the habit of being

My window looks out over the Hudson River and the West Side Highway. I have thick drapes to keep out the traffic noise and the light from the streetlamp. It isn’t perfect but I still manage to sleep until late morning or afternoon. My bed has collapsed but the mattress is on the floor and that’s all I really need. Or so I tell myself to avoid calling that antique repair place in Chelsea I found online a week ago. Anything not to have to talk to anyone.

I haven’t left the apartment today. Silvia is back with stories of baracades in Mexico City and political drama I had no idea was happening. Someone gave her friend a sandwich with money hidden inside, a bribe to join the rally for a candidate who lost but refuses to accept that and has taken to blocking traffic. And then there were photos of the All Saints altar for her father, and the story of his death, and then the stories of the deaths of the two cats she had previous to Ally, who is still hanging out with me a fair amount even though Silvia is back.

Tuesday I stayed up until 2 watching the election returns. M had said that we’d lost Virginia for sure and I said that we hadn’t and by Wednesday I was just as excited about having been right about something as about the turnout itself.

On Thursday I panicked in the middle of a neuroscience exam, and it was so surreal, even in the midst of the panic I kept thinking about how it was really the exam and I was really freaking out and how could that be happening? The normal thing is that I panic right up until the exam begins and then I am focussed and fine. But this time I was so nervous I couldn’t collect my thoughts enough to write my essays coherently. I didn’t even feel like there was any material I didn’t know, only that I couldn’t get the words out, my head was so muddled. It is still hard to believe that I actually choked on a test. Choking on tests just isn’t something I do.

But Friday I found out I got into the writing workshop I wanted and it is an enormous relief to know that, at the very least, by January I will be working. As long as I can start writing again I know everything will be alright.

Flipping through my old India ink drawings and M says I’m really a lot more interesting than I act. I say I used to act it out all the time, it was all I ever thought about: how to do more than simply make art, but to live it, every minute. How to be the story that needs to be told. It was palpable, my sense of who I was: it covered my space, dictated my dress, consumed me always. I was naive, a drama queen, but I was someone specific, someone intense. And now, I tell myself that’s all shoved in boxes, hidden in writings that no one ever read unless they were there, and there were so few people there, buried under my schedule.

But an artist, he says, doesn’t need to be an artist on the outside, she can look and act like everyone else, as long as she’s got it on the inside. The inside and the work are all that matters. I can have any mopey persona I want, as long as I don’t stop making things, as long as I don’t stop completely.

Just take one day of that 17 year old’s life and break it up into 2 hour chunks and live it out over weeks. In between getting Marian’s memory span experiment going and studying the properties of retinal ganglion cell receptive fields, I could still paint, I could still wonder about all the things I wondered about before I was so worried about all the things I’m so worried about. I tell myself it’s impossible but it really isn’t. That’s just something I tell myself, so I don’t have to think. Adulthood is all about making things go on automatic, and that’s the opposite of living.

It’s not that she’s producing incredible work that’s so amazing, says M about MJ, it’s that she’s producing incredible work as an adult.

And maybe it is true that you don’t realize you need to make a change until you’ve already made it. Maybe something has shifted and it’s only a matter of time. But no.. no waiting. Either it’s happened or it hasn’t. Or it’s happening. Is something different? I don’t know. Maybe. What if I just pretend it is? Is that enough?

One, no, two, of those India ink drawings, five years old, mentioned the word serenity. I wrote a story called Serenity only four months ago. (Four months feels like an infinity to have not done anything.) It is odd that we can have so many recurring themes in our lives without really realizing. A concept engulfs you and you feel like you’ve never felt such waves before, when actually the same resonance has lingered for ages, building up and backing off again and building up until the ringing is all you can hear.

And if I haven’t actually changed at all? If I was always, am always, okay?

In the first three days of November, my grandfather had a stroke on vacation in Hawaii, my mother told me my brother is unhappy and doing poorly in school, my antique bed collapsed and I was nearly squashed like an insect trying to disassemble it on my own. Otherwise, I just don’t want to leave the apartment, at all. The friends who can manage to break through my walls of Seasonal Affectation find nothing but moping and complaining on the other side. Mitsu did manage to get me out to see Khaela’s show on Friday, which was great. He also got my mattress back to a flat position on the floor until I can work up the nerve to call a furniture repair shop, which makes me wonder where I’d be if I were actually as alone as I go around telling myself that I am. Also, for what it’s worth, my roommate’s cat has been head over tail for me ever since my roommate left for Mexico. And I applied for a writing workshop next semester.

Yesterday I went plummaging through boxes of pictures and letters and bits of the past. Crumpled origami cranes and hotel keys and zines I’ve gotten in the mail, magazine cutouts taped together into sheets that used to decorate walls, beads and notebooks and little silk bags and little wooden boxes. Piled up in the corners of my room I’ve got a whole collage of my past and my aesthetic, which always takes me by surprise when I discover it again. Whenever I meet a new person whom I feel connected with, it’s this that I want to give them. I want to ball it all up for them and tie it in a bow, I want to sit with them and walk them through all these small, beautiful items and how they all fit together and how they all matter, and how they’re all part of me. I want to do all of this so they’ll really know who I am. But looking at these souvenirs myself, I almost feel like the girl who is so strongly evoked by them is someone else. Someone I used to be, who had this intensity, this story. Reading my old writing is the same way. There is this recognition - oh yes, that was how it was for me, back when I was in my life, back when I felt things - but there’s no sense of why I’m no longer in that state or how to get back to it. And I spend so much of my life feeling like I’m not in it. You watch other people and *everything* they do seems to make up their life - going to work, shopping, washing dishes, everything - but when I look at myself it seems like only a very tiny subset of what I do qualifies as “my life.” I think, going to work, that’s just something I do because I have to, it’s not really my life. And so on. But it is! All of it is! And why aren’t I doing anything to make it look more like the life that I want?