big salad though, with gorganzola. I ate my salad and I tried to read my book.

I had on a costume. It wasn’t a costume party I was going to, but it was almost Halloween, and any excuse to dress up. It was the first time I’d dressed up in a long time, and people watched me. People stared when I walked down the street. But it wasn’t that long until Halloween. The children said look at the black cat and the women said cute ears and the men said meow.

When I came to the bar where the party was, I walked past it on purpose. I checked my pockets for money and my ID. I did this standing out on the sidewalk before I turned around and went in.

I went straight to the bathroom. After I had peed and before I had flushed my phone rang. It was Mark. He thought I was at home. I explained that someone might be waiting to get in the bathroom. He said be safe and don’t talk to any strange men. But I knew he was happy I was out of the house on a Friday night.

When I hung up and left the bathroom I looked around and didn’t see anyone I knew. I didn’t want to talk to any strange men and I wished Mark was there and I hated the thought of ordering a drink for myself because it made me feel like an alcoholic. An alcoholic without any friends. I never said anything to anyone and I never ordered a drink and I left.

Down the street there was a bakery. It looked okay not to talk to anyone in. I didn’t know what to have and I wasn’t really hungry but I felt like I had to have something so I asked the lady at the counter. She asked if I liked chocolate and I said I loved chocolate and she told me what cake to get and I didn’t want it but I said okay.

I got a table in the corner by the window. There was a Magic Eye book on the table. I couldn’t see the illusions and my coffee was bad and I picked at my cake. A boy came in and looked at me every few minutes. I tried to read my book and took my cat-ears off.

The houses in that part of the Village are very beautiful. Some of them had pumpkins on the steps. I walked toward the glowing red subway lights and went home.

Outside it was rainy and all the buildings seemed to be beige even though they all aren’t really. I had an umbrella but I didn’t have it up because I didn’t have gloves and having my hands in my pockets kept me warmer than the umbrella, which just turned inside-out with the wind. Even in my pocket my right hand was a little cold, because I had picked up a seven of spades from the sidewalk and it wasn’t dry.

After climbing the stairs to my apartment I went into the bath but didn’t wash because I wasn’t dirty. I just wanted to use the hot wet to get the cold wet off of me. There weren’t any bubbles and only a few stray hairs were floating in the bathwater. I had my book with me, which was A Moveable Feast. I liked this book very much because it was not really fiction and it was about writing and about living and about Paris. I liked it so much I couldn’t wait until I was back on the subway to finish it. I wanted to finish it somewhere quiet and alone.

I had the towel on the floor next to the tub so I could dry my fingers in case I had one hand in the water and one on the book and then needed to turn the page. The towel was pink. The towels all turned pink in the wash once, when one of them bled on the others. It’s been so long now that I don’t remember which one did the bleeding and which ones are really white and stained. I don’t remember which towels are mine and which ones are Jennifer’s either.

Jennifer lives with me and we’ve been friends a long time, and it was she who had given me this book to read. I had read another Hemingway a couple weeks ago and liked it a lot. I like Hemingway because he writes short books with short chapters with short sentences with short words. And also because one time someone compared my writing to his, which is very silly but no one had said I’d written like anyone famous and talented before, and it made me like Hemingway and made me like whomever had said it, though now I can’t even remember who that was.

I was in the tub with one foot on the faucet when I got to the very last sentence on the very last page of the book. Underneath it, written lightly in very thin pencil-line was:

Hi Jennifer
I Love you
Sharon

Sharon is my mother, and I would have known it was her even if she had not signed it, because her handwriting looks like mine except I bear down harder and my letters are skinnier and I would not have capitalized Love. To read this made the back of my throat get hot and then the back of my eyes get hot. I wished my mother had given this book to me instead of Jennifer. I had really liked it.

I realized then that my mother had probably sent this book to Jennifer when Jennifer had gone to study in Paris that summer. That was the same summer that I was lost on the Interstates with James. My mother could not send me books and write “I Love you” in the back of them because she did not know where I was. This would not have been the right book to give me then anyway. I had stopped really reading and Paris was an impossible thing to comprehend.

Below my window a power line crosses 43rd Street. A trio of tennis shoe pairs dangle from it, like relics of a 1950’s sitcom. The children play ball in the street and wait for the ice cream man, but the difference is that they are constantly shouting “fuck you” and other obscenities at each other. I can hear it from my little bedroom on the 4th floor, and sometimes the lady who shares the fire escape with me will lean out of her window and holler down to whichever kid is hers to shut up.

* * *

To get from Astoria to the Village, it’s a fifteen minute walk to the subway station from my apartment and then another thirty minutes on the train if there aren’t delays. There are often delays. When I first moved here, I was really annoyed by the commute, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Now that I’ve gotten busy, I find it nice to be forced by the MTA to just sit still for a while.

I do almost all my pleasure reading on the subway, and it goes to show you how much time I spend on it that I’ve done more reading since I moved to NYC than I had in quite a while before it. I might have a coffee in my hand, and music in my ears. I might be lost in 1920’s Paris when the delays happen and I might not even notice them. All around me, the car will empty and get crowded again and people will stand clear of the closing doors. I can find it a warm and peaceful ritual, a something that is always the same. When the train gets really slow I can see all the graffiti and trash and homeless hotels set up in the tunnels, and somehow it gives the City life. When I get out and exit the station, I might swipe my Metrocard for someone coming in, which is the best thing about having an unlimited monthly pass and a long ride in.

