Consider Us Lobsters

1

As a fan of his work, as well as an M.F.A student and an aspiring writer, I went to a bookstore in Brooklyn with my boyfriend to listen to David Shields read from his latest work, How Literature Saved My Life.  He walked up to the podium carrying an already worn out and heavily marked up copy of the book that looked nothing like the gleaming hardcover I held in my lap, but looked very much like every notebook or well-loved essay collection I own.  I liked him instantly.  Not that I hadn’t liked him since I read Enough About You, which he began with the Emerson quote, “And I shall essay to be.” That was what initially convinced me that David Shields is one of those writers who writer to be, to live – the way that I try to do, or hope to do.  And so it had seemed perfectly natural to me that he should have now written a book entitled How Literature Saved My Life How.  To me, he had always seemed like the kind of writer who believes that literature can or might save his life – or who at least hopes it will.

When I was an undergraduate fiction writing student I met a lot of people who believed that literature (novels, specifically) is nothing more than an entertaining story with a plot and characters and momentum.  This seemed empty to me and the emptiness has nearly killed me, for it had contradicted my life-long belief that literature is full of the very stuff that can save a life --- that it had and would continue to save mine.  Luckily, I came across David Shield’s nonfiction work.  Luckily I also discovered the lyric essay.  
After the reading in Brooklyn, I went to have David Shields sign my copy of How Literature Saved My Life.  As he did so I mumbled, oddly star-struck, that I had spent the summer reading Reality Hunger, and though I was too nervous to elaborate on the point, what I was trying to say was that it was one of the books that had saved me.  Or perhaps I should say that it resurrected my passion for writing and reading. 

As he signed my copy of the book, he noticed the syllabus for my graduate literature seminar that I had tucked into the back, along with my notes on his reading.  I told him that I thought I was going to write a review of the book.  But, really, as we both know for it is the sentence with which he begins How Literature Saved My Life, all criticism is a form of autobiography.

2

It is impossible to discuss how literature can – or can’t – save a life without discussing David Foster Wallace.  In How Literature Saved My Life, Shields quotes Wallace in saying that what is so great about writing is that we’re existentially alone on the planet – I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling, and you can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling – so writing, at its best is a bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness. 

When I first read this, my boyfriend and I were sitting at a café in Brooklyn, just killing time before heading to hear David Shields read at the bookstore across the street.  I excitedly began to read it aloud to my boyfriend, for it was the truest wording of my own strongest feeling about writing and reading and the human condition.  However, I didn’t get through the quote before he interrupted, irritated with for talking to him while he was in middle of reading The New York Review of Books.  This, of course, hurt my feelings and proved my point and David Shields’ point and David Foster Wallace’s point.  I couldn’t know what my boyfriend was thinking.  He couldn’t know what I was thinking. Unfortunately, that particular piece of writing that was bridging the abyss between myself (the reader) and Shields or Wallace (the writer) was not bridging the abyss between me and him. 

3

Recently I have taken to telling my boyfriend that I love him more than I love my writing.  I don’t know if I’m saying it for his benefit or for my own.  And I don’t know if it’s true.  Some days I think it isn’t. 

I love my writing to the extent to which I have learned to appreciate myself.  My writing is mine, unconditionally.  It says and does what I want and what I need more so than anything or anyone else in the world.  In writing, I can be in a relatively socially acceptable and fulfilling conversation with myself, as well as with the unnamed, faceless reader: the perfect listener.

4

At his reading in Brooklyn David Shields proclaimed, “I wanted to be a person but I overly committed to art.”

5

When I am doing my best writing, I am not a very good person.  When my writing is fluid and rushing deep down into the crevasse of consciousness, I am extremely moody, manic, mean and even more malcontent than usual.  Sometimes I think it is because in order to write well, I need to go deep inside of myself to a place where no one can reach me.  A place where I can reach myself, where I can hold and comfort my broken and crying younger self.  A place where I can have the clarity of mind with which to decide what it is that I think and feel and need and want.

