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.