the habit of being

There’s banging upstairs and my hair is dripping from the shower and the little white dog is curled at my feet. Three out of four overhead lights have burned out. The boxes are piling up. I’ve been taking all my pictures off the walls. Everyone else seems to be buying a condo in Dupont, but I’m moving away to The City and an hour-long commute to a job I don’t have yet.

All I want to do anymore is have my writing published, yet my own potential scares me so much more than the rejection of faceless editors. I read things from age 15, 16, 17, and I know that today does not live up to that promise, in so many ways. I imagine that my creativity, a once-boundless resource which could be tapped at will upon taking up a pen and ridden for hours at a time, wrung out of me drip by drip with every step I took in 2002. I see a great splash of it escape my body with every act of violence I took part in, and every sexual act was an act of violence, and there were so many, many, sexual acts. The meager remaining reservoir is left to evaporate slowly while my mind atrophies under such concerns as work, taxes, paying rent, my credit rating.

But what can be done? How can an adult expect to be able to think freely and abstractly, the way so many smart high school girls can, locked up safe in their rooms with all their books and scattered notes and art supplies, protected from boys and business? I wrote so much more eloquently about love and pain before I had any idea. I didn’t know how sloppy it all is, how messy and unsure and vague, how nauseating and impossible to describe. I didn’t know it was pointless to try. And once you’ve stepped away from that glorious innocence where it is all so intensely pretty and metaphorical, they never let you return to your beautiful notions. I would give anything for just one more beautiful notion, to feel again the way I felt about stillness and science and beauty then.

I can only feel strongly for people now. Instead of art, I make relationships. And falling in love may be nice, but it doesn’t last; it’s not tangible, not like words on a page.

I care more about people than I do about words and it will be the end of me. I can listen to my mother’s stories and hear her in the moment instead of wondering when my next chance to write it all down will be. And maybe this makes me a nicer person, but it will keep me from being the artist I aspired to be. I am not critical, judgmental, political. Maybe it is possible to be too nice to make a difference.

The Man with the Blue Shirt and Cigarettes walked up to my table at Wendy’s, where I was making a friendship bracelet from embroidery floss. I was dressed in my usual thin ragged hippy skirt and dirty red tank top. James was in the bathroom.

“Hey, do you need a job?”

“No, we’re just travelling, but thanks.”

“You need money?”

“We’re okay.”

“‘Cuz I could give you a job.”

I didn’t catch on. I didn’t want to be mean.

“What kind of a job?”

He sat down in James’ chair.

“It’ll just take fifteen minutes.”

“I’m not interested.”

Staring at the thread in my hands.

“I’ll give you $50.”

“I’m not interested.”

Staring at the floor.

I must’ve said it three times before he finally said OK and walked off.

James passed him on his way out, coming back from the bathroom.

“Don’t leave,” I told him, as soon as he reached the table.

* * *

A couple weeks into our relationship, I popped the question.

“So, how many women have you slept with, anyway?”

“I have no idea. Twenty, maybe?”

“Twenty?”

“Yeah, well, for a long time it was only one. But there was brief period afterwards when I had a lot of one-night things.”

“I’ve only slept with five people.”

“That’s five more than I had when I was your age.”

“Good point.”