6

For now and maybe forever I love my boyfriend better than I love my writing.  And the certainty I have of my love for him is something that neither writing nor reading has ever given me.

7

On our first date I told him that most people tell me I’m too cerebral.  My boyfriend replied that he didn’t think it was possible to be too cerebral.  At that moment, I knew that if he was telling me the truth, then he was the one for me and we could spend a lifetime together discussing what it means to be or tow believe in the one. 

On that same date we discussed religion.  Or, more specifically, we discussed faith.  He said he considers being Irish Catholic to be his ethnicity, not his religion.  I said consider myself agnostic.  I don’t believe in a higher power but I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong.  In fact, I rather hope I am wrong.

A month later, for my birthday, he took me the Cloisters, an old monastery uptown atop a forested hill overlooking the Hudson. The Cloisters are an extension of the Metropolitan Museum and house religious art and paraphernalia.  I had chosen them as an activity for my birthday because I had wanted to be reminded of my favorite European cathedrals from my time abroad.  And so, as we walked through room hung with medieval tapestries I told him that whenever I fly somewhere I have to say a prayer before the plane takes off, in case the plane crashes and in case there really is a higher power who could save me from such a tragic fate.  In the prayer I always explain that I don’t want to die yet because there is so much more I want to do.  I want to finish writing my book, I want to find real love, I want to live a full life of learning and marriage and family and the sheer experience of years.  In the prayer I say I don’t want to die because I want to experience god and if there is one, then she must be life itself.  My boyfriend replied that he always makes the sign of the cross right before he flies.  I’m not sure it’s quite the same thing. 

8

At the reading he gave in Brooklyn, David Shields began by saying, “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.”  Initially he attributed the quote to Picasso.  He then recognized his error and correctly attributed it to Philip Roth (who, according to the New Yorker, recently tried to discourage an aspiring writer from getting into what he said is a dreadful profession).  What Picasso said is that art is a lie that tells the truth.  I think both Roth and Picasso make the same point.

9

After a couple weeks of dating, my boyfriend suggested that we each write narrative nonfiction stories about the date we went on together and then compare notes – or, stories.  I loved this idea so I immediately went home and spent the next week writing a story about our dates, though what it was really a story about faith and about how, for the first time in my life, I had some – and it was in him.  In the end, he never wrote me a story.

After initially saying that I wouldn’t let him read what I had written if he wasn’t going to write anything for me, I decided to read aloud to him the story I had written.  It was about a month later on a Sunday night in October. We were sitting on his couch and the football game he was watching was in the middle of halftime so I almost had his full attention.  I don’t remember his reaction.  Maybe, probably, he kissed me.  But I remember reading the story aloud from my small orange notebook, dressed in his t-shirt and gym shorts.  I remember thinking that I had never felt so bare and vulnerable as I did in telling him – by means of the story – that I had faith in the love I had for him and in the love he said he had for me.

10

Sometimes, when I leave his apartment, I like to leave my boyfriend notes and poems.  I can’t know for sure what these small acts mean to him but I can only hope they mean to him what they would mean to me: a lot.  I do know that he keeps the notes and poems.  I know because I sometimes find them sitting atop his dresser, sometimes on the floor, sometimes tucked in his drawers between his clothes along with the journal I gave him when he told me he wanted to get back to his writing.  In the five months since I gave him the journal he has only written in the first two pages.  When I ask him about this, he says the same thing he says when I ask him why he never wrote me the story he had suggested me write for one another.  He says he thought that was something he wanted to get back to, but now he realized that that part of his life – the writing life – is over.

11

In Brooklyn, David Shields choose to read from a section of his book I which he frankly recounts his relationship with the girl who lived in the dorm room next to his when he was an undergraduate at Brown.  Before they began dating, Shields began entering her room while she was at class so he could read her diary.  He likes to read about how she sees him.  Finally, after months of dating, he confesses this transgression to her and their relationship quickly disintegrates.  He concludes that he had loved reading about their relationship as much as he had loved the girl and once he was no longer reading her diary, he was no longer very much in love at all.  The, David Shields declares, is what is known as a tragic flaw.

