If I had my life to live again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.

Tallulah Bankhead

An interesting insight from a woman who hardly left her own room:

Returning.

I years had been from home,
And now, before the door,
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before

Stare vacant into mine
And ask my business there.
My business,--just a life I left,
Was such still dwelling there?

I fumbled at my nerve,
I scanned the windows near;
The silence like an ocean rolled,
And broke against my ear.

I laughed a wooden laugh
That I could fear a door,
Who danger and the dead had faced,
But never quaked before.

I fitted to the latch
My hand, with trmbling care,
Lest back the awful door should spring,
And leave me standing there.

I moved my fingers off
As cautiously as glass,
And held my ears, and like a thief
Fled gasping from the house.

- Emily Dickinson

I’m home again.

A surprise visit, I expected it to be as inconsequential as all my others.  Usually my stays are just short enough to avoid major familial conflict and that suits everyone fine.  I’m “just visiting” so everyone can put on their good face and things run smoothly.  I hang around the house as little as possible, spending most of my time running around with friends and that suits everyone just fine.  For the most part, as I’ve written before, being in my room is a weird experience, but a necessary and an ultimately personal one.  My room acted as a sanctuary.  A place that was altogether mine and that was a place marker for how far I was moving on in my life while passively commemorating all I’d left behind by being made up of what I’ve literally left behind.

Not this time, no.  This time I’ve been invaded.  My fucking little sister took the liberty to not only sleep in my bed and somehow manage to rip all the sheets off “because I couldn’t sleep in mine one night…oh my god!”  she also filled my CD player with her cds, went through my book shelves, left multiple unread books of her own all over my floor, burned out my light bulbs, stole my pillows, and carelessly went through my cabinets and my pictures—all when she has a perfectly decent room right through the fucking wall.  Needless to say, I’m livid.  In fact, I haven’t been this angry in months.  While she feigns innocence, I’m forced to grapple with the fact that this is no way my room anymore.  Everything here I don’t need.  I don’t know what makes me more angry, the fact that my sister has completely violated my personal space, or the fact that I’ve filled my life with so much useless material shit in just a few years.  There is no way I’m going to take all this with me, wherever I go.  It’s going to just sit here, defenseless against invasive little siblings, gathering dust.  And there’s nothing I can fucking do about it.  Had I never come home unannounced I probably would have been none-the-wiser.  This isn’t my home.  This isn’t my life.  It’s painfully obvious now.  Thank you, family.

So what do I do with all this shit, all this stuff I’ve acquired over the years?  There are things I’m finally coming to terms with just pitching: mementos from special events that no longer feel so special I can no longer justify holding onto, as well as miscellaneous accessories to electronic things I never use or that don’t even work anymore, every empty box I’ve ever acquired, not to mention cassettes that I can’t even play anymore.  Some stuff, however meaningless now, is still nice stuff and I believe deserves a second chance with someone who could really appreciate it.  How do I find these people?  Are there charities for these things?  Should I sell it all?  When the hell am I going to find time to do that?  However many things still stay and they stay because even though they might not serve a purpose and they might not get packed up to gather dust wherever I end up, they’re still my things and they’re going to hold out here, in my room.  I can’t seem to justify throwing them out to pasture just yet.  Somehow, I also know that I’ll never pitch any of the pictures I have on the wall, framed, or stashed in an album or box.  Likewise, I still have just about every “love” letter or sweet note from a friend hidden somewhere, though I’m not entirely sure I’ll ever understand why; they seem to last much longer than the sentiments behind them.  However, these things, my things need a place to stay and be respected as the relics they are.  This place is my room.  And in a house where every family member is truly lucky enough to have a room of their own, this shouldn’t be too much to ask.  It’s the fact that when I do ask this tomorrow, that I’ll get in trouble for being a selfish, insufferable, hateful being while my sister gets offended for ever being accused, "apologizes," and then continues her violation of heart and home that validities my hating to come back here.

I also hate how right now I'm far more comforatable with sleeping in a stranger's bed rather than "my own."  Fucking a.

Memory.

