“Stop reacting to everything.”
We laughed. But just as quick, I considered how depressing that would be. How regulating and unlike me to not be disposed to palm trees, the sharp pleats in a pantsuit, young Al Pacino. How unnecessarily held captive life would feel if I didn’t react. If I wasn’t susceptive and quick to greet what awakens me. My voice is, contrary to whatever insight accommodates how others think I should sound, the most like me. My least restrained quality, it rises and rejoices when the mood suits, and tendrils even when I’m doubtless. It’s how I deliver. How I divulge. It’s my noise. How it rises and falls, and then vaults. My “Oh yeah?” expresses confidence, like I’m willing to bet on something, but also “Oh yeah?”—as in, sincere interest, as in Go on. I could be voicing disbelief or absolute thrill when I begin a thought with “Apparently.” Why give that up? The spoken dexterity.
From what’s been expressed to me, my voice’s junior quality, let’s call it, could use a bad cold. A ballast. Some sobering. Some humility. A series of milestones that supposedly authorize a woman’s voice.
On those days when I speak to no one until evening, when I’ve made plans with a friend, only for dinner, so as not to disturb the writing I hope will have been achieved—that so rarely ever is—it’s on those days I forget I can speak. That I am capable of noise. I’ve spent hours molding the silent commotion in my head—a noise in and of itself, not sleek like a setting-loose but inharmonious, like rummaging—that to say anything more simply exhausts. Writing, like the hours that follow a concert, coats me with a static buzzing, well after I’ve closed my computer and rejoined the world. A day spent transmitting tendencies and chasing the occasional, phantom idea that hovers in front of me, only to disappear when I attempt to toss words on it, would—how could it not—take time to cast off. But when I sit down for dinner with a friend, and my first words do come out—cracked, slowed, and flat—and I think, Isn’t that nice? my next reaction is to hurry and recover. To not savor, too warmly, this expected-of-me alternative. Those fixes I arrange myself into. How slippery it becomes to make amendments. The dicey irreparableness of being. I ask the waitress for some water. I clear my throat.
14
At My Least and Most Aware
NOT much has changed. I’m still a difficult woman who startles easy. I still forget to wash the apple before I eat it. I’m still oddly thankful for the rush of hot air let off from the sides of buses. Like things could be hotter, grosser. I’m still doubtful my stories possess a clear point. The sound of men gulping water still bothers me. I still interrupt. I’m still unprepared for how unusual it feels to receive a postcard; the traveled touch of card stock; of tapered handwriting chasing vertically up the side, allowing for a squished, tender sign-off. Thinking of you. Miss you. An unforeseen Yours. Even the faint sound of a postcard falling through my mail slot and landing on my floor is, somehow, still enchanted.
I still prefer counting to fourteen instead of ten. I still don’t mind, perhaps I even like, ice cream’s cold swallow rising up my throat so I can swallow it back down again. I still only have nightmares when I take naps. I still wonder what stops me, what version of me would exist had I let someone take my picture when I was younger, wearing a bikini with my hair up, while in the background an out-of-focus lake contrives to mislay the mood. Because hanging over pictures of lakes and girls and summer is the impression, often, of a missing person.
I still have trouble discerning between loneliness and solitude, and Sundays, and Schubert’s sonatas. I’m still dismally unfunny; restless when I sit on grass; too much of a daughter to forget about the dead. Even though I own none, I still love the size of LP records. Their square, tactile bigness. And I still believe that people who buy them and collect them aren’t snobs at all, but true blues. A record sleeve is unwieldy. To hold one is to sometimes appear like you’re hugging one.
It still comes as a shock to me how irreversible life is. How there’s no going back to whatever version of me existed before I saw that movie—the kind that switches me on to new streaks of consciousness by showing me a woman I feel strangely, formerly, acquainted with. Or watching Spielberg instill in me not a fear of sharks but a love for movie sound tracks and their wily, persuasive ploy to make my innermost thoughts sing. Or before I took pleasure in doing nothing, before I figured out there’s no one way to live, before I tasted city smog outside another city’s airport and knew right then that I was a city kid. Or before I felt my father weep into my arm the night his mother died, or took Angela’s class fall semester and read Marguerite Duras’s account of a river and its current, a girl, a lover, a mother, of memory’s weakness for women and gold lamé heels. Or when I was woken up by the news and this planet’s despairing chorus—how it dislocates the heart and coaxes cynics and makes a mass out of individuals. Or whatever version of me existed before I met that boy whom I loved for one winter and well into spring, when the magnolias in early bloom looked not just pink but elaborate, ambient, and grand, like my insides were seeable—flowering so forcefully, like nature cautioning me: Durga, this won’t last.
I still get shivers on the hottest summer days. I still think feeling startled, for instance, by a Post-it unsticking from my wall or by fluff flying in front of my nose is a subliminal reminder that I am alive and that being alive is a beta test full of little frights. I still confuse being misunderstood with feeling shame. I’m still hungriest when it’s not quite dinner or when it’s way past several bedtimes that would have allowed for a sensible sleep. I still believe it’s impossible to experience anxiety sitting on a veranda and, contrary to popular imagery, possible to experience sharp panic in proximity to the ocean, the spray of waves, and the crescent sweep of a beach.
I still imagine my brain is peanut-sized, especially when I can’t understand how bridges are built over large bodies of water; especially when I consider painters who paint hands that reflect a life and writers who thoughtfully clarify what is halfway known to them yet somehow lingering.