the habit of being

I need a new notebook because all my old ones have too many pages written on them. I’m pretty sure my handwriting doesn’t even look like that anymore. It’s been too long to be sure.

The new apartment used to belong to artists who did things involving pretty and/or naked girls, which is all it takes to make art decent. The kitchen floor is pink and Jenny and I will get our own rooms and windows. There’s a grocery store down the street with fifty-four cent water. It’s kindof a long way from the subway but the rent is cheap and the neighborhood isn’t scary and there’s plenty of baklava. I can’t believe I’m actually moving back to New York. Some of our books are already boxed up.

On the way home from apartment-searching, my 5:00 bus had no leg room. The girl in front of me was tiny but put her seat back anyway making it even worse. Rain dripped through the emergency exit on the ceiling to the arm of the girl sitting next to me. At 9:30, outside Baltimore, I looked out the window and saw a red glowing tire bounce down the highway and hit a car. It turned out to be from our bus and we were trapped in the middle of the Interstate for 3 hours while no one told us anything except that it wasn’t safe to get out and it wasn’t safe to have anyone come pick us up. I got home at two in the morning.

I want to get a job in the visual perception lab I worked for back in 2001. I never really particularly understood the science but it didn’t matter as long as I was smart. Sometimes we talked about beauty and there was good Indian food at the lab meetings once a week.

At the lab, there are Rothko paintings and huge letters on the walls. Jivamukti is right around the corner. Please let it work out. My last day at the studio is next Friday and I will be unemployeed for a month except for dog-sitting.

My mother is afraid to leave her apartment. Well, at least, she doesn’t want to. She’d rather not.

She makes her to-do lists, and derides herself if she doesn’t “do right.” Doing right includes getting out of bed in the morning, walking the dog, going grocery shopping.

She confided in me, when she hadn’t left the building for a week. But it’s not that she’s miserable.

“I’m not sad all the time. I’m just sad about going places. When you’re here, and we’re all home, I’m real happy.”

“But only when you’re here,” she added after a pause, and then laughed.

I’m only there once a week, at most - on Sundays. She has not only to get up and get out, but to drive a whole hour to the city to pick me up, and drive a whole hour back with me, because I never learned how to drive myself. She does this, however hard it must be, and then we talk, and we joke, adding “fuckin’” in the middle of multisyllable words, drinking strong gin and tonics when “cocktail hour” chimes at 5. I beat everyone at Monopoly, and we watch Six Feet Under on HBO. I get more tip-fuckin’-sy at my parents’ place than most places I go out at night.

She drives me back on Monday morning, in time for work, after I insist that calling in sick isn’t an option.

. . .

My impending move terrifies me. I spend half my spare time reading job listings, the other half scoping out available housing. I’ve applied to be a receptionist at a Midtown doctor’s office, an organizer of an Upper East Side penthouse/walker of Labradors, an assistant to an East Village “peace activist.” I replied to a posting by a woman saying she’d give a free room in SoHo to someone “hip” who’d help her manage a newly-opened juice bar. I never hear anything back.

An announcement was made in the studio newsletter, and people keep coming up to me and asking when I’m leaving, what I’ll be doing in New York. I don’t have a very good answer. I say I used to live there, that I plan to go back to school eventually. Sometimes the subject switches over to September Eleventh and I’m off the hook.

The only time I ever fully stop worrying about moving is when I’m with Mark. We can take long naps together, in the middle of the day. I can stay away from my computer. I can say, quite simply and honestly, that I’m happiest when we’re together. But then he says he’ll miss me, and I joke with him about coming along, then I cry silently, because I know it’ll never happen. My getting him to leave DC is on par with my getting hit by lightning. He’s been here too long. He has too many memories. He actually said, out loud, that he can’t live without her.

I worry about credit checks, high rent, commuting a long way, my lack of a college degree, leaving the only community of friends I’ve ever had, not being able to see my mother every week. I worry about going backwards rather than forwards, trying to reclaim a past I can never have again and winding up with a future I don’t want. I worry that the Adult Astoria Experience is nothing like the Naive Greenwich Village Experience.

Still, I’m glad to be leaving the apartment James and I shared from October 2002 until May 2003, the apartment whose walls heard me screaming “fuck you” and “you are SUCH an asshole” in the middle of the night, the apartment I called in sick from and lay in bed all day in, the apartment we watched movies by the dozen in, to keep from having to talk. I’m glad of this, no matter how cheap and convenient that apartment is, no matter how used to my routine I’ve become.

I tell myself the move will keep me from getting too comfortable. That the reason it worries me so much, even though I know I can’t stay here forever, is because I can easily see myself wanting to stay in the same place for years and years, no matter how illogical, as long as I can create a perfectly molded cave that I can curl up in and feel supported on all sides.

I associate moving around constantly with the worst kind of mental instability and sadness I’ve ever experienced. People are so surprised, after hearing all my travel stories, that nothing scares me more now than uncertainty about where I’m going to sleep.

