the habit of being

I had an honest-to-God Missed Connection on the 6 train today. I’ve read these things on CraigsList, but had little faith that they happened to normal non-stalkers like me. Furthermore, when Mitsu told me he sometimes saw 20 women he found attractive in the course of a given day, I had to counter with a measly 10 men a month, which makes this experience even more special. Here’s how it went down:

Me: Wearing a hard-to-describe white Max Studio top that buttons down the side, a long gray French Connection skirt that ties around the waist and poofs out to make my hips look even bigger than they actually are, a flowery April Cornell scarf wrapped around my neck approximately 2.5 times, and blue canvas tennis shoes with rainbows on them and no socks. My just-beyond-shoulder-length brown hair was brushed into manageable “please don’t let me look like a strung out maniac in my passport photos this time” ringlets. I was sitting next to your friend across the aisle and fiddling nervously with the fringe on my scarf and the handles of my blue Vision Sciences Society 2005 totebag as we made eye contact 5-7 times but did not smile at one another.

You: Even slouched over with your elbows on your knees, I could tell you were at least 5 inches taller than me. Your eyes were of Precious Moments figurine proportions, which I have to say freaked me out a little at first, before I fully appreciated your face as a whole, and your slightly long but not at all immasculating brown hair, which looks an awful lot like my father’s in that picture of him from when he was 25 and so hot I don’t even feel embarrassed saying so. Unlike my father at 25, you are not built like a string-bean. Your bright green tee shirt and shorts might have looked dorky on someone else, but on you, they said “I’m European, possibly Italian, I play futbol, er, soccer, and I look great naked.”

We both got out at 59th and Lex, where we transferred to the N/R. I went uptown, and you went downtown, and you’ll probably fly back home to Italy and completely forget me and the amazing 5 stops we shared.

I miss my slurry accent and the heat and the grasshoppers and big as my hand. I miss the dumb boys who got their gargantuan pick-up trucks on their 16th birthday, the happiest day of their lives. I miss being called “Miss.” I miss bonfires of Tillmanstone Farm, and watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show on a sheet at Georgia Southern University on Halloween night. I miss my mother’s anatomy lab, the bones and the slides and the opened-up cats. I miss Willingway Hosptial, where my mother worked before that. I miss my own stream and my own pecan orchard and all my generations of ill-fated cats. I miss picking blackberries of the sides of my own dirt road, which didn’t have a name, and then did. I miss Lisa Luckett, with her Little Miss Bulloch County tropheys, and how she stole my Barbie clothes even though she had so many. I miss the red car my step-father drove, red with a white stipe down the side, while he and my mother were still dating. I miss handing out the chips to the grown-ups at AA meetings, even to the ones who hadn’t earned them yet. I miss arrowheads. I miss having a better library in my mother’s bedroom than anywhere else in town. I miss how the bookstores never lasted longer than six months before going out of business. I miss family stories, and all the windowsill lizards that shared the same name - Leonard - and stars. I miss runnign dow the beach at Tybee at one in the morning, and going to the Ritz Carlton in Atlanta once a year so we couple pretend we weren’t poor. I miss hating my stupid, backwards, hometown, and those red-faced fat people who sold Confederate flags at tables on the side of the road, and used “Yankee” as a derogatory term, effectively.

I signed up for what I thought was a contemporary art course, called “Art Now.” Having taken the elevator on the wrong side of the building, I got lost and came in late. There was a very long table set up, with about 12 students on either side. On one end, a gray-haired professor in a bowtie held a pipe he wasn’t smoking. On the other end, a scuffy middle-aged man sat with glossy eyes and a frayed red string around his wrist. The only empty seat was next to the string wrist guy, and I really started to get worried when he said “I bet some of you guys thought this class was really going to be about art, haha.”

Soon we were told that we needed to be sitting in a Magic Circle, which meant we had to back away from the table. Red string man grabbed the back of my chair for me and dragged me back toward the wall. His Ph.D., which he brought up about 4 times just in case we forgot he had one, was in shamanism.

After the Magic Circle was in order, we learned that the main project of the course was to write a MANIFESTO. The syllabus was a stream-of-consciousness rant about how to be a radical using as little punctuation as possible, and every time the MANIFESTO came up, it was in all capitals. The MANIFESTO was to cover the next ten years, basically, our vision for a utopian society, how we were going to change the world, etc. The first step was the turn out all the lights in the class room, meditate on our futures, and then go around the table sharing what came to mind.

