Bridges

January 8, 2009

(Marin)

I crossed the bridge at dusk. Headlands, hills, skyscrapers were softened and blurred at the edges by the air thick with vapor and late light, as though memory had already taken them into its folds. As though I could inquire of memory, and none of this was left to chance. The day would ends thus, and had; the sun would set; the mist would flare just so behind the red-painted beams of the bridge; and a young woman would watch it. It had already and always been determined.

I was a little sad, really, to see San Francisco so small and pale from the bluffs of Marin. It looked like a city of the past. This metropolis, which had once threatened to crush me with its tremendous magnitude and detail, now appeared too diminished to contain my hopes. I felt I had walked through the gate of the city and, looking back, found its promise shut to me. I stared at its chalky walls, opaque and suggesting nothing, like a house with the lights off and the curtains drawn. I would leave, I thought, and efface myself in the darkness that was rising in the sky like ink wicking up through a piece of cloth.

Then I thought of a little house down in the southern part of the city, a door I could open to find myself in a lighted room, a kitchen full of yellow light and the heat of an oven. Comfort. A friend. These things were a beacon in the gray dusk, banishing the histrionic longing and grief of a poetic temperament, opening a crack in the gate of the city through which I could slip and be safe.



January 10, 2009

(Marina parking lot)

Sometimes I think I know what I believe, but I have an alarming habit of changing my mind. It makes me quite ill at ease.

I have already suffered such revolutions of opinion that the girl I was at ten years old has been driven almost completely out of agency over my life. I have traitorously enjoyed many a preoccupation I once denounced.

It would be a comfort to attribute such revisions simply to a more mature understanding of my own true feelings, but it would also be euphemism. I have changed. What I once was has been turned under, like grass beneath the plow. That is the brutal truth of growing up that those who have already grown, in their explanations and consolations, omit: The adult self overthrows the child, usurps her seat of power, and sends her to some thick-walled dungeon if not to execution.

It is dreadful to change our minds, for we are our minds, aren’t we? If, over the course of many years, we come to feel differently about everything really important, haven’t we destroyed and replaced who we were? And therefore who the hell are we?


January 23, 2009

(another giant mood swing)

Yesterday I was standing at the sink washing the little saucepan that my mother gave me right before I left, and I thought what a good, strong pan it was and how it would probably outlast me on this earth. I am not used to thinking that about my possessions. I expect to cast things off, use them up, outgrow them. But here was a thing whose weight would be placed upon the permanent part of life.

Later that night, my supervisor e-mailed to tell me that my seasonal contract would be allowed to lapse at the end of two weeks. No more job. Immediately I thought of leaving San Francisco and being alone again. I had never been completely reconciled to stopping anyway. Yes, I had happily learned faces, bus schedules, the tenets of retail, cupcake recipes, street names. But quickly now I was eager to abandon it all. I wanted to put on baggy cargo pants, pack a cooler, and hit the road. I would leave the saucepan with J.

I would leave a whole identity here, to survive only as long as the memories of other people kept it, to be gradually eroded and distorted by the atmospheres of other people’s minds. I could relinquish this story of myself completely to them, for after all I have no claim on it. It has no claim on me. We talked about this once in philosophy class: We are not objects but subjects, to which nothing is inextricably tied. On which nothing is indelibly written. No flaw, no merit belongs to us. Therefore, we can do anything. But how I forget this when I stand still and the weight of a human gaze falls upon me.