I’m just like my mother, just like Mark. One day I’ll need to get out, for my own good, and I’ll find that the comfy cave has become part of me, that leaving entails carrying a mountain on my shoulders.

Today M. brought me home early in the morning, after our one-cookie-each and French press coffee in the Cowboy Cup. Despite myself, I fell into the tub without writing, and then into bed in my towel, and I slept another three or four hours, dreaming dreams I promised myself I’d remember so I could tell him, but then forgot anyway.

I called my mother around noon, and she tells me that they may take an apartment in a renovated hotel in the middle of Frederick, MD. It is too small and too expensive, but we have always dreamed of living in a hotel, and I am happy for her. She talks about the park down the street, and school districts and restaurants and windows. They’ve already found a buyer for the house in Georgia, and there is so much to get rid of to move into an apartment, so much of my childhood I’ll never see again.

Jen and I went to an Indian restaurant for lunch and split the check. She went home to write a paper while I went shopping in the freezing rain. I bought cheap underwear and expensive foundation. Now I’m sitting in a bookstore cafe reading literary smut across from a stranger who is studying economics. I consider buying a dessert, and ponder how in the span of one month, my sex life has changed completely.

I feel very much like a virgin, who has been recently woken up. In so many ways this is ridiculous, because before I met M., I had already done everything. I had done so much that there was very little left to do. But without a new perversion to explore, I found, finally, pleasure instead. I cannot scream loud enough that I was wrong about everything. I knew nothing at all. Sex really is not violence. It does not have to be. It seems that everything before was only profanity, vulgarity, thinly-masked anger disguised as passion. I could never accept that now, knowing otherwise. I have become somebody else. I was a girl who had gone numb to everything but pain, but now I have found far better reasons to cry.

I’ve just about read this week’s whole New Yorker, which I swiped from the landlord’s mail pile before my English major of a roommate could get at it. If I do read it all, it’ll be a first probably, even though I’ve had literary pretensions my whole life, lived in Manhattan, and even had a copy in the mailbox every week back in Statesboro, GA (the anti-New York). My mother also read the Times for years before she ever set foot in the City, a moment I suspect she treasured even more than I did. I only had to spend 18 years in Georgia before I got to go there. She had to spend four decades and raise me with the right sensibilities.

Incidentally, I’m spending four days there next week, and lay in bed for an hour trying to remember the names of the streets I used to walk on in the Village. This time, I’ll stay in a friend’s dorm room at Columbia.

College interviews are possible. Expensive yoga classes are definite. I need to pick up some special hairclips for my mother. I need to go to my favorite Japanese bookstore, my favorite falafel joint. I need to get a fake ID.

. . .

After you’ve realized the literary quality of your own life and the limitations therein, what is next?

We tried to hang the mirror and failed. Then, we watched the film based on Henry and June, and maybe I thought it would teach him something about me, like when I told him to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is like I have my own little canon which I hope might explain me somehow better than I can; beyond my own mass of writings, there are certain books I feel need to be read by people who are close to me. (To know what moves me is to know me. I see beauty therefore I am?) There are certain movies I’ve watched with all my lovers. (There is that poem, and how I thought it was ours but really it is mine. Funny how easily the joint experiences and metaphors become individual after the separation.) He said I want you badly and we had sex on the couch. I’ve been wearing these shells around my wrist from Harvard Square; there is an old message in my voice mail I haven’t yet deleted, from a noisy New York street. I try to tell him things sometimes, but he finds me mostly quiet. I rage silently at the prospect of being written off as less than what I am, which is of course inevitable. Sometimes it bothers me terribly that he has not scrambled to read every word of mine he has access to - any morsel that may may hold another key to how I think, how I feel, my history. These are the things I most want to be wanted. I brought blackberries and dark chocolate wafers. I refilled the ice trays; they were empty. I cried for some silly reason and he felt guilty. We went to work in the morning.

. . .

I read The Life of an Amorous Woman by Ihara Saikaku and I slept right through the party I was supposed to go to last night. All as well; I feared for my chances of getting home. I held a friend’s not quite day-old baby in the hospital. She squeaked a little but didn’t cry, opened and closed her little mouth, was beautiful and smelled good. I got an invitation to another friend’s wedding reception in the mail, on nice paper with elegant calligraphy. I spent almost as much money on food last month as I did on my rent. Granted, my rent is pretty cheap, but so is my pay, and I need to stop eating out so much. I stepped on a nail in the big house, and silenced a beeping alarm. I dreamt I was back at NYU. It’s been a year and a half.

I sit in the grass on Washington Square Park. There are pigeons and people, so many people, on the 4th of July.

The first time I came to New York I was 13. Now, I am 18, and this is where I live. Though I haven’t moved yet, I know. I just know, walking around here and looking - all these people, two lovers embracing in the grass, a girl in pink jumping rope, people working in sketchbooks, people walking their dogs, every style of clothing imaginable. Nothing seems flat, and I’m not afraid of getting lost anymore. I belong here, in a relatively cliched way.

