the habit of being

My Personality professor is charismatic and articulate and funny, but what I really love about her is that she uses the words human suffering on a regular basis. Without embarrassment. To talk about things other than the crisis in Darfur. To talk about ordinary everyday life.

It is, in fact, downright embarrassing for me to be as sad as I am sometimes. It wasn’t always. But now I am so far from being a refugee, and I know that. There is such vibrancy! A week ago, I was running to dance performances nightly. Buying lacy dresses. Lying on a slab of rock while a stranger scrubbed me from head to toe. Lying on a palate while a stranger walked on me. Missing the pink striated sunset over the Hudson River, right across the street from my apartment, because I was just too goddamn busy to stop a minute and look at it. I was walking around out there with my neuroscience text in my arm like a badge of honor, though I know as well as anyone that that’s not really who I am.

I spent last weekend in DC, feeling things. I hadn’t been down there in over a year. I walked around my old neighborhood, walked by my apartment in Georgetown. It was so fucking beautiful. My walk to work, everyday, went past all these gorgeous, gorgeous, homes, brick sidewalks, leaves on the ground, the whole cliche. And it was so quiet and so calm. Peaceful. People walking their dogs. I often think about how lucky I am to live in the West Village now, but, honestly, that part of Georgetown wipes the floor with West Village in terms of sheer loveliness of the environment. And I was living there for a third of my current rent.

It’s hard to believe that I lived in all that beauty during one of the saddest periods of my life. I spent nearly a year there before I started to appreciate it, even a little. My second year in DC was better, but still, people would try to tell me how good I had it.. working in this pretty yoga studio, living this pretty life… and I didn’t believe it at all. All I could think about was how I’d fucked up my life in New York, how I had to make up for that somehow, how everything was ruined and I so far behind, such a disappointment.

So I figured out how I could fix it. And, on the one hand, I am incredibly proud. I’ve built my version of a New York lifestyle out of toothpicks. I can look at where I am now, compared to any other time in my life, Georgetown included, and I can see the progress. The obvious progress. And yet I’m not satisfied! I want this. I want that. I want to write, to create, instead of “working” in that other, lesser, sense. I want a family, a home, security.

And everything, every small step, I actually attain becomes meaningless as soon as I’ve got it, and I’m still left with this misery of wanting what I cannot have. And then, maybe, two or three years later I can look back and realize what I did have, all along. But in the meantime I’m just missing it.

Greedy, juvenile, insatiable, ungrateful.

These are the same old feelings I have already experienced and analyzed, over and over, but recognizing them for what they are doesn’t actually help. It may be a step, but it doesn’t help. I feel like I’m too smart for this, too old for this, and I pile that guilt on too.

I just want the anxiety to end. I want my destiny taken out of my own hands. I want to choose not to choose. I want to feel taken care of, completely. And I don’t even see how I can stand to admit these things to myself, when they go against so many of the other facets of my self-image. The selfishness in it all. The backwater lack of feminism.

I want a cocoon wherein I am truly free. A space where I can concentrate on my work, my real work. Not just a physical space, but a mental space. It doesn’t really even matter exactly what shape it takes. I am not certain such a thing is even possible, or if it is, whether I’d even have anything left to say after I attained it. Yet I continue to want it, and the wanting makes me continually unhappy, and the unhappiness defines me. Confines me. Stops me.

And I know it’s all just a big story in my head. A big story of disappointment I see my life through, distorting it all so strangely. I know that, but I can’t turn it off for longer than a few minutes, a few hours maybe, at a time. I’m always trying to teach myself to stop expecting things, and I’ve had some success with that strategy. But I can’t seem to stop the yearning.

Under the covers, I slowly unwrench my back; my vertibrae pop. First thing in the morning, threadcount is the measure of my happiness. My sheets are freshly laundered. I rub my feet against each other. I do not want to get up.

It is cold and bright outside my bed. I am tired from dreaming so hard. I peak outside the quilt timidly. The light from the window pierces my eye, white lightning strikes my retina, and I retreat. In the sheets I shut my eyes again, tears float up toward the corners, and then the pounding sets in. The apartment is shaking with a drum beat. The clock ticking. The water dripping from the bathroom faucet. My heart echoing. Bam bam bam. Get up get up get up.