A blonde girl named Aubrey, who had a lot of necklaces, said that in ten years she would star in a gritty character drama, with no action scenes, directed by Sofia Coppola. One boy was so full of himself in the past and present that he couldn’t quite imagine the future. He’s already written his Unauthorized Biography of Christina Aquilera, and now he is concentrating on a new project about the history of the metrosexual. At least three girls will be starting fashion lines. One boy will be writing an addendum to the Bible.

I said I’d be a mother, and the next day I dropped the class.

It’s been one year and seven months since we met, and we’re sitting on a bench. We’re sitting on a strudy old bench whose green paint is chipping off onto the lumpy brick sidewalk where the pigeons wait for handouts. We’re sitting under a tree next to a handball court fenced in all the way up to the sky. We’re sitting in a drizzle of rain in a perfect breeze that smells like expensive perfume and flowers and pigeon shit and homeless men’s urine wafting up from the subway. We’re sitting on Spring Street.

He has my cheek in his hand and he’s trying to make up for four months of not kissing me and it stops drizzling and I make up for it with my tears. He says “I love you” and I say “I’m going to start crying” even though I’m already crying and his fingers are wet and he says “don’t.”

He gets down on his knees in front of me and the bench and he kisses my knee.

My ankle has dried blood on it - a long scab surrounded by a wash of brown from the bathwater when I cut myself shaving and it bled more than I thought it would. My blood stain matches the coffee stains on his raincoat and no one else is dirty but us. Everyone walking by has such pretty dogs. Everyone has such pretty shoes. Even the girls who are trying to dress grungy for style are so impossibly clean. The children all look like cherubs.

Dear Someone,

I haven’t been writing journal entries. It’s been a long time. I had to write things called journal entries for a class, but because I had to write them, they weren’t. I’ve written a few longer pieces. I’ve finished my first semester back at school. I made A’s in all (two) of my classes. I’ve sighed in the relief that I can still do it, and maybe better than before.

I’ve gone to Florida as a scientist, and come clean about being a writer, only to have my Emminent Colleagues in the Field tell me (after a few glasses of wine) that I could still do it - I could get my Ph.D. and go off to some small college (closet) and teach and write and Be Happy. The idea made me happy. The wine made me happy. The only thing is how everyone says a graduate program done well is all-consuming, and I don’t think I could stop writing for five years now just to get a vita. And the other thing is how I don’t even have a BA, but I’ve broken so many rules already. I’m much too friendly with people I oughtn’t be, and not at all friendly with the people who ought to be my friends.

I seem to be in a terrible rush to be an adult. Many of the other students in my writing class assumed I was writing about things that had happened to me very many years ago, and were surprised to find out that I’m not older than I am. Sometimes it does feel like by writing about things that happened, I put them further into the past than they would be otherwise. Once a girl that was me is committed to the page, she is no longer happening, and I am someone new.

Sometimes I think I will always waste the same amount of time, no matter how busy I am. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I find that I look more like my parents than myself. Sometimes I feel ridiculous in the clothes I wore a year ago. A year ago, I did not pay any attention to the news. A year ago, no one ever asked me if I had kids. No one ever asked me if I were married.

I did handstands in the ocean, off of Lido Key. I never wear make-up anymore. My birthday is coming up, and I want to know my entire genealogy. I don’t just want to know about the famous relatives or the crazy relatives or the writers - I want to know about all of them. I want to cry because I never met them.

Today I bought Electrelane’s new album. Today I signed up for a pilot program the MTA has put together where they’ll email me if my subway lines are screwed up. Today I had a falafel super combo and went to a talk about computer vision and laid out a plan for a paper about peripheral reading and told my ex-boyfriend he could sleep at my place this weekend. Today I had 1 skinny latte, 1 coffee with milk and no sugar, 1 earl grey tea, and 2 English breakfast teas. Today I went to my first yoga class in five months, my first yoga class since I stopped going because of morning sickness.

I want to live in New York City until I’m 30. I want to live in New York City until I move to California or Europe.

Yesterday I got passport pictures taken and I looked like a hag. My hair was a raging frizzy mess and my eyes were different sizes and my lips were bleached out and I don’t care. I haven’t had sex in almost half a year and I don’t care.

A man came up to me while I was writing and asked me if he could draw my portrait. I asked if I could read. I read, and I sat so still my back hurt. I sat and sat until he showed it to me. My nose did not look exactly like my nose, but it was a nice drawing. He had a large gap between his teeth. He was very Black and very big. He asked me my name and I said Kat and he said meow and I said yeah. He wrote my name of the picture and said he was Ron and it was nice to meet me. I kept reading.

I’ve noticed that loaning out my favorite books feels like letting someone sleep with my lover. It makes me feel sick.

Best,
Katharine