the habit of being

Lately, what I really want to do is go to Antarctica. I keep saying this: when are we going to Antarctica? But I’m not sure if it’s really Antarctica I want so much as the idea of Antarctica. It doesn’t even really need to be that far away, just as long as there are hardly any people. Antarctica could be just about anywhere, except New York City, because just about everywhere feels deserted compared to here. But it’s also the idea of all that white snow and ice. To tell you the truth, after I made the switch, I never went back to liking the hot soaking tub at Osaka as much as the cold.

The other night, Saturday I think, I went to see the film adaptation of this book Into the Wild, which is based on a true story of a guy who dropped out of his regular life after college and hitchhiked all over the country, before going to Alaska and freezing to death. When I was eighteen I did something similar, minus the freezing to death, and I read this book while I was on the road. So I went to see the movie, and, in it, the guy carries the same book of edible plants my boyfriend and I had with us during our travels and used to make a few very unsatisfying grass salads. For some reason, I felt compelled to email my ex and tell him this. He read the book too, and I think he identified with the protagonist more than I did. After we split up, he went on to travel alone, thruhiking the Appalachian Trail, which was probably what he needed in the first place, and then he got married.

To make a long story short, our relationship was a big traumatic mess that haunted me for a long time afterward, and we didn’t communicate for years, until this past April, when I was in Portland, just at the beginning of waking up. I emailed him, and we wound up having sushi, me and him and his wife. Nothing particularly noteworthy happened at this meeting, but afterwards it seemed like I’d laid down an incredible burden. We pretty much hadn’t talked since then, until the other day, when I emailed him again, about this movie and the plant book. He replied, saying he still had the plant book, and rather nonchalantly added that he’d just been at Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s place when he just happened to be flipping through the friend’s back issues of a certain magazine when he found a story I wrote. The story was something I published under a pseudonym, and it dealt in part with some of the traumatic happenings of our relationship.

All of this is a little strange: the issue of the magazine in question is now about a year and a half old; I just happened to see this film and email him right after his discovery of it; and, to top it all off, apparently he and his wife have been planning to name their first son the same name I gave to “his” character in the story.

I distinctly remember being so incredibly panicked over the prospect of any of the real people in the story, which I wrote in early 2005, finding and reading it that I considered not publishing the piece at all. I finally convinced myself that that was incredibly unlikely to happen, at least not for a very long time… maybe in the very distant future, if I wound up getting famous, someone would make the connection. After all, it wasn’t that big of a magazine. Anyway, now that the dreaded event has occurred, I am much less mortified over it than amazed at how the universe must have had to conspire to allow it to happen. Things like this happen to me all the time!

I had this realization, while I was in the shower, about a week ago. The gist of it was this: I was in the shower, standing there under the water, and I was thinking about a phone conversation I had had a few minutes earlier. I was in the middle of thinking about this conversation when I noticed that I was actually in the shower. I paused in the middle of the thought and said to myself, wait a minute, I’m in the shower now.

In this split-second pause, it was clear to me that while I was thinking about that phone conversation a moment earlier, I wasn’t just in the shower, I was actually still having the conversation, right then. The conversation wasn’t some event that was stuck in the past, over and done with and frozen and unmodifiable. The conversation, as I thought about it, was just as much in the present as the shower was, and in fact no longer existed in any other moment but the one I was currently in. The conversation wasn’t sitting back there behind me somewhere in a perfected form I could only partly access, it was right there before me, happening, even though I was doing something else. It wasn’t just a static thing I was remembering, but something that was still active and changing as I thought about it.

Thinking about all this a little more, it becomes obvious that not only is that phone conversation going on right now as I bring it into mind again, but everything is.. my entire history is in each moment. And every moment, my history is changing. Just as there are many possible futures, there are many possible pasts. There isn’t just this one immutable life story I can plug into or out of at different points in time. It sounds silly, but it is literally true that every breath is a brand new life: a new past, present, and future all in one. And this is why we cannot be forever doomed by the mistakes we’ve made and the traumas we’ve suffered. It isn’t possible, because those mistakes aren’t really the stable anchors we think they are. Or, to put it another way, they are only stable in as much as we think they are. All you really have to do is let go of the belief in this false stability, and you’re free.

