Internet-gram to a friend: August 2008

I think about all of those little fragments that we send off through the web and then forget about and normally they're just gone.  But sometimes, years later, we accidentally find them and marvel at how dreamy and tormented and yet hopeful we used to be back in our university days.  I was Love-lorn and so lonely but also so happy, because the city I felt could just swallow my heart and make me forget about myself and all of these silly things.  Plus there was always love to be found in beautiful friendships with co-workers and peripheral interactions with teaching assistants.

Writing of transitions.

I never ever start packing until the day before I move. This weekend will be no different. I do, though, start losing marbles and slipping up, while the chasm of my room and its layers of transitory things and things in transit menaces in the corner when I bother to let my thoughts wander. I dried my hands with a white dish towel and left a smear of no-guilt blueberry raspberry bake (the remnants of which might have stayed off of my hands in the first place had I finished washing my plate, and not just begun). I forgot to put the baking sheet under the pie plate for the first twenty minutes, which almost triggered some smoke and moans, but fortunately not the alarm (This is not normal for me to forget, even if the recipe is new). I drove around a familiar country loop near my neighborhood and took a wrong turn in the night, went berry picking by myself after another bout of incessant rain yesterday because I didn´t want to stop driving. I will make time to run for an hour in the morning but I can´t seem to remember to fold my laundry until 1 am. And I often miss the tranquility of living alone and not having anyone to care about my occasional slips and being able to clean and polish just for myself. Do you crave independence, work, no time for anything, restraints on your restlessness, during idle spats? I like being lazy, though all of the things to do and decide buzz and I can´t go ten minutes through a book or the tube without a random guilt trip. I can, though, drive the routes and let the highway wind and the radio take care of that. I always miss driving. But that´s craziness too because in the end I will want to get somewhere, not just away from the places that are now empty vats of childhood -- perfectly lovely, with no gaudy colors, but more or less empty. 

You asked me once why I love New York, and I am inarticulate like hell when it comes to things that make me crazy happy, so I don´t think I answered very well. But maybe it has to do with the lack of escape plan. Once I´m there I feel that the world is gliding about and everything I might need to learn about -- at least their vague traces -- can be gleaned in its messy presence. It is concentrated life, gaudy, and no matter how divided things are there is still that person on the sidewalk saying I AM HERE with whatever tricks or glances he decides to slide by. Or life decides for him. I don´t feel as tempted to succumb to distraction or to just lose it on some quest for self-validation, and I feel the rush of energy course through me too -- that´s true -- and it´s to a limited extent like that in other cities too, because there just is no off button. And I like to hear the city at night, I just like to. It´s comforting. Noise, people. And it´s harder to feel lonely, maybe not always but impossible to be desolate.