And sometimes it's just darkness. Where do the children play? I can't be sure if it's Yusuf asking or if it's Cat, but it doesn't matter because I don't have an answer for either one. I think Yusuf was much more at peace so it doesn't seem right that such a thing would torment him but maybe he just put on a good face. Will you keep on building higher til there's no more room up there? I think Yusuf found the answers to the questions Cat asked over and over again before realizing that there weren't any. Answers, I mean. Until he realized that he had to be what he was not, he had to become the other, and only then could he breathe easy. In the end it was never about finding a hard-headed woman. Salvation lay, apparently, in an arranged marriage. Who would've thought? Certainly not Cat.

But I was talking about the darkness. In one quick motion the lights are shut off, the curtains are drawn, the sun sets and for a brief terrifying moment that drags for hours and hours it seems as if the darkness is forever. Is this self-indulgence or just simple truth? Is it just me, or is it all quite stultifying? Am I getting tired of the sound of my own voice? Are you?

Sometimes people take things you didn't give, and they just win, simple as that. It doesn't seem fair, but that's what happens when you're naïve, a bit reckless, and follow the rules. Cat knew this, and so he joined a different game. He didn't try to rewrite the rules, he just left. It's courageous as hell, if not revolutionary. Oooh baby baby it's a wild world, it's hard to get by just upon a smile. Ooh baby baby it's a wild world, and I'll always remember you like a child girl. But suddenly I'm offended because I never was a child and anyway it's all his fault.

How does it happen? One minute you're easing comfortably along, nodding in acknowledgement to the familiar boredom, and the next you hardly recognize your own reflection in the mirror. Was your mouth always so drawn, cheeks so sallow, eyes flecked with such dull gray tones?

And why do they dart, from left to right and back again, so many times in the course of such a short space, as if they know? As if they sense him? That intruder with thick eyebrows and shuffling feet, who just now raises his hand to the knocker before thinking better of it and throwing his shoulder with all his weight behind it against the door.

Longer boats are coming to win us, they're coming to win us. Longer boats are coming to win us. Hold on to the shore, they'll be taking the key from the door.

And never the twain shall meet

THE DREAM:  It's different each time.  This time we're in bed.  It's dark and he's lying next to me on his side, facing me.  I'm lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling, unable to believe he's actually here with me, in my apartment, in my bed.  I smile at nothing, at the walls, at the air.  I whisper, I love you.  He says nothing, but climbs over me and out of the bed and walks to the floor lamp and switches it on.  I don't dare look at him, I just lie there waiting for I don't know what.  He returns to me, to the bed, and sits on the edge of it.  He looks me dead in the eye and pushes the hair out of my face.  Say it again, he says, not yet smiling, but ready should I coax him into it.  I finally look up at him, my heart pounding.  I love you, I say again.  I love you, too, he responds, and before the elation swallows me whole I wake up.  I'm grinning, weightless, free.

THE REALITY:  You watch too many movies, he says.  I'm standing in his office, a few feet from his desk, facing him askew, arms crossed.  It's all wrong, I think.  We're both smiling, but for different reasons.  I'm just happy to be near him.  He, I imagine, is incredulous of my hyper-idealistic notions of romantic love.  I'm merely content to be talking to him about romantic love, about anything at all.  He looks at his watch.  I don't know, I say, desperately trying to buy some time, just a few moments more.  Relationships are hard.  He laughs.  You're telling me, he says, referring implicitly to his girlfriend of eight years, now his fiancee.  I watch him deftly switch off his computer monitor, gather his things.  But you're a veteran! I sputter.  Again, I get a laugh.  That laugh.  So goofy yet entirely self-assured.  I wake up mornings hearing it.  Hardly, he replies.  I'm still learning every day.  I follow him as he gets up, exits his office, walks into the hall.  The passing of time is palpable now.  I'm increasingly conscious that each moment brings me closer to the long stretch of evening I'll have to pass without him.  I fumble for a show-stopper.  So what keeps you there?  What makes you stay?  It's a bold query, but I think I've got him.  He stops.  Turns back to me.  Looks directly into my face.  That's a question without a single answer, he says, after a minute.  It's not one thing, it's several.  Little things.  A lot of them.  He turns back and ambles toward the exit.  I've lost him.  I stand paralyzed for a moment, unable to formulate a retort.  Wait, a retort?  When did this become an argument?  To be continued? I call airily after him, but he doesn't hear me.  The door's already shut behind him.  I stare after him, but not for long.  My feet feel rooted in the ground, and I'm forced to concentrate hard to return to my office.  I sink into my chair, glowering, weary, trapped.

