the habit of being

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?