* * *

I’d be so thin if only it weren’t for the fat that spills out over my hip bones.

Every headache or mood swing is a potential pregnancy. Every quiet moment is a potential poetry. The more I live the more I realize I am unfit to write. Yet I hope for some revelation.

* * *

I guess we were happy, sometimes. Or, there were some times when we might have called what we were happy. I liked riding in his car when he was driving and it was dark out. When he still had a car. I’d slump down low in my seat and look at the stars. Or I’d lean over and put my head on his shoulder, though there was stuff in the way and most of me wasn’t comfortable. Or I’d put my hand in his pants and later he’d say he thought he’d have an accident. I never could tell the difference.

* * *

I walk around my apartment with a fist full of hair on the back of my skull, searching for a ponytail holder, a “hair tie” as they say in the north. I never think to let go my hand while plundering, and my arm gets tired and the hairs peak out from my scalp in little waves.

I want to talk to no one except my mother. My mother with her hair so like mine, her twin grip unyielding. I wonder if she could teach me everything. I thought not as a teenager but now I find her wise. And yet she says I taught her compassion as a child. I wrote in my very first little journal - My dad has lots of problems. But I love him, just because he’s my dad. Did I? Do I? Yes, I do love my father, but it’s not just because he’s my father. Everyone has lots of problems. It seems the more problems someone has the easier I find them to love.

* * *

A letter comes from my father in That Place. He includes a print out of the Twelve Steps of a Relapse. Step 6: I became willing to help people get rid of their defects in character. He says he couldn’t help but think of my mother. He also sends me seeds, folded in the plastic of a cigarette pack wrapper. They’re little brown seeds in the shape of tiny imperfect hearts, which are not referenced in his note. He’s working at a plant nursery, though, and my little half sister is 13 and really bloomin’. She’ll be dancing in the Nutcracker this year. He says nothing about the seeds and I do not know what they will grow. Or if they’re even seeds. I cannot imagine what else they could be. My mother asks me if they have any smell and says well whatever you do, don’t smoke them.

* * *

A blonde-headed girl in a blue pinafore and little socks stood holding her mother’s hand in the early morning dew. She was dressed as if for Sunday school, but it was not Sunday. It was Thursday - abortion day at Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge. The girl’s mother held a sign in her other hand, a blow up of a blown up baby, and a look of righteous indignation set across her lips. I did not hear the women shouting or the men shouting. I did not attend to the gruesome placards lining the street. I walked along the other side of the road in my ragged clothes with only my head scarf to protect me from all those glaring eyes, and I could not stop staring at the little girl. You shouldn’t be here, I wished I could tell her. I wished I could tell her mother. I shouldn’t be here either.

* * *

I don’t have any realization to impart. I haven’t realized anything new. Not today or the day before. I read on the subway, I sleep in my warm bed, and I long for that which I do not have. These things just continue on. I just go about my living, seeing things now and again. I have occasional silent moments of great calm, and even then somewhere I will tell myself I ought to write about this feeling, but I cannot. I would rather just have the moment and let it be. I will curse myself for it later, when the moment is gone and I can’t conjure it back, but I hope that I have them saved up somewhere inside of me, a little glowing spot. Such greed. Why is it that I am so obsessed with forgiveness and yet give no thought to being thankful?

* * *

My little brother has written a poem or two that we cannot help but admit are good. The thing that seems to bother me the most, apart from that I was supposed to be the writer in the family, is that he didn’t have to do anything wrong to get these poems. They’re not swollen with guilt, loaded with regret. A good writer is made by his honesty, not by his drama. I’d hoped by writing I might somehow make my drama useful.

And there’s also that he hasn’t spent years upon years trying to write before now. How wonderful it must be, to suddenly discover writing.

What if we’ve got only one shot at representing something? The more times one tries to write about something the more confused the something becomes with the writing. What if I’ve mined my life already?

* * *

My stepfather won’t give up his tub of change for Christmas. My mother just doesn’t understand. He wants to fill it up, he says. She says, If I’d've known that I wouldn’t've gotten him such a big tub. It’s a big galvanized silver thing from a hardware store. It has two handles, but even only halfway full I can’t lift it. He puts his pocket change in it every day after work, when he lines up his wallet and his comb and keys. I guess it’s a nearly a year’s worth now. Apparently when she said she wanted it for Christmas gifts, he rolled his eyes. She’s told me this on the phone three times. He must not even like Christmas, she says. But I’ve sure he’ll relent. I don’t know how they’ll get all that change to the bank, but I’m sure he’ll relent.