12

Recently, I have awakened in the middle of the night, startled by the sound of my boyfriend, who is sleeping next to me, shouting somewhat incoherently about forms and contracts and accounts.  I shake him awake.  I tell him his work is giving him night terrors.  I tell him to breathe.  He seems angry with me but I tell myself that maybe he is embarrassed.  And I wonder what it is like to feel so stressed and so stubbornly alone in the stress while believing that the writing part of your life is behind you.  I wonder what else there is.

Of course, I have night terrors too.  In my dreams I scream and cry and fight back as I relive my worst memories, but when I write I put those memories and that rage and all the broken hopes on the page and I make something for myself out of everything that could have made me just another victim.

13

In How Literature Saved My Life David Shields mentions his correspondence with the writer Sarah Manguso who wrote to him and mentioned that the original meaning of apocalypse is “the lifting of the veil.”  Sometimes I want to tell my boyfriend that he shouldn’t be so stubbornly private, that it would be the end of the world if he would just let me know what he is thinking and feeling.  But maybe it would be.  The veil would be lifted.

14

My boyfriend is irritated when we meet at a bookstore after work and I immediately start telling him about my slightly morbid fascination with David Foster Wallace.  He had a wife.  He hung himself in their California home.  She found him.

I tell my boyfriend that in light of Wallace’s suicide, I find his essays like “Consider the Lobster” and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” to be loaded with signs that it was coming all along, that in spite of being a great writer and a successful one, nothing could save David Foster Wallace.  The essays show, however thinly veiled, his fixation on despair and alone-ness and the fact that nothing nothing can truly assuage these conditions of being human.  It would seem that we could all be considered lobsters in the pot, screaming and crying and trying to claw our way free, aware – or not aware, but afraid all the same – of our fate. 

I try to talk to my boyfriend about this again as we ride the Subway to dinner and again as we eat our sushi and again as we lay in bed.  He has nothing to say and I have the feeling of being impenetrably alone inside my own head.  And maybe that is the true definition of despair.

15

It was a February night, a week before our planned excursion to Brooklyn to see David Shields read from his latest book, when my boyfriend and I made a decision.  After making this decision, I found myself watching his face and writing in my head what I believed would be the ending to the book that I am writing that barely even has a middle yet.  While he slept, I wrote down what I been writing in my head.  The note I made begins with the declarative phrase, “This is what life is about.”

The next day I remember thinking that I wanted to take back the original statement I had made to my boyfriend about how great David Shield’s new book How Literature Saved My Life is.  For, while he debates whether literature can save anyone and he admits that it certainly didn’t save David Foster Wallace, he never suggests anything else that might.  He says, “I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness.  Literature doesn’t lie about this – which is what makes it essential.”  This is all wonderfully, heartbreakingly true but that is why it is lucky that those of us who are writers and avid readers are also people.  People can touch and love in a way that writing can’t, in a way that warms the bed and warms even our cold, selfish souls.  Writing, at its best, is a bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness but so too, at its best, is sex and good conversation and all the intimate ways in which we are able to share ourselves with another, even if we might misunderstand each other from time to time.

Maybe loneliness is a misunderstanding.

16

The night before Thanksgiving, my boyfriend and I went to a small, rundown, little grocery store wedged between bars and t-shirt shops near Astor Place.  We bought a pumpkin pie from the store’s meager bakery and then made due with whatever else we could find.  My boyfriend picked out pre-cut and packaged turkey and a can of cranberry sauce.  I picked out all the necessary ingredients for making guacamole.  As we left the store, he walked ahead of me, carrying our shopping bag.  I lagged behind, holding the pie in my arms, making a point of memorizing everything about the store and the feeling.  From the doorway he looked back at me, “You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?”  Of course I was.