I take it back. New York City can be Antarctica too.

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?

I watch a neighborlady in a $3.99 housewife smock from the dollar store, hosing off her air conditioner on the sidewalk, husband standing by. The heat wave is over. No more $200 electric bills. An American flag flaps. My bedroom door slams on its own. The breeze makes my cell phone fuzzy, and my mother says “Step away from the window.”

“Well, if you’re going to read a book about a retard,” she says, “you should just read The Sound and the Fury.” It’s too hard, of course, for my little brother, for whom I’d recommended The Curious Incident… He has to read a novel for school, and we’re appalled but not surprised that his teacher gave him Left Behind. Half the girls in my high school English reported on one book or another from that series when the dreaded Oral Presentation came round. Me? Atlas Shrugged. “My little heretic,” laughs Mom. We settle on The Catcher in the Rye for Wayne.

Watching the sunrise on ephedrine, my fingers tremble. Watching The Decalogue on Tootsie rolls, my mouth sweats. I take my camera out looking for things that look like photographs to take pictures of.

At the museum, I’d rather look at the people looking at the art.

These pills are big and purple and they make me feel like I’m going to have a heart attack or a panic attack any second. Apparently a lot of people have had heart attacks, and that’s why it’s illegal. I probably would’ve thrown away the bottle a long time ago if it hadn’t been for the ban. It’s not like I think they will actually work. Taking pills that make you feel sick is nice, because then you feel justified in taking more pills. Faking an addiction you don’t actually have: on the edge, over the edge, off the deep-end.

A better approach to losing weight without working out. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner: EAT COFFEE.

Little Asian girls with pigtails are the cutest thing. Saw one in a blue cotton dress with a balloon in the DMV, where I waited for five hours for the ID with my misspelled name. Now they are springing up everywhere.

I was in Soho, taking pictures of graffiti and windows, two of the most chickenshit things to take pictures of that there are, when I decided I would Buy Something, even though I don’t have any money on account of the new iBook that I can’t play the finale of Six Feet Under on. I hadn’t bought new clothes since I moved here. So a window saying Sample Sale emerged with an arrow, which I followed to a door. Somehow I tried on and bought a gray dress that was a size or two too large for me. Maybe the extra space in the dress was filled up by how huge I feel, but in any case it is hideous. It looks like the silk version of the $3.99 housewife smock, only I paid a lot more for it, only to ball it up and toss it up on the top shelf of my closet, disgusted.

I went to the Photography section at the bookstore to look at The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Closer, which are both soft and losing hold of their bindings thanks to people like me and our pilgrimages. We sit cross-legged on the industrial carpet in the middle of the aisle, not caring if we’re blocking people as we flip through, slowly. Only once, then put it back. They’re in such bad shapes, these books, that no one would ever actually purchase them, which is good because I’ll know where they are when I need them, and actually having them at home might just wear them out anyway.

I’ve always wished I could drive a car, but my terror of learning how is paralyzing. I grew up in the kind of town where driving is absolutely essential in establishing one’s freedom and independence. In Statesboro, Georgia, if you couldn’t drive, you couldn’t get anywhere. I stayed in my room all the way through high school, and fell in love over the Internet. By the time I moved to a city where you don’t need to drive to be free and independent, it was too late. Because I was in love, I was anything but free.

Now, four years later, I walk around New York City looking at all the wonderful places I could go and things I could do if only I weren’t alone. I can’t stand the idea of eating in a nice restaurant by myself. My insecurity about not having a date would ruin the food. Seeing a movie or visiting a museum alone is tolerable, but if there’s no one to share it with, I feel like I’m missing out on half of the experience.

Every few weeks I post an online personal ad. Every response I read makes me feel more and more like a prostitute. By the end of a day of this, I am sick to my stomach. I delete the ad. I delete all the responses - even the nice, not-creepy ones. The nauseated feeling doesn’t go away. I realize that I don’t actually want to meet anyone new. I hate being alone, but I hate the idea of having to perform a first-date routine even more. It’s the same problem I had with driving.