Inquiries

A late lunch with friends. Apple pancakes. Catching a glimpse of myself in the glass buildings, looking for once as I imagine myself to look, and happy about it. Sun and relative warmth after months of oppressive cold. The hard click of my Mary Janes on wet pavement.

As I type this, my cat’s cheek on my forearm. His soft sighs.

Over orange wine and lotus root, P says, You know how lucky you are to have a purpose? How disappointing that you keep saying no to it.

How many times have I cried to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth? And again, with S, my tears pooling darkly on the bedsheets.

At the orchestra, five rows from the front, I close my eyes to be moved by its live rendition. And find myself distant from it by a hair. Why does a tinny facsimile bring me to tears, when the real thing passes through like another woman’s pleasure? I’ve become so sensitive to every emphasis, the length of each note, that any deviation breaks the connecting thread.

Like listening to two audiobooks of the same story, to which I’ve listened maybe thirty times, but feeling them differently from each other. One is the same inflection, tone, pace as I remember from age eight, age ten, smuggling my headphones under my sheets like contraband. The other, though the same words, is entirely strange. Like another story altogether.

Nothing feels the same twice over. You can never get anything back in full.

I turned a hatred of circumstance into a hatred of place. Easy mistake. Things become clear, or else you reverse them, when you leave.

So many seasons of my life I long for again. The summer morning commute through the goldenrod fields, Wretch by Stevenson on loop. Chicago in August, half-drunk and beautiful in a bathroom mirror. Hill runs through Shadyside in the fall. Skipping full-tilt down main streets, emptied by the late hour. Wandering New York until the sky goes pink. A hand stretched in front of me, too afraid to yet hold it.

I’m a clever girl, I know when my rope runs out. So much of beauty is just youth.

How much of my life would I give to be incontestably beautiful?

I know I was once a decent singer, or else enough people lied to me about it. I know I am now a poor singer, but no one will tell me if I am out of practice or if this has always been the case. I live in so much delusion of who I am to other people.

I describe writing these essays as oiling the gears, or doing recovery exercises. My capacity for creative thought diminishes as my capacity for endlessly optimized productivity grows. Everything is a way of thinking. I was a student once; I have left that. An artist, rarely now. A worker all the time.

What is the use, I ask myself, in complaining about the same thing, if you will never make the decision to end it? Well, complaining is a sort of blood-letting. It keeps the unbearable bearable, which is not always a good thing.

All my life is a blood-letting. I count the months until my deliverance, which is neither guaranteed nor probable. So much goes into ensuring I wake up every morning. What I couldn’t stand a year ago becomes normal. Disturbing to realize I could, with time, condition myself into anything. What am I, then?