The Purple Heart

*Some names have been changed. Any similarity to actual people is entirely intentional.

It is easy enough to look back and pinpoint the beginning of things.  Beginnings are marked by a sudden change – a sudden burst of brightness, perhaps.  Beginnings are definitive.  Endings are of a very different nature.  Endings are vague and difficult to place on a calendar or clock.  Endings are a cumulative mess of goodbyes and second starts and failed attempts that seem to exist indefinitely until something else begins again.  At least, that is how Chicago was for me.

Chicago began for me when I was seventeen and it was August.  I drove down from Wisconsin, on two lane highways and county roads, to the north side of Chicago where I had a room with a view of Lake Michigan, a poster of John Lennon and a mixed CD from my best friend.  I had always known that I did not belong in Wisconsin, and I had had a sense that I belonged in a place like New York or London.  But being seventeen and having never been to New York and having visited London but having no idea of how to accomplish moving to a foreign country, I went to Chicago.  Later, in London and then in New York I would say that Chicago was where I really belonged.

My first job in Chicago was on West Lawrence Avenue.  I had been living in the city for less than a month when I started taking the red line and then a bus and then a long walk up the west side of Lawrence Avenue to the small building that at one  point had a bullet hole in the window of the door.  I would leave for work directly after my anthropology class in which I was learning about globalization and local culture. I worked with elementary school students whose parents had come to the U.S. as refugees from the Khmer Rouge.  We would practice spelling and punctuation and basic math and they would tell me about their older siblings who had joined gangs and about their cousins who were making good money waiting tables downtown.  And then later in the evening I would watch them practice traditional Cambodian dances.  At this point I would feel quite lucky, for it seemed to me that I was witnessing a fragile beauty that bloomed there in the late evenings in the basement of that building on West Lawrence Avenue, below the floor that was dedicated to Social Services and the floor that housed a small but striking memorial to the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

Some nights, when their parents were late to pick them up, we would wait on the upper floor of the building, a room that housed a make-shift museum of artifacts and remnants of the dead’s daily life that had been smuggled out of Cambodia.  The children would pick up and play with old toys from the displays and would take pictures of the carved statues with their camera phones until the door with the bullet-broken window would open and night and snow would blow in along with the sound of their parents calling their names.

A year later I met Caroline in my first college fiction writing class.  She had an apologetic grace that I admired and I must of have had something she admired as well for one night in early September she invited me to meet her in Grant Park to listen to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.  When I arrived she had a bottle of red wine in her purse.  Sarah was still new to Chicago.  I had been living there for a year and, because I had recently moved into my own apartment, I felt almost native so from Grant Park I led her north up Michigan Avenue.  I liked the downtown best at night and I loved it that particular night because I could see the beauty of the lights through her eyes -- bright and new and full of promises that neither of us could have articulated but that we had both probably dreamed up as children.  As we walked she would stop to stare in store windows, admiring a dress or a pair of shoes, telling me about this designer and that one and what I heard was a way I almost wanted to be.  I led her all the way to North Avenue Beach where we sat together on the shore.  She opened the bottle of wine and poured me some into my empty Starbucks cup.  She was older than me, old enough to buy wine and to know how to make a vodka tonic.  That Starbucks cup was my first glass of wine, but in many ways I was old enough.  The wine tasted heavy and dark.  I didn't like the taste but I liked the idea and I liked her so though I drank it slowly and accepted a refill when she offered.  We watched the Chicago skyline rise up above the Drake hotel and our friendship began.