* * *

I have vague notions of the art I could be creating, and yet I slip into my clean sheets and say, tomorrow, tomorrow. I envy the clicking keys of my neighbor, working, yet let her metronome pass me into dreamlessness, all hopes for tomorrow. But tomorrow I will only again be seduced by vile television, consumerism, candy, politics. Tomorrow I will do no better. There is no tomorrow for an artist. There is only now. If I am not creating now it is unlikely I ever will. And so it is that I meet my worthlessness and caress her in my fresh linens, my messy room, my cold city.

I am forever inventorying all the things I have lost.

The things that I have lost include poetry and obsession, flights of ideas and the ability to alter my mental state for the sake of art. The things I have lost include sincerity and innocence and most of my ideals. The things I have lost include a baby and a sense of connection to my childhood. The things I have lost include my mind.

I read my old writing to try to get a sense of the edge of reason I once hovered on, the edge of beauty I’ve now become scared to approach. I realize that since I became such a pussy I only repeat myself. I must stop this eternal self-pity. I must look outside the window I lacked for so many months and have now, finally, been allowed.

It happens that, now, I often find myself wanting comfort more than good stories to tell. I do miss being intoxicated on the symbolism of things. I turn down love affairs I once turned my world upside down to have. Meekly, I stare at the floor and obtain the posture of the victim I no longer am and never was to begin with.

I think the way to find yourself is to lose yourself in something. For me it is easiest to lose myself in someone. I have learned that I must be so careful to whom I get close. Some people are not safe to get lost in. I seek only the embrace that is safety and perfect tenderness. I take in only that which is soft and delicate and lovely. But it is not enough; it will not revise my perception of the universe.

I would like to drop my persona from the fire escape, become one with the wind chime and the fluttering blue sarong I use for a curtain. I would like to extend myself, to feel colors and light through my skin. I want to touch God as if he were my lover.

Who else but God could love me more than I do?

Oh, to love the way I have loved. I have loved like opera. Else I could not have created such tragedy. Most of all, I am so terribly in love with myself. It is a terrifically doomed relationship, because those are the only ones that matter, the only ones that make any difference at all. I have given myself up for such drama. I have ruined myself for the want of such sadness.

If life is suffering, then those who have not suffered purely and completely have not had the entire experience of living. If there is nothing else here to dive into but pain, we must dive into it. Only from there can we start to release ourselves.

I talk about crying so much because crying is the defining act of humanity. What if hurt is part of the divine experience as well? Jesus wept.

Why should they tell us we should not be sad? Why should they tell us we should not be selfish? If we were not selfish, we could not understand why it is so important to care for others, we could not experience the bliss and the escape that giving brings.

There is no point in practicing so that you will no longer be sad. I will practice so that I will have the most whole and true and genuine and compassionate sadness that I can.

My mother and I came home from the nursing home to find my grandfather sitting in front of the computer with his hand over his eyes. I followed her into the other room.

“I think Granddaddy’s crying,” she interrupted me.

I turned. It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry, though that hardly occurred to me at the time, when we were all crying, together or in shifts, quietly or in the midst of conversations.

“You go,” she said.

I went.

I leaned over the leather office chair and hugged him. He smelled pretty bad, which was weird to me. He was wearing mismatched blue pajamas (plaid top, striped pants) and his nose was running and he was sobbing.

“He never gets dressed anymore,” my mother had told me earlier, “no matter who’s there.” When I first entered the house that morning, he was sitting at the kitchen table with the funeral director, dressed in those same pajamas. It was a couple days later when someone finally told him there was a hole.

There was an email open on the screen, from my uncle Al. .. and I knew I was the apple of her eye, but you were the whole tree. That’s how much she loved you. He told me to read it, and after my mother showed up with Kleenex, he read it out loud. He called them Al’s words in a very reverent tone. We assured him that was how it really was, and it’s true, and I rubbed his shoulder and didn’t even cry.

When Al made it down from Delaware with his fiance, he wouldn’t let them, both over 40, sleep in the same bed in his house, because he had to “set an example.”

