A week before my birthday she packed her things and left.

I do not blame her for doing this.

Nor do I really understand what it meant for her to move.

In my memory it’s less the momentum of courage it must have been for her and more a coagulation of images in my mind. Binding together to reach towards some meaning.

A wide ramp stretching from the porch to a moving van.

Broad bodied men lifting finished wooden bureaus. Wrapping them carefully, like sleeping children, into quilted blankets.

Her curls bouncing as she carries a cardboard box down the hill, leaning backwards behind its weight.

Did I climb into the car and ride away with her? Or stay behind to watch him walk into his study and shut the door. The latter, I believe.

And then I was all alone.

And then it was the weekend and a new woman arrived. Long bodied and brunette with a daughter who danced in our garden. Somersaulted on our trampoline. I said I wanted to see my mother. I slammed the door.

And after that, after that brief uprising and the rage it incurred, I never did so again. My mutinous days were over. Perfection melded with self protection. And I was all alone.

I’ve never wanted to remember this before. And now that try to, I realize why. The indistinct recollections my effort dredges up affect a despondent pain in the core of me.

A hunger.

An ache so wide it could consume, from the inside out, the person I’ve tried to become. Despite everything.

Despite the nights he sat on the sofa, head in his hands, and sobbed.

Despite the pain I forged because I never did.

MAYBE they’re all right.

For years I’ve been told I’ll never settle.

Settle for one person. I am:

Too complicated. Too adventurous and with too much to do before I die.

MAYBE I am.

My mommy disagrees. Says I’m:

committed, steadfast, serious.

And MAYBE I am that as well but not yet to another person.

MAYBE not ever but certainly not yet over that fear of opening the door and letting him inside me, only to have him turn and want to leave once he’s arrived.

I wonder sometimes when I’ll come to want what everyone else does. I wonder sometimes if I already do. Want that Other, elusive and all encompassing.

But till I figure all that out, I’ll love the maybes instead. Throw myself into delicate play aimed at their unpacking. And for that, I’ve got these words:

Gertrude Stein. The communication of Intuition: “that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.”

Carole Maso. “To imagine story as a blooming flower or a series of blossomings. To change the narrative drive to better mimic one’s own realities, drives.”

And the spaces they recall.

The yellow cones shaped by head light and fog that shone out in front of me each night I drove home from the darkroom. Each night and for one year.

How could I foresee that one year would make me who I am?

The year as an independent space. That year, and each one before it has amounted to something on its own before propping up the space that follows. Building upon the place that proceeded, and forming this person. This never ending project.

And how could she foresee that boy she barely knew would return four years later? Gun her down in the campus bookstore.

It’s like a novel, my mother said when I came to her, crying. Bleary eyed, despondent, over the opportunities lost. The importance of time. The importance now, more than ever, to put down these revisions. To rewrite and reshape the meaning of these words.

I say this selfishly. Not because I knew the girl but because she could be me.

This will not be you.

How do you know?

Because the stars. Because we charted you at birth. Chartered your course.

And that is a comforting thought. That the constellations told her. Cassiopeia said. I was meant to write. Meant to write this out.

And MAYBE if that’s all I’m ever meant to do, I’ll be alright with an ending when it comes.

I.

Crafting sentences is best done by watching. Watching out a window, preferably.

Things are easier examined through the barrier a window provides.

For example:

…That boy in the yellow windbreaker, carrying a paper bag from the Gap has circled the block three times so far.

….Women wearing rain boots walk without bending their knees.

….Men stride forward from their heels to their toes, covering in a single step the geography of their entire foot.

“She’s a big girl,” says one mother to another, “but she wears it well.”

Map your body out. Feel it. Wear it well.

My life is composed of actions observed. Conversations overheard. In New York City Starbucks.

II.

Always in Starbucks…The couple next to me.

They are every couple and this is every Starbucks. Green and white and buzzing with the interrupting whir of people chatting, blenders blending.

First date, I decide.

Coffee.

Coffee means sex, I decide.

“I’ve only been in one serious relationship,” he says.
I am surprised by his directness. She is trying to impress him, hiding her interest.

“It’s hard in the city,” she says instead of the “why?” I decide she’s wondering.

The conversation stalls. I empathize with her.

III.

I’m looking out on Amsterdam, all green leafed. All fresh. The sidewalks have been washed into a darker grey by the evening’s ritual rainstorm. The cabs, the streetlights and that woman’s purple rain boots are brightened by the drizzle.

The world is buzzing. This is where I stop and listen. This Starbucks, which is every Starbucks. And this not quite couple, sipping their pre-sex coffee. Asking the requisite questions. Buzzing their way towards the night.

Buzzing his way towards home, that man, crew cut and brown skinned with “Leon” embroidered on his shirt. Stitched in white thread onto the left breast pocket. All lower case. A super for some fancy co-op. Spends his day sticking roach motels to the tiles of old lady’s kitchens. Smiling at them and being polite.

If I were a super, I’d want to be named Leon too. I hope I’d know myself deserving of a capital L.

I know so now. Finally. Know myself deserving of a capital S.

A capital AR.

Know myself a capital woman who deserves to be capital L.O.V.E.D.

If only because I laugh at myself as I write this all out.

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

~From Annie Dillard's, An American Childhood

I first read Ms. Dillard freshman year of high school. Doing so, changed me. Her words have been as profound to me as any of the storied novelists - any of the Faulkners, O’Connors and Austens. Every few years, I find, I return to her writing. To the old dog eared copies of her works that line my bookshelves. I re-read and skim the margin notes made by my high school self and see where I first picked up the words so dear to me today. Words like, “littered,” “ornament” and “mistook.”