At another job I met Milton. Milton was my age. He was from the south side of Chicago.  From the very first time we rode the red line together, he liked me.  I had yelled, “What?!”for a reason that I cannot now recall and he had smiled with a big, toothy grin.  And all that day Milton had watched me until finally I had said, “What?!” again and he told me that I was “hard.”  Stuart told me that “hard” meant that I was tough and he told me he couldn’t figure out what had made me that way.  I liked him because no one had ever called me “hard” before – or even “tough” – and because we had both been born into lives that had forced us to be the kind of tough that went far beyond thick skin, that went into our voices and our quick but careful smiles and our entire way of being.  Milton was kind and smarter than most people I had met in school.  On Saturday afternoons we would take long breaks and he would tell me about his girlfriend and show me pictures of his daughter.  He liked teaching me about the world he came from and about the cut and clarity of the diamonds he wore to prove it and even about the gun he carried in case someone decided to remind him of it.

And if I didn’t know it already, after knowing Milton, I always knew that I could handle anything because I knew that he thought I could and that was good enough for me.

The same summer I met Milton, I also met Alex.  Alex was a newly graduated English major from San Francisco who rolled his own cigarettes and called me erudite because he thought I was, even though I didn’t know what it meant.  Alex liked used bookstores and grilled cheese sandwiches and dipping his French fries in mayonnaise and even though I had a boyfriend I liked him quite a lot.  Alex suggested that Annie Hall might be my favorite movie, even though I had never watched it.  And, later, when I was in Canterbury I watched it and found out he was right.  Alex wanted to know what books I had read and what I had thought of them and even if the sparks were only in my imagination I saw some when I quoted my favorite lines from my favorite books to him and, later, when I no longer had a boyfriend I did have a better I idea of what I wanted to have.

Before I left Chicago for Canterbury, Caroline and my friends from work had a small going-away party for me at her apartment on the fifty sixth floor of a building that rose high over downtown Chicago, just above the canals.  Below us the city sprawled like a Technicolor diorama.  And while traffic that looked like toys moved in slow flashes of orange light far below us, we talked and drank and as the night wore on the wine flowed red and then white and then bubbling gold.  And I had watched Alex as he stood leaning against the balcony railing fifty six floors above concrete.  He took a long drag of his hand rolled cigarette, letting the smoke fill him.  Moonlight or streetlight or chance fell upon the orange embers at the tip of his cigarette as a light breeze sent one flying towards me.  It disappeared into the night air just before it touched my face.  I watched his body bend casually over the railing as he tapped his cigarette against it, setting free more glowing embers, all falling fast and orange down fifty six floors of black night.  And later that night he told me that those sparks would disappear in the air before they ever got close to touching the ground.

Months later when I was living in Canterbury, watching Annie Hall, I would think of this moment and write about sparks.  And much later I found that I could see Chicago in every hot orange ember of a late night cigarette that I watched men in tight jeans smoking in any city in the world.

By the time I met David in September of my last year in Chicago I was in love with Chicago.  David was a rock’n’roller, a stoner, a writer, a good friend and a bad idea.  Like Chicago, David was tough to love but impossible not to.

He had Chicago in his smile. He had it in his voice, in the deep ale and cigarette songs he sang in a dimly lit bar or in the unfurnished living room of his apartment.  Maybe that’s why I loved kissing him – because I loved Chicago so much that I wanted to get as close to it as possible.  When we first met, David had looked at me like he wanted to see me naked and I had met his gaze.   Nine months later I let him undress me until I was naked on top of him in his bed.  Those days I wore Chicago the way a veteran of war wears a purple heart – only I was still dressed up in Chicago even when I wasn’t wearing anything at all.  And so David became entwined with my love of Chicago until they were one and the same and later, when I was living in New York, I would listen to his music and every part of me would ache with the pain of missing something that was too big and too much of an idea and too little of any kind of truth to have ever been mine at all.

