Habitation

December 2, 2008

(Fisherman’s Warf)

Walking along the Embarcadero today, I realized that I had once again become unhappy. The feeling was lent a particular urgency by my sandals, which had been chafing my ankles something fierce for a good forty-five minutes, but the substance of it belonged to a more intractable irritant. I had come all the way here. I had crossed the plains, driven up mountains, driven down mountains, passed through deserts and woods, and arrived finally at the shores of the great western ocean. I had placed myself under a hotter, brighter sun, in a land of eucalyptus, cypress, palm, cactus, and climbing vines full of magenta flowers that seemed to bloom all year long. A different geography, a different botany, a different architecture, climate, and human energy were now brought to bear on my life. For all that, however, I did not feel that I had been made better. My mind did not burn hotter, brighter. Nor was heart stronger. I had experienced no lasting creative awakening. For all that this adventure had made me feel, it had not made me an adventurer. It had not made me a writer.


December 4, 2008

(in the kitchen)

I am now the one who bakes. My coworkers have bemoaned their thwarted diets as they ate my orange cupcakes and banana chocolate chip cookies, and J and I have made short work of more than one sweet potato cake with toasted coconut and pecan buttercream frosting. I am now the provider of desserts. This is, apparently, how I make home.

I drove away from the stucco house with mismatched shutters on Wentworth and believed myself homeless of spirit, to remain unmoored until I built a new home – over many years, through toil, through sweat, perhaps a bit of blood and tears for good measure. Home was to be a labor of the heart. Little did I know that the way to my heart was through other people’s stomachs. I have been out from under my mother’s roof for less than three months, and already I was beginning to feel established, not through any rapturous communion with the place but simply through flour, sugar, and heat.

I say the apartment is like a cave, being dim, chilly, and often damp, not to mention sort of subterranean. J jokes that at least we have fire. We have the gas stove. That is our current degree of sophistication: We have the technology to heat our food. When we are bored or cold, we both end up in the kitchen, toasting various things and making tea to justify our staying. I sit on the counter, J leans in the doorway, and we talk. Sometimes, after we have baked something, we leave the oven door open to cool down the oven by warming up the house a little, and we stand in front of it with our hands stretched out as though over a campfire. Sometimes it seems my life is taken up with these efforts for the sake of simple comforts, with trying to feel full, to feel warm, to feel safe. My hope is anchored to them. Perhaps the adventure of moving from home was too thrilling for the deep chambers of my brain to bear – the most ancient chambers, not fine but strong. I went too far, too fast. It was a stepping over of the circumscription enforced by habit; it was a breach of my nature. For though our minds have strength to rove like planets, our flesh is made to return.



December 19, 2008

(in the living room, reading up on nylon-lycra blends)

You work your way into a life, burrow deeper into the skin, the job, the friendships and errands and small, daily triumphs that must sustain you. You work your way through and through these things, like a network of veins, losing yourself in them. And you are tempted, then, to relent in your efforts of narration and give up on being the author of your life in favor of being a character. You become less watchful and more aware of being watched, feeling that your acquaintances are making something of you for themselves, narrating your part in the events of their days. As you pass from one to another, your entire story is told many times over. It no longer need be repeated and refined in that private chamber of your own mind, where the thick, still air belabors every movement and every breath. No, these people around you, for whom you increasingly care, shall draw in aggregate the outline of your self.

They shall make you out as the sturdy, bookish, Midwestern girl, who bakes cupcakes and carries boxes, who reads poetry, who is a little clumsy with people sometimes but means well. You want them to think you clever or soulful or kind. You begin to labor not on your reckoning of the world but on the world’s reckoning of you. You become the object. This transformation constitutes a dismaying vulnerability. Also a relief.

For it is not so bad, after all, to play a part, if you play it by heart. You can be the aborted author turned retail girl, whose steadiness now and then parts, provoking suspicions, among friends, of some sad, lovely inner life. It is probably easier to be loveable than to love.