On The End of the Affair, or "My Love Letter to Deborah Kerr"

I just love Deborah Kerr.  Her grace, her elegance.  She always plays a captivating sensual creature with a palpably guarded depth and a haltingly sarcastic wit, though we certainly see the latter more in An Affair to Remember.  There's a dream-like quality about her, and a dream-inducing quality to watching her.  She wears her sadness - or is it her religion? - like a heavy cloak, it envelops her, wraps neatly around her shoulders.  She is loveliness personified.

It's that fine line between trying too hard and giving up

There's a difference.  There's always a difference.  Inexplicably I strive daily to be what I'm not, and inevitably crash back to earth with the feeling that I'm settling for what I am.  Why can't I get comfortable in a suit?  Why do I squirm discussing the law with colleagues?  Why do I secretly roll my eyes gossiping with other women?  When will I stop SCREAMING ON THE INSIDE when family insists on talking politics as if it touches them, friends insist on talking fashion as if it moves them, media insists on talking trash as if nobly pursuing its destiny.

I can't help but sense the difference.  When I listen to NPR or read the Post, I let the news of the world wash over me like a current.  Particles of sediment stick in my hair and graze my cheek.  I shake my head and they're gone.  I feel little more than a temporary high at being connected to the world for a brief moment in some small way.  A tinge of pride knowing I'll have something to say at the water cooler tomorrow.  Knowing I'll feel like I fit in, if just for a little while.  That Facebook IPO was certainly a disappointment, it's really too bad about those Nasdaq glitches, huh?  Sure.  Kind of a nail-biter waiting for that jury in the Edwards trial, no?  Alright.  (What an ass.)  Yes, but the labor market's a lagging indicator of economic growth, so...  WHAT?  Right, those anti-NATO protests in Chicago, what a mess...

There's a difference.  When I read fiction, when I read poetry, it seeps into me.  The words carve grooves into my organs and lodge themselves there until I don't remember where I end and where they begin.  I gather words, phrases, sentiments and store them in my figurative knapsack because they feed me, nourish me, sustain me.  When good writing enters my consciousness through eyes and ears, I feel changed.  I feel more myself.  I feel hopeful, validated, energized.  I think, Yes, there is a purpose, and this is it.  Here is the reason for being.  This matters, and therefore, I matter.  I often wonder what would be the point, in its absence.  In art's absence.  To live, for what?  To make money, but why?  To what source would I turn for pleasure, for fulfillment, for meaning?

I enter Tolkein's world and my heart skips a beat.  Far over the misty mountains cold / To dungeons deep and caverns old / We must away ere break of day / To seek the pale enchanted gold.  Song, beautiful song!  Tolkein's genius courses through my veins and I'm weightless, taking flight.  As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves.  Translation: I am home.

Dave Eggers' open wounds and aching honesty are like a one-two punch to the gut.  But there was intelligence in that breathing, and passion in that breathing, everything there, we could take that breathing and hold its hand, sit on its lap while watching TV, the breaths were quicker and shorter and quicker and shorter and then shallow, shallow and that's when I loved her as much as any other time, when I knew her as I thought I knew her . . . .  It's close, I can feel it.  If I reach out I can touch his heart, feel it beating, pulsing in my palm.

