I.
The show is exactly one month away. I spend all day hunched over my studio desk, painting and listening to episodes of This American Life one after the other.
A few days ago, I noticed that many of my glass paintings had been ruined by the mounting process that Brian and I took so long to perfect. We did tests, but the problem manifested itself too long afterwards. The paint is being pulled off the painting, creating air bubbles the size of fingerprints on the small, delicate surfaces. These bubbles reflect light.
It has been hard for me here. Making art without struggle turned out to be just as difficult as making art within it, prompting me to consider whether or not it was just me– my own problem– and whether or not I was an “artist” at all. But I had done something, finished a body of work, and I could point to it and say, “this is what I have done,” and that would be enough. When I saw the flaws, I felt as though even this shred of assurance had been stripped from me. It was the last straw. I sobbed in a manner that was less like crying and more like yelling, so loud I woke up Rachel through the wall. It was the culmination of months of self-doubt and frustration. “I have nothing,” I kept repeating over and over, “I have nothing at all.”
II.
I can feel this experience ending– my body is starting to fall apart as it does after periods of long and intense travel. I have developed sudden TMJ which is making my ears feel stuffed full. I swear my eyesight has gotten worse; I cannot read street signs until I am close enough to have already passed the street. I wake in the morning with my jaw clenched, my fists clenched, my long nails making deep imprints of miniature hillside landscapes on my palms. The incessant sounds of trains, which I had loved immediately when I first moved here– it had to do with romance and reassurance– are beginning to irritate me like a soon-to-be-ex lover. They seem louder, more strident, they seem to always be interrupting. And even when they are trying to be quiet, I hear them squeaking, painstakingly, over the tracks. It sounds like howling, like something dead and tortured– the sound of something being dragged to a horrible place.
If my body, albeit without my mind’s consent, is telling me that it is just about time to go, the next question, of course, is where?
There is no answer to this question that does not cause me some level of pain.
New York is looking less and less attractive to me. Things are changing there. My friends are falling away from each other now in a much more final and pronounced way than the wishy-washy indifference after college. The couples are breaking up. The past couples are getting sick of suffering around one another. The roommates are fed up. Some people have found new friends, new boyfriends, new jobs, new lives. People are sick of New York. It seems that “leaving” is on the tip of everyone’s tongue, but nobody knows to where. Where else is there? And what else is there to do?
Miami would be easy, at least for a time. I could live with my mother, get a part-time job at the gallery I used to work at, make art and sort of get my life together for awhile. But I would be living with my mother. This is a very hard thing to do. And, from a social standpoint, I haven’t been back to Miami in a permanent way for years; though I still feel close to many of my friends down there, I can’t say I feel close to any of their lives. Besides, many of them seem to be getting sadder, crazier, more unintelligible and dependent. It often depresses me.
I could go somewhere else entirely– to the West Coast maybe, or to teach English in South America, but this seems cheap, like running away, like wasting time. And I would quite possibly be lonely.
In all three options, my reservations have something to do with community or loss thereof, and the precarious promise of the company of old friends.
An ex-boyfriend called me at 5 am the other night. It was interesting timing, as I had been thinking about him a lot recently, mostly because I had just listened to a This American Life episode about camp, and that is where I initially met him, in the summer of 1999. I was 14. Last May, after eight years of back and forth, we had a very dramatic falling out and we hadn’t spoken since. It was a normal conversation, friendly, almost too friendly, like no time had passed. And then, as the sun began rising and with the same inevitability, we talked about what had happened between us, the event that inspired the longest stalemate in our history, and one we both believe to be permanent. The tone changed immediately; we were both clearly still a little sore, still resentful about our irreconcilable differences. We agreed that it was really over this time, the friendship as well as the relationship, quite obviously so. This realization should not have been hard– we really did not feel close to one another anymore. Forget love– in many ways, we didn’t even like each other anymore, and we were both comfortable in that. And still, when I hung up the phone, I cried. I never got to sleep that morning.
There was a time in my life when I could say about certain people, “we will always be friends,” and really believe it unquestioningly. I remember once, in high school, having to make a target-like shape in my psychology class that was supposed to be my support system. The people I put on the ring closest to the bulls-eye were the people closest to me. People on the secondary and tertiary rings were my second and third front and so on. I remember thinking that the people in that first ring were definite lifers. I could not conceive of a time when my day-to-day life would go on without them. Though I can still somewhat make out the imprint of the letters, they have one by one been erased from my target– two by religion, one (my camp boyfriend) by accrued anger and resentment, and one by plain indifference.
