RIGHT NOW, forever

The first thirty seconds in a person’s
presence are the most important.

If you’re having trouble perceiving and
projecting, focus on projecting.

Necessary ingredients for a successful
projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness.

The goal is to be both irresistible and
invisible.

When you succeed, a certain sharpness
will go out of his eyes.

2012-05-24

There’s something incredible about reading what your closest friends have written: deciphering in it the parts of them you know and the parts that are unexpected, that seem entirely independent of your knowledge of the author. And what a thrill those parts are, coming as they would seem to straight from the imagination—the only part of someone else you can never really have access to, no matter how often you sit at each other’s kitchen tables talking, no matter how many long walks you take as a pair, the world around you pleasantly fading a little, unable to hold up in interest to the collective thoughts of the day.

2012-05-10

►

we shared a deep longing for the consolation prize

2012-05-09

►

It takes a long time to fill that expanse inside you again, the minutes and habits and parts of yourself that used to be shared. This did not bother me then and it does not now: it’s a fact of a life in which you choose to love and I would not choose another kind.

I have a little something new at TR today.

2012-05-04

►

For most of April I was plagued by springtime insomnia: the kind brought on by temperature changes, vague promise, seasonal noise, late night chats, and the internal readjustment to all of these elements that keeps your brain working after hours. Here, in my narrow room on St. Marks, I lie in bed every night looking into this window across the street. I have stared in this direction for a year and have no idea what kind of person lives there, whose life is playing out in the apartment parallel to mine, but it is, of course, occasionally comforting to imagine that its inhabitant is also sleepless and restless, also trying to avoid mentally excavating the past by replaying bland, good thoughts or counting backwards from 100 by sevens. The advantage of living on a very loud block such as this one is that I am always aware I am not the only one awake, but sometimes it can feel like I’m the only one trying not to be.

Late at night, when the cars are fewer, the difference between indoor and outdoor here is aurally insignificant. I can hear the scrape of cans when the garbage is picked up and the sighs when the last people seated outside sign their checks at the Mogador or stumble out of Ten Degrees and shout “Taxi!” as if that has ever worked for anyone. This recognition is non-portable, will be useless to me when I leave in a few months. Maybe that’s why the noise is more grating than usual, and also why lately it has been harder to honor any of the commitments I have here in the meantime, but simultaneously affecting me more when I witness other people not honor theirs. I’m leaving, I keep thinking, even though what I say aloud is, But I’ll be back. I’m not certain I’ve done a good thing this week besides lie on the exercise ball with my feet in the air and try picturing, with mixed results, how I am supposed to get from here to there. I haven’t figured that out, but my familiarity with the living room floor’s wood grains is better than it’s been in the twenty-plus years I’ve been in and out of this apartment. This, too, will be forgotten by September.

2012-04-26

►

Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.

Adrienne Rich

2012-04-24

►

When you spend time in an environment that is totally foreign, you become accustomed to undergoing a series of disquieting personal transformations, of experiencing life as someone different than you are at home. For most people, this happens when they travel abroad. For a year and then some, it happened to me every day, without even leaving my own borough.

I have a new piece up at TR today, although it’s not new, exactly: I started the first version of this over two years ago, which is four apartments ago, three or four boyfriends ago, a couple countries and several states ago. This originally appeared, in a different form, on LowLog, with the help of Michael & Ida. Last year, when I was just about to start revising this, I also met someone who made my world and writing immeasurably better and I don’t even know where to begin with the gratitude so I guess I’ll start, imperfectly, here.

2012-04-15

►

Dearest L:

GREETINGS FROM SOUTH KOREA! WISHING YOU WERE HERE!

Love,

C

2012-04-03

►

I was up by Grand Central today and walked by the airport shuttles, where I have more than once deposited different boyfriends and where they have more than once deposited me. I remembered the various individual “I love you” goodbyes and the looks in their eyes––green, green, brown, brown––in those moments, and seeing my own eyes––blue–-reflected back in them, and how that was all very good and edifying in its own way, but none of it was as good and edifying as what’s been happening the last few months. I want to say this comes as a surprise but I’m afraid it doesn’t. I think deep down I always suspected it could get better than that, which is not to say I assumed it actually would.

Although I would do it all again (that’s the funny thing about it), there are days when I am furious with myself for how I spent the first couple years of this decade, being frivolous with my time and money and body and energy during what could feasibly be the only period in my life when my time and money and body and energy are wholly mine and unshared. But I was fortunate to remain gainfully employed the whole time, not get into huge financial trouble, and not get pregnant. Maybe there are periods in life when that’s the most you can hope for––the absence of select failures, rather than solid accomplishments. It is good to know that and even better to be out of that kind of period and into a new one.

2012-03-29

►