It’s a funny thing.  I’ve spent the past three weeks living on my own, but not really on my own in Stone Harbor, the same little town on the Jersey shore where I spent a week every summer with my family: immediate, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins. The same place where many, if not most of my favorite family memories are set.  I’m not saying it was always idyllic, but it was the closest anything ever could be.  Anyone would be lucky to have such memories.  Every block I walk past sparks something.  There’s the staples like Springer’s, our favorite ice cream shop; Mack’s our favorite pizza place; and of course, Wawa.  Then there are the little incidentals I remember because of personal anecdotes:  the lot of the house that we stayed in almost 6 years in a row with the balcony that we used to throw barbies or defective games off of; the house down the street that tried to look like the White House; the yellow house I remember passing when I first learned to ride my bike around the block; the spot where the bikers discussed the “dirt dirt.”  Ridiculous things that my family, or more likely only myself, Lauren and Molly would remember.

I write about these things, I think, to try to solidify them.  Otherwise, they are these amorphous memories like John Ashbery wrote about in the poem I just posted.  I wanted to try to comment on that poem at the time I posted it, but I just couldn’t.  I was tired, I was overwhelmed, whatever.  I’m rising to the challenge now I guess.  The poem just seemed to encompass everything I feel whenever I go home.  A “diaphanous disaffection” for my room on Timber Lane.  It’s not a disaffection in that I no longer like it; it’s a disaffection in the literal, dictionary sense of the word, an estrangement.  And it’s diaphanous (look it up; it’s good for you) and transparent and a “dewy mess” of a feeling and a place in time that I can never truly capture again.  When I walk into my old bedroom or other places where my ghosts live, I feel like I’m waving my arms around to grab a hold of a translucent apparition that I will never be able to fully embrace.  My arms wave wildly and I end up clutching myself, alone.  There is nothing left for me to hold onto. 

And it’s sad, it’s upsetting in the same way that Ashbery writes that “dreams are by nature sad,” because they’re abstract and fleeting, just like every experience we’ve ever had or ever will have.  So I think in many ways we, as people, have tried to find ways to combat that sadness. We take pictures.  We draw.  We write.  We reenact.  We discuss.  We create some way to validate and capture any moment.  We make friends to share experiences with and we try to leave an impact on one another so that someone will remember us in their own abstract way. 

I’ve been reading a lot, mostly fiction, lately.  One of the very first things any elementary school student learns about literature is that it always has a narrator of some sort.  So naturally, with all the stories I’ve encountered I can’t help but wonder who my narrator could be, who anyone’s narrator would be.  Who remembers us?  Who knows how we feel as we watch the sunrise over the ocean in an insomniatic haze or what thoughts run through our head as we watch passersby on 96^th street.  Who or what is it outside of ourselves that can string together the ups and downs and all the in-betweens of our life? I think that's why I tend to fall for boys who write, in hopes that I might someday become a character that can live on beyond myself. 

I feel like that is one of the biggest benefits of close relationships.  The people you choose to share your life with so that you always have this living connection with your past.  It’s why when you call your girlfriends you can talk as though you’ve never missed a beat.  Even why, primitively, things like cell phones, aim, xanga, and facebook exist to begin with.  It’s also why it’s impossibly painful to lose a close relation of any kind in any way.  To lose that that person is to lose a part of yourself, part of you were that makes up who you have become.

I really love the last line of “The Improvement”–“See, our lips bend.”  Ashbery writes that line as if all our life is as simple as one never-ending kiss.  At least that’s how I’ve chosen to read it.  Full of passion, it’s the variation, the give and take, the adaptation that makes it worthwhile.  Each moment is excellent and meaningful, but just a jumping-off point for the next.  To kiss is not to dwell on each past second or movement: these cannot be repeated.  To really truly kiss is to immerse yourself in a building up of excitement and the anticipation of what could happen—will happen—next. 

I’d rather do that.

The Improvement

Is that where it happens?
Only yesterday when I came back, I had this
diaphanous disaffection for this room, for spaces,
for the whole sky and whatever lies beyond.
I felt the eggplant, then the rhubarb.
Nothing seems strong enough for
this life to manage, that sees beyond
into particles forming some kind of entity—
so we get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment.
A life of afterwords begins.

We never live long enough in our lives
to know what today is like.
Shards, smiling beaches,
abandon us somehow even as we converse with them.
And the leopard is transparent, like iced tea.

I wake up, my face pressed
in the dewy mess of a dream. It mattered,
because of the dream, and because dreams are by nature sad
even when there's a lot of exclaiming and beating
as there was in this one. I want the openness
of the dream turned inside out, exploded
into pieces of meaning by its own unasked questions,
beyond the calculations of heaven. Then the larkspur
would don its own disproportionate weight,
and trees return to the starting gate.
See, our lips bend.

--John Ashbery