It is beautiful, calm, people are asleep, the breeze is perfect, there are birds and trees, a cross on the top of a building. Orange flowers, cell phones, video cameras (people video other people, just ordinary people walking by, only they are not ordinary at all, and neither am I). They never stop, these people, always moving, changing faces and bodies and sounds. The constant movement is static in itself, and as calming as the ocean, and somehow even still, in in a sort of alternative way, maybe like quantum mechanics, though I can’t say why. Close to me a single squirrel stands on it hind legs, looking around. An old mime gesticulates in a beard and a tuxedo. Some guy in grey looks at me, occasionally. There is a pen for children and a pen for dogs. Benches dotted with backs of all lengths and breadths.

(It occurs to me that I could be fucking you loudly right here in this grass and no one would care at all.)

We could be those two lovers sitting together, lost in their own little world, observing the the walkers in their strange getups as if they were no different than the trees, the purple NYU flags, the yellow cabs, the birds and the breeze.

The squirrel likes me, it is practically in my lap.

I want to be a performance artist, paint myself brick colors and lie still in the path, watch this odd kaleidoscope picture change again and again, as if nothing but a speck apart from it all, an object with eyes.

I think it will rain, and I didn’t bring an umbrella.

I might have so many adventures here. I might have no time left even to think or to write them all down. I’ll just get up one morning and decide today I will -go- somewhere. I could do that again everyday and never run out of places to go, even without leaving the city. Yet something is missing, and I want you here to see this with me, because you’d really SEE it, in the way only you can, and you would understand.

. . .

Home. Not home. In between homes.

Orientation was tiring. I did a lot of walking around Greenwich Village, adventurously. Explored many little stores, some of which had sections one had to be 18 to enter. Met girls with lots of piercings and very little clothing. Talked with Thea from South Carolina (who is also in a large-scope long distance relationship) and Brad with blue hair (future English major and wimp, but has read lots of good stuff, and recommended good ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s). Shocked people with stories of south Georgia at the “diversity workshop.” Went to the largest used book store in the world, which is indeed quite huge, with books on shelves so tall you have to get up on ladders just to read the titles of the ones near the top. Took a biology test. Realized that I’m going to attend the kind of college where the orientation leaders show you the Rocky Horror Picture Show on a big screen in a lecture hall, scream all the call lines, and even dress up and do the floorshow. Got used to telling people that I’m a biology major, and registering their shock. Rode in taxis, alone, didn’t get lost, or raped, or even murdered. Signed up for fall classes:

MONDAY
9:30 -10:45 Calculus I (lecture)
11:00 -12:15 Molecular and Cell Biology I (lecture)
2:00 - 3:15 General Chemistry I (clinic)
3:30 - 4:45 Writing the Essay
TUESDAY
9:30 - 10:45 General Chemistry I (lecture)
1:30 - 6:00 General Chemistry Lab (lab)
WEDNESDAY
9:30 - 10:45 Calculus I (lecture)
11:00 - 12:15 Molecular and Cell Biology I (lecture)
2:00 - 2:50 Calculus I (recitation)
3:30 - 4:45 Writing the Essay
THURSDAY
9:30 - 10:45 General Chemistry I (lecture)
2:00 - 3:15 Molecular and Cell Biology (recitation)
FRIDAY
9:30 - 10:20 General Chemistry Lab (lecture)
11:00 - 12:15 General Chemistry I (recitation)

I’m an academic masochist, though I’m starting to think masochism doesn’t exist.

. . .

Haley: “My two years of biology in high school were the toughest, most magical introduction to any subject I’ve had. I found I was good at humanities, but I was better at science. And I had no idea what I would do with a humanities degree, didn’t want to be an academic, and didn’t want to do business; besides, I was horrible at econ. Most importantly, I found that academia killed the most exciting parts of the humanities for me through its excruciating essay assignments and bombastic academic writing. In contrast, academic science gave me the vocabulary to discuss biological sciences and the tools to answer my billion questions. Even with all it’s systemic problems and personal frustrations, I love science. I found it incredibly exciting and question-provoking. I still do.”

I wish I were more original, but I must admit that I feel almost exactly the same way, especially about how classes often ruin everything I like about the humanities, particularly writing.

I decided, before I left for NYC, that I wanted to make a zine, a little paper collection, highlights from sarasvati and erendira. I am not forgetting about that, it seems important. I want to send one to my AP English teacher. I promised her non-academic writing for a year.

(ETC: A story is always hardest to tell for the first time. After that, it can be called to mind fluidly and recited at will. The telling becomes automatic and is much more an exercise in sound and cadence than in fragment reconstruction, mystery restoration, thinking through black holes or keyholes, working from part to whole (what is that called? one of the tropes) or vice versa. That’s why I tend to feel as if I haven’t really finished living a moment in my life until I’ve written it down. )