Stephen Elliott floors me every single time.  He sends me reeling, spinning, staggering for balance, gasping for air.  He plucks each word from the sulci of my brain and lays them carefully out in immaculate order on the page, as innocently as if he had written them himself.  He did write them, though.  That's the stunning, heart-stopping, breathtaking truth.  I felt dizzy and I told [her] that when you're an artist you're trading on that sliver of intellect that allows a slightly different lens onto the problems of humanity, or even something less. I couldn't quite describe it properly but I could see what it looked like. It's a thin membrane, I said. I was talking about insight, kind of, and imagined a bar graph with different colored zones and this one particular fragile spike in your chart. I wasn't talking about beautiful sentences; you can learn, over time, to write good sentences. I was talking about that other thing that disappears when you don't get enough sleep, or when you're sick, or when you wear out and cease engaging with the world, or when you fall back on your own cliches.

Did I think that first, or did he?  I wonder this as I gaze at my reflection in the mirror.  I look tired.  My shirt is wrinkled and there are bags under my eyes.  I think to myself that I should eat better, I should go for a run.  I should make a trip to the grocery store and buy the ingredients for that mushroom risotto I've been meaning to try.  I should blend myself a fruit smoothie and watch the news.  Perhaps I'll learn something, and I can walk into work tomorrow with my head held high instead of slinking past the water cooler and ducking into my office.  I should.  I should.  I should.

I sigh, and walk slowly and resignedly to my room.  I crawl into bed and fluff the covers up around me.  I stare at the cover of my new book like an eight-year-old with a brightly-colored package on Christmas morning.  I open to the first page, smoothing the paper and gently creasing the spine.  I sigh deeply, and begin.  No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars--bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for.  It's Mary Karr, a memoir.  I can't help it.  I'm already head over heels in love.

WRITER'S BLOCK

Happiness
Giddiness
Laziness
Busy-ness

Friends all around
New must-see shows
Out on the town
Chores 'round the home

These are the things that block paper from pen
Keeping me wond'ring when I'll write again

Something about imagination, or creativity, or the beat of my heart

The characters, they come to me in fits and starts.  I get a glimpse of a face, the dart of an eye.  Sometimes I know what they're thinking, though I often disagree.  Occasionally a mannerism will come to me, and I will say, Yes.  Yes, that is exactly right.

Some days the words don't flow, the thoughts don't come.  I sit in a crowded place, staring at passing strangers, willing them to tell me their story.  When nothing happens, irritation seeps into my bones.  We are all human, I think, All in this together.  Why won't you help me?  But they continue on, unconcerned by my plight.  I think, I'd do it for any of you, if you asked me to.  But then I think, Would I?, and I turn my face from them in shame and despair and a sharp loneliness pierces me and suddenly all seems lost.

And then I spot a child.  He has fallen.  He is teetering on his heels, trying to right himself.  And that's when it comes to me.  It's true.  I've remembered something I must have forgotten along the way.  I internalize it, accept it, name it.  I think, It's true:  there's always hope.

I wrote this yesterday.  Sometimes, the words, they do come.

--

In the wonted gaze of a comfortable lover
we take solace
though the urge for what we know must be yet to come
tugs and claws at the tenuous fibers
stitching us whole.
A raw need we choose to ignore, in favor of--

Well excuse me for preferring my security blanket tucked
snugly around me
the way only one used to doing so night after night
can manage.

After all, what is so wrong with peace?
with tranquility?
Am I not like you?
Am I not to feel the warm presence
of all I have worked for and hold dear
by my side
through the long nights?

I think I'm entitled, too,
to a little contentedness.

To a small space inside each day
Wherein I can close my eyes
And breathe.

Not for you
not for me
not for--

Just the air
in, and out
the way it was meant to be.

An Ode to Panic Attacks* (*music not included) & a poem

I have on average one panic attack per day now.  Sometimes they come on gradually, like a rainstorm that builds over the course of an entire afternoon.  First, the air will go still and quiet ("That's weird, I was pretty happy a second ago and now shit feels kind of ominous...").  Then, the sky darkens as the clouds gather and build ("I mean, I could keep my day job, right?  It wouldn't be so bad, would it?  I was just overreacting - I don't have to make such a drastic life change - do I?!").  The temperature beings to drop and the winds pick up, blowing dust and trash and hay bales all over the--WHOA, wait a minute.  I apologize.  I assure you that wasn't me getting overly corny:  I watched R&H's State Fair (1945 musical remake) for the first time last night and I think the imagery just stuck.  (BTW:  If you haven't already, give it a watch!  It's charming, and not only if you have a painfully unrequited girl crush on Jeanne Crain like I do.  Unless, of course, you hate R&H, in which case this musical will literally make you suicidal.  I mean it.  LITERALLY.)  *Ahem*, ANYWAY:  the wind!  ("MY LIFE IS OVER!")

