Nook people need relief from distraction’s overall insistence: the trap of everything else. Their ambition is not to be understood outright, but to return to an original peg. To share without betraying whatever mechanism individuates him or her. Perhaps that’s what we call our disposition. How becoming is multipart, but mainly a pilgrimage inward. If you share too much of yourself, you risk growing into someone who has nothing unacknowledged. Those yet-to-access riches that I’d suspect are what tingle when a song’s lyrics eject me into outer space; assure me I can love; can go about and be loved; can retreat and still get, as in both catch and understand, love. Those yet-to-access riches that I’d suspect too are what tingle when a building’s architecture persuades me to notice other systems of proportion.
Or when an Annie Baker play sets in motion a story I’d like to write; an ex I’d like to call; a dinner party I’d like to have and invite Annie Baker to, and Sarah Polley, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Dolly Parton, and Shirin Neshat, my friend Judnick, and Eartha Kitt, were she still here, and one of my heroes, Polly Platt, were she still here too, and my stepfather, Mritiunjoy, because he’s always good company, and my old super Sherlock, from my first apartment in Crown Heights, because he’d get along well with Mritiunjoy; with everyone really. It’s that floating feeling—a light, invigorating sickness—that stems from seeing an Annie Baker play; that makes me want to make stuff instead of make sense, even if it’s just a dinner party, or, quite the opposite, committing to a weeklong vow of silence. Because nook people are turned on by and twig how terribly normal it is to drop out of life occasionally.
What a nook person wants is space, however small, to follow whatever image is driving her, instead of sensing like she might have to trade it in or share it before she’s willing. Her awakening demands no stage but, rather room to store that second half of what she deems her double life: what’s corrugated inside. Intuition’s buildup.
Nook people find it trying to imagine themselves in real-life situations but long to climb into, for instance, a movie still. Into a pasture of wildflowers and tall grass and Merchant Ivory and Helena Bonham Carter’s mane. Into 3 Women’s desert pastels; those lenient yellows and corpse violets. Into Tom Hanks’s Soho loft in Big. Every single frame of Maurice Pialat’s à nos amours, but especially when Sandrine Bonnaire is dangling spaghetti into her mouth while a teenage couple makes out right next to her. Especially then.
Heat’s floor-to-ceiling-windowed Malibu view, because a nook person forever seeks enclosed perpetuity. That Escher-like Beetlejuice house. Its patio. The discoverable mess of Elliott’s closet in E.T. Or Céline’s Paris apartment in Before Sunset. Where she’s making tea and coyly dancing to Nina Simone, looking over her shoulder at Jesse to say, “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.”
Nook people are interested in what’s backstage; are especially passionate about the small-scale bedlam of wimmelbooks; seek coats that cocoon; seek windows with shutters; a pattern that reveals itself over time; a vacation alone. Nook people can gently disagree while securing their spark. No. No. Spark is not substantive enough. Their approach. That radiant heat they typically keep stored inside because it functions as insulation.
Nook people love signing with a heavy pen; don’t mind waiting in the car; love sitting on a stack of banquet chairs in an empty banquet hall, feet dangling; appreciate the surprising density of a beaded curtain; the weight of a pile of denim; gripping a large Fuji apple with both hands; the twine of Joni singing, Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling and wish they too could live in a box of paints.
Nook people fall asleep in their palms; are pacified by tucking their hands in the warm seam of two thighs; are rarely sure how they got good at anything; confront despair with a strong drink or by giving up for months, only writing first sentences or returning to a corrupted love; or converting their bed into a life raft, or wearing a thick cat-eye simply to walk to the store; or making innocent decisions like buying a shower radio to cure a bad day, or finding a friend who is folding her laundry and requesting that you sit on her floor while she pairs socks, or suggesting that you donate your bunch of brown bananas so that she might bake the bread.
Nook people confuse emotional truth with other varieties of truth. They are a composite of the last person who complimented them and the next person who might ignore them, and also whomever or whatever they consider themselves a child of.
As children, nook people so wished to be forgotten in department stores. Locked inside once the doors were closed. They were very good at hide-and-seek, perhaps even overlooking the game’s reciprocal nature. Because when nook people find themselves lost briefly, they are stunned into a phenomenal sense of peace. Once, as a kid, I took a nap in the woods in the dead of winter because I couldn’t find my way back to the farmhouse in upstate New York where my family was visiting friends. I’d walked in circles and confused my trail of footprints. Disoriented, all I could think to do was take a nap. I slept deeply, which is rare for me. As the sun began to set and as my parents began to worry, there I was snoozing soundly on a mound of snow, palisaded by a forest of bare trees and the holy, cease-fire quiet only nature can administer.
As adults, nook people cower under overhead lighting. They prefer when lamps yoke the floor rather than animate an entire room. They are habitual creatures who fear each time they’re charmed by something, because what if it’s the last time they are charmed by anything?
I keep a miniature pink flamingo on my desk at all times. It sits next to me when I type, like a charm that isn’t a charm but a knickknack that proves I am not immune to superstition. If I lay it flat, the flamingo is smaller than my SHIFT key and just about the size of a date pit. The flamingo is rubbery and painted, and shaded as only mini things can be painted and shaded: so meticulously, so verbatim. It looks as if it’s been zapped small from real life.