Of all the times I left Chicago, the most iconic image in my mind is one from the night before I left for France.  The lights of the Loop beamed like stars in the distance and the rattling sounds of the “L” mingled with the far-off whiz of traffic on Lake Shore Drive and the last verses of the Stones song that was drifting through the open door of the bar at my back.  It was a warm February night and I was standing on the corner of Wabash and Balbo, watching the black hair, black leather, black combat boots figure of my friend Mad walk away up Wabash.  She wore Chicago the way I wore Chicago, the way a veteran of war wears a purple heart, the way all of us who came to Chicago from somewhere else and made it ours wear the city.  Even in the moment I knew that was Chicago to me: tough and beautiful and something I admired. Though the city might always be trying to be one thing or another – a tourist attraction or a stereotype – at heart and in spite of itself, or perhaps because of itself, Chicago was a rock’n’roll princess, a mafia darling, and the realest damn thing I had ever experienced.

For a while after I left Chicago, I found myself missing Mad, because to me they are one and the same.  I see her face in my head on lonely nights in New York, where I live now.  I smell the winter windy city air and cigarette smoke lingering together on her leather jacket. I feel the cold that has settled onto her hair as it brushes against the bare skin of my neck when she hugs me hello and goodbye.  I see her throw back her head of long black hair as she takes a shot of whiskey.  After spending time with her, I started drinking whiskey too because I liked the way it sounded when she ordered shots of Jameson and so I started ordering shots of Jameson because it made me like the way I sounded too.  And now, in New York, I am always surprised when I meet a man and he doesn’t like the way I sound when I order a shot of Jameson because everything she said was so sure and strong and I loved her for it and I would like to be loved for it too.  But, then again, it was her who told me that I too was sure and strong.  With a glass of whiskey in her hand, she had told me that it was in the way I entered in a room – in my black boots and long black jacket.  She said I was someone that people felt they should know.  And I had felt so lucky to know her.

When I returned from Cannes, I did not return to Chicago. Instead I spent the summer with my family in Wisconsin before moving to New York in August, but within a week of my return my brother and I were in his car driving down county roads and two lanes highways, to Chicago’s north side, to David’s apartment where his band was playing and a party was raging and where I believed that something happy and hopeful could begin for my brother as it had begun for me. Mad was there too and she taught my brother to drink whiskey just as she had taught me and after some consideration I decided this was a good thing because of all the people in the world who could give him his first shot of whiskey there was no one tougher or better than Mad.

David’s band played covers of the songs I had listened to when I had been much younger and had not yet been to Canterbury or Cannes or New York or even Chicago, songs that had made me feel that I belonged somewhere, songs that I had lived inside until I was able to make my way out into the world in search of my very own place within it.  And now that I felt that I had found my place, I was trying to give my brother the beginning of one too.  So my brother drank the whiskey Mad had poured into a paper cup for him.  And Mad smoked cigarettes out on the back porch.  And David pulled me into the corner of the kitchen and kissed me as if I had never left Chicago and as if we had all the time in the world before I would ever leave again.

It is easy enough to look back and pinpoint the beginning of things.  Beginnings are marked by a sudden change – a sudden burst of brightness, perhaps.  New York began for me when I met Zach.  It was a hot night in late August and it was my fourth night in the city.  I was walking down Second Avenue with Audrey, a friend I had met while living in Cannes.  Audrey had picked up smoking during our time in Cannes and as we walked down Second Avenue she asked strangers if they had any cigarettes.  That’s how we met Zach.  He was standing with his friends outside a bar, smoking.  He gave Audrey a cigarette and soon we were all in a taxi speeding uptown to Spanish Harlem where Zach and his friends had an apartment with a rooftop deck and some beer and a view of a city that neither I, nor Audrey, had seen much of yet.

On that rooftop in Spanish Harlem I found myself standing before Zach and his friends, holding my beer bottle in one hand, while the orange lights of the roof and the city blended together and blurred my memories with my new reality.  I was reciting Woody Allen’s opening monologue from my favorite movie, Annie Hall.  And when I had finished quoting Woody Allen paraphrasing Groucho Marx saying, “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member,” Zach smiled, stepped a little closer to me and said, “That was good but here’s how it really goes.”