Sometimes, the panic attacks come on like one of those freak thunderstorms, where one moment the birds are singing and the next you're drenched.  And that one goes something like this:  "AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!"

And now, a poem.  I wrote this about ten months ago, but the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I re-read it today, knowing how true it's become.  When I wrote it, I don't think I had any clue that it would one day become autobiographical.  Of course, I still have to live through the most painful part - telling most of my family, and listening to the disappointment, the fear, the anger, the confusion, the hurt in their voices.  I'm incredibly lucky that the few people thus far privy to my plans have been overwhelmingly supportive; or, at the very least, haven't attempted to dissuade me.

Without further ado, I give you:

-- 

Selfless

If I live twice, how can it be

That I live not at all? You see

I live a double life, which means

Each life only half lived must be.

My body forty hours sits

Inside an office, windowless

I read, I think, I read, I write

And I make smalltalk, ever-trite.

And yet my mind, consistently

Imagines where I'd rather be

What I would do if I could choose –

What I must risk, what I might lose.

I often wander, mentally

To coffee shops, towns by the sea

To old theátres, used bookstores

To windows on the thirtieth floor.

I'd quit my job, I'd pack my things,

I'd leave this place, see what life brings—

I'd take up with a whole new set

With artists, writers, dancers, chefs.

My friends, on the one hand, concerned

Would sit me down, would take their turn

To spout the error of my ways

To point out how much working pays

They would lament how rash I'd been

They'd espouse patience, calmness, Zen

They'd recommend I contemplate,

I reconsider my hasty fate.

My family would be shocked, appalled

They'd scream, they'd wring their hands

They'd bawl, they'd ask me why, repeatedly,

And yet with no retort agree.

At first I'd stoically reply,

Patiently sitting, hands at my sides,

That this was my decision to make

That it concerned my life, my fate.

I'd say to them, I want your love

But not if with conditions it comes

You must simply love me for me

And that includes this long journey.

This journey will change me head to toe

I may become one you'll not know

We may have to start over again

Relearning how to be family, friends

Then sleep on it, they'd all implore

For goodness' sake, whatever more

You ask of us, give this one thing:

That you will wait until morning.

And that, the moment I relent

Will mean more than each hour I'd spent

Planning, plotting, building up

The dream is over, the jig is up.

--

If I had any foolish notions that this journey would be easy.  If I at all imagined it paralleling a heroine's journey in a Hollywood movie.  If I believed I'd start with resolve, and then after a two-and-a-half minute montage consisting of alternating twenty-second shots of me bent laboriously over a stack of books in the library, pounding away furiously on the keys of my laptop with a determined and focused grimace, smiling wearily and wiping beads of sweat from my brow as I serve a boisterous family of four their mediocre dinner, and gratefully falling into the welcoming folds of the comforter atop my modest twin-sized bed, I'd hold up to the light the most glorious novel/play/novella/collection of short stories/screenplay/compilation of poetry ever to present itself before readers' awestruck eyes... well, I WAS WRONG.

Writing is hard.  There's no eloquent or articulate or noble way to phrase that to alter the fact in any way.  WRITING IS HARD.  Even when you're good, and I've got no delusions of grandeur on that score.  I have no idea if I'm good.  I don't even have a clue if I'm good enough to validate this experiment!  I've never received encouragement regarding my writing to justify this sabbatical.  All I know is I've got a building body of work roiling my insides and I won't be at peace until I try my best to get it all on paper and nudge the fledgling drafts into the world to the best of my ability.

Today, a To Do list.

--

-Strengthen vocabulary
-Improve grammar
-Learn to spell
-While you're at it, learn to write
-Attain bravery
-Develop courage
-Have fewer panic attacks
-Tell Mom

--

I mean, that was mostly a joke.  ... Right?