* * *

The happiest bit of my day is walking through Washington Square Park on the way to the lab. Whatever anxieties I may be having about math or my competence in general, I wake up from them then, to feel the crisp morning air and October drizzle washing my face. The world seems full of photographic possibility. A woman holds an umbrella over herself and the book she is reading. A student with no umbrella sketches her. White men walk little dogs and black men sit at chess tables. The fountain is on. Under the statue of Garibaldi, my 18-year-old self sits in her big black sweater that falls off her shoulder, waiting for her boyfriend to arrive from out of town. I walk past the ghost, lightfooted, and feel content for that for this moment, I am exactly where I should be.

* * *

At the big tag sale in Central Park, I choose only white shirts in soft fabrics. I rummage with the masses, but my hand finds only these out-of-season angel clothes. I leave all the colors and the patterns for the stylish indie girls whose asymmetric haircuts match their asymmetric hips (one or the other is always jutting out). I’m sure that those girls can find something to do with them.

* * *

When Mark was here last weekend, we had a late brunch in a French cafe in the East Village. We sat outside and he let me have the chair facing the sidewalk and we sipped a mimosa. Mark ordered in French and waiter called me Madame. I don’t remember talking of anything more important than puppies and how Americans don’t have conversations like Europeans do. The lady who owned the restaurant asked me if her beaded bracelet was purple or brown. I said it was purple and she didn’t believe me. We lingered a long time and felt happy and didn’t think about how he had to go home tomorrow. We had espresso in those tiny cups they have and split the raspberry on the creme caramel. It was the first nippy Saturday of the Fall, and we’d made love that morning, and we would go drinking that night.

Lacking subtlety, I do myself no justice, but perhaps I have exhausted all the justice I might have done.

Sometimes I say to myself, “You shouldn’t be trying so hard,” but I don’t listen, and it hardly matters, because I am not trying very hard afterall.

The unfortunate thing about the young writer, the younger writer like me, is that she hardly cares a bit for setting - not as far as it extends beyond the boundaries of her cranium. So there are only sentences, ungrounded, and if by luck one of them turns out well, it is still quite homeless and lost.

* * *

There was a time I believed my writing self to be my highest self. I wrote the self my day-to-day self wanted to become.

Now, it’s not at all like that. I write my lowest, foulest, most-flawed self, with all her faults magnified. I take up my notebook and my ego stares straight into a makeup mirror. I write my bitterness, my selfishness, my greed, my crudeness, my sense of entitlement, my hate, my arrogance - all the things I want hidden as I walk through the world and my relationships. I’ve actually said to people, many times, that I do not feel or understand anger, and yet you read these diaries and it is so glaring and so intense.

I would like to think this is some cleansing practice, a way to release all this pent-up self-pity. But I don’t know. If it’s on paper, then it is there. I have to stare it in the face, yes, but do I have to deal with it? Do I not just glorify it and perpetuate it further?

There is a sort of person I would like to be - a person who is loving, forgiving, compassionate - and I know that I am capable of being that - that I have had moments of realization that were quite intensely felt, quite beautiful. But those times are so hard to write about, and my narrative avoids them. This is not only true of the story of myself that I write on paper, but the story of myself that I tell in my head, the story that I whisper to myself relentlessly.

It is a constant battle not to believe that all the drama is really who I am. The most important work happens in those moments between thoughts, the gaps in the inner dialogue, but when those gaps are still very narrow, it is hard to believe that they exist at all.

There is a long history of other writers, much better writers than I am, writing of their, or from their, insanity. Writers tend to be bipolar, and I am beginning to realize that the “poles” involved aren’t simply depression vs. mania, but conflicting views of the self. There is the self that is great and brilliant and artistic, and the self that is horrid and flawed and broken. It is painted that a bipolar person would be always stuck in one of these modes of thinking, but it seems to be that the real trouble, my trouble at least, lies in the fact that I often feel both of these ways at the same time. It is very confusing to feel at once that you are beautiful and disgusting. And it confuses matters even further when you begin to realize that feeling either of these ways is a simple and similar ego-trip, and that there is yet another option that is vast - an accepting, non-judging way to look at it all, a feeling that all is as it should be and these labels have no meaning.

In the lab, we study whether objects are recognized as wholes or by parts. It seems I recognize myself by parts. The whole is just too vast, embodying too many contradictions. I don’t know why it is that I’d prefer to write the part that has to have the big crying complaining breakdown, and leave out the calm, sensible, self that steps up afterward, embarking on the next paradigm.

It may be simply that artists paint the picture of their insanity because their sanity is just too busy to pose. If only a fraction of your self is stable, that fraction has be devoted entirely to getting and keeping your life running with some degree of order. I can sit and write of my confusion and all my various feelings of loneliness and desperation, but the fact remains that there is part of me that is keeping my shit together all the while. I just don’t write about the self that is wading through a sea of scientific papers, the self that’s attending talks at the Center of Neural Science, opening bank accounts, paying taxes, learning programming languages, making me get up in the morning, watching the presidential debates, keeping me in good graces with my parents, negotiating my return to school after three years away. Maybe I just don’t find that self as interesting as the self who never grew up and never had to deal with adult concerns.

We were sitting after yoga and I was see-through. My skin was gone. I had my eyes closed and then I opened them and it was still the same. The room was dark and there were other people sitting and I was transparent.

The teacher said follow your breath but I couldn’t. I was barely breathing. I didn’t need to breathe because I didn’t have any skin and all the air was already inside. There was nothing between me and the air. It was inside me and outside me and in the other people sitting, all at the same time. I didn’t need to do anything about that.

I sat there and tried not to think of how I could not feel my hands or my arms or my legs or anything at all except the air. Then I started to get dizzy.

By the time we chanted “Aum” I was feeling downright sick. I wasn’t transparent anymore. I stayed on my mat for a long time after class was over.

When I changed out of my yoga clothes there was a mirror. I looked in it and smiled. I was very beautiful. The other people changing were very beautiful too. It was all the same beauty.