I edited the obituary, taking out her age and fixing the sentence structure as best I could while not leaving out any of the obscure names of survivors Granddaddy insisted needed to be there, to attract the most people to the services, none of which, not even interment, would be private.

The whole funeral was so wrong that if she hadn’t been dead, it might’ve been comic.

We didn’t argue with him for What She Would Have Wanted, only comforted ourselves with the knowledge that she’d never know, and came up with dream funerals where everyone took a long hot bath and then laid down on the couch or drank some coffee, had a cigarette and a good dessert. Her handbags would be on display, and we’d talk about when and where she got each one and how long she waited before she took it out of the bag and used it for the first time. We’d read her favorite passage from The Love Book, the one she wanted read to her all the time. She’d be buried in her best white nightgown and robe and slippers.

There would be none of this open casket stuff. There’d be none of these supposed relatives who made her nervous staring at her, with her hair all wrong and her face fixed up to look like some Ordinary Old Lady’s, while those who knew her best cowered in a corner trying our best not to see. (After she finally had to go up, when everyone else was gone, to leave a note and an origami crane from my little brother, my mom said into my hair with the most heartbreaking love “her fingernails are still the same, but one of them needs filing.”)

Making it through the wake was a nightmare for us, introverts like her, what with scary Aunt Peggy’s plastic shoes and red toenails, people who came up saying “you remember me!” rather than introducing themselves, as if it were some sort of test, second cousins once removed who’d never even met HER, let alone us, and others we did not want to be emotional around. Granddaddy, the extrovert running the show (or, “first class operation,” as he called it), glowed. All he needed was to get around people, tell them every detail of her illness and everything he had done for her, how much money he had spent, how much the pants she’d be buried in had cost so many years ago, how hard it all was, how he hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. It helped him, and he needed it, and who were we to interfere. (Let us have the most compassion for the one who has the most guilt.)

Mom’d overhear Granddaddy telling about six different people what a comfort I was, citing the email incident as proof, and he’d ask people how pretty I was, and call me his girl, and whisper in my ear that Betty didn’t love anyone the way she loved me.. except maybe him. I don’t know why he latched on to me that way, maybe because he thought I didn’t know the things that other people knew, or because he didn’t realize that everyone else felt genuinely sorry for him too. I don’t know what I did that was helpful, except listening, which my mother has been doing so much more of for so much longer and to so much more anguish.

We worried about whether we were acting right, and forced ourselves out of our seats to shimmy around the room with our backs to her corpse reading the names on the flower arrangements for thank you card purposes. Among them were the sunflowers we’d picked out, with the kitten I’d drawn on the card, and the roses that said they were from us, which we’d never seen (my grandfather had taken the liberty), and arrangements from Granddaddy’s old business partners in Delaware.

. . .

At the funeral, my great grandmother remarked “Katharine looks so sad… is she sick?” and my mother replied “No, she’s sad.”

Back in my own city, I’d realize it was the first healthy sadness I’d felt in years. At the time, I cried and held my mother’s hands and listened to some church lady friend of my grandfather’s mother’s sing some song about going home to the Lord, and some lady preacher named Katie talking about eternal life, saying “Betty” in a wrong tone, and putting in as much as she could (not much) about the life of a woman she’d never known, picked up from her husband and children, into a cookie cutter sermon. A very private person, entirely devoted to her family, enjoying the small pleasures of worldly life but always working on her spiritual life, not suffering now, definitely going to the good place. It didn’t matter what she said. It didn’t take anything to get us all teary, my mother passing tissues along the pew. She’d tell me that night she hadn’t heard much of it at all.

My stepfather made for a faulty pallbearer, showing up late for official pall bearing duties, when they’d tell him he had ten minutes and they didn’t really mean it.

They buried her in the wrong cemetery, in a plot right by the curb without even a tree, a plot my great grandmother had bought in her cheap morbid obsessions. Betty’s people are in a pretty place with hills and trees, where she and my mother had walked when Mom was a child, talking about the relatives buried there. This place was flat, with little flower holders poking out like bristly hairs missed while shaving - a match for the funeral home, not an old house with a wrap-around porch where the introverts could escape, but a bland square place with new-looking falseness, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, a place she’d be uncomfortable alive.

On the top of the vault that’d cover the coffin, “Berry M. Kemp” was engraved.