And so it goes that New York began for me when I was not quite twenty two and it was not yet September and I was too stubborn to believe I could be happy anywhere other than Chicago.  The night after I met Zach, my brother drove down from Wisconsin, on two lane highways and county roads, to the north side of Chicago, to David’s apartment where his band was playing and a party was raging and there was something to begin to be happy about.

Never Love A Wild Thing

He must have thought I was crazy and he must not have loved it.  I was dancing by myself in his kitchen while he remained seated on the couch in the living room.  Maybe he was watching me but I wasn’t seeing him.  I was seeing my hair – splayed gold strands of movement.  I was seeing my threadbare white socks move against the tiled floor.  I was seeing the places and the people I longed to see again.  I was losing myself inside the song– but really, I was finding myself in a way I never could when I was just sitting and talking and trying to smile.  And I was transported.  And that was the important part.

He said I should think about seeing someone – someone I could talk to about these things.  He said it as if it wasn’t normal to feel what I was feeling.  But I think I would have to be a less conscious version of myself to not go a little crazy in anticipation of committing to living in the same city and working the same job at the same time for the same five days a week for a year or more of my life.  I think that anyone who doesn’t go a little crazy before they give themselves and their freedom up to the requisites of practicality must truly be more than a little crazy.

                                                         

My favorite songs were leaving songs.  Both the sad ones and the ones that sounded happy to be free.  I listened to them even when I was staying and I dreamed of leaving again, eventually.  And when I was gone, sometimes I listened to them and dreamed of leaving where I had gone, only to return to where I had been.   But still my love was the leaving.  I liked the sound of movement.  I liked the way the sound feels.

I went to Blois, a French chateau town in the Loire Valley, by myself for a weekend in March.  I lost myself in movement and song.  But really I was finding myself.  But really I was transported.  I walked through the chateau, experiencing the place that had played home to some of my favorite moments and characters from history.  And I walked through the town, experiencing the place that was still playing home to my ideas of romance and beauty and hope and adventure and France.  And I walked with songs playing in my headphones and I was in the moment and the songs were with me and it was enough.  And I knew that they would hold the feeling for me long after I had boarded the train and left Blois – left, but not moved on.

I could feel hot, fresh sweat soaking the back of my friend’s shirt as I held him against me, held him up as he swayed and dipped drunkenly into me.  Maybe he was a little bit crazy and maybe I liked it.  We were dancing on the kitchen floor -- him and me and my brother and a couple others that I had missed all the while I had been in France. It was summer and it was my first and only night back in Chicago since I had returned from France.  His hands were in my my hair, on the skin that the back of my dress left bare, on my hips that the dress was only trying to hide.  He was mumbling to me about how good artists need to have their hearts broken once, twice, several times. He was telling me that it was a good idea to travel while I was young because then when I was old I could go back to those same places and remember who I had been.  And I was happy enough with the way we were moving and the songs that were playing, happy enough where I was.

My brothers looked at me like I was crazy and they looked like they understood it.  I was dancing in the dining room, wearing the same dress I had been wearing all week, shaking my hair in an insistent frenzy of fun.  I was shouting at them to play the song again – the way I had done every night of the week. And they were obliging because they knew it wasn’t the song I wanted, it was the place it took me back to.  It was the people I had loved and left behind.  It was the possibilities I had once perceived.  As long as that song was playing I could be transported.  It could all be possible once more.  It might have been a gin night or a wine night or it might have been both.  And an outsider might have thought I was spiraling out of control but I was just spiraling, just moving in place – afraid of my life’s momentum and afraid of losing it. 

I liked flirting with disaster because it could never let me down.  I was most comfortable around other car crash prodigies – the desperately reckless types who made art and music and anything out of being broken and being called crazy and being alone and being aware of it all the damn time.  They were the ones who would dance with me in a bar or in my bedroom or on the kitchen floor.  They were the ones who understood what it was to need the music and the movement. When I was with them I wasn’t transported.  I was just there.  And that was the important part.