It may have been naive, but I still held on to these ideas about unconditional lifelong friendship through college. The kicker is I still hold on to these ideas; I have, ironically, just put other people in the center ring. That early morning conversation reminded me of this, reminded me that no matter how hard I try I cannot keep everyone. Turns out that “lifelong” is, in fact, a very long time.
And yet, this does not make things easier. It does not keep me from saving things: notes, pictures, even phone messages and consulting them regularly. It does not keep me from thinking about all of these places I have been, all of these firmly defined communities– high school, camp, college– and holding them in my chest with one dreadful, pulsing feeling: yearning. I mourn every loss thoroughly, like a sudden death, even though most of the time it is more like one after prolonged illness. It is exhausting and eternally painful. I do not understand how it is that while I am squinting to follow the crumbs back to the “us,” most people seem to accept that it’s already been incinerated in the witch’s oven. I recognize that this is the more mature, realistic approach. I recognize that I have a problem.
III.
It occurs to me that the one thing that has always been the least interesting to me (to put it mildly) may be the solution to my problem: marriage, family.
It seems that what keeps me in constant mourning is the idea that people can lose you, that no relationship is really sacred enough. From my own experience, I know that marriage and family is often no exception to this, but there is something to be said for the convening power of institutions. I am outside of an educating institution, I don’t ever plan to be a part of a religious one, so the institution of marriage seems to be my best bet if I want what I say I want– binding continuity– causing me to think twice about my continual condemnation of it.
If I could marry my friends, I would. But “marriage” is only allowed to be a romantic thing between two people of opposing genders. So be it– I want something contractual.
Just to insure the prolonging of this insanity, Rachel sent me this article from Atlantic Monthly. The author, a woman in her 40s who had a son through artificial insemination, makes a case for “settling” in marriage at a younger age. By settling, she does not mean “settling down,” but rather, marrying the guy you might not be in love with to insure that you don’t end up alone at 40.
She makes a very, very convincing argument and reading it gives you a sinking feeling and a headache. Her point: marriage is bad, but loneliness is worse. Marriage is not about passion after a couple of years anyway, so if you make no grand expectations and pick the guy who is safe, your life will be boring, but pleasantly functional, and that beats alone, exhausted, unwanted and miserable.
I have no trouble agreeing with her. I have long ago thrown away the so-called radical feminist implications of wanting to be in a stable, familial relationship with a man. Watch enough Sex and the City episodes in a row and you realize the alternative is just too bleak. The sexual revolution was created by men, for men. Women, with few exceptions, can dabble in it, but find much more fulfillment and empowerment (as terrible as it sounds) being loved and respected within these albeit conventional modes. I just didn’t think it would ever start to sound good to me. Now, I begin to uncover that I have been the perfect candidate for this system all along. I value time invested above all else. I am unfailingly loyal. And most importantly for these purposes, I am infinitely more sentimental than I am romantic.
IV.
We are almost at the end of this experience. I find myself on the brink of leaving yet another group of people who have become important to me, perhaps never to really cross paths in such an intensive way ever again. I find myself on the brink of a decision: whether to return to the relationships of two former lives or to create a new one entirely. The last option seems the most threatening. I say it’s because I am afraid it is a “waste of time.” It’s not exactly that. Perhaps it is simply that I am wary of picking up yet another set of new people who will keep little tiny pieces of my heart with them, only to grind them up and scatter the dust at a later date. Perhaps I am afraid that soon there will be nothing left to leave behind.
Or perhaps it is that I know there is no long term home for me on the West Coast or in South America, and all I want right now is to “settle.” Perhaps in the face of yet another transition, in the striking absence of attachments, feeling for the first time almost ever that I am a person alone and that no one is bound to me and I am bound to no one, I am again searching in a panicked desperation for “home.” It is the theme of this experience; I know that now. I think again about a confession, uttered to me in shameful secrecy when I left New York about the yearning to pick a person and make a home out of them, to follow them wherever they go, so you can never be homeless. It sounds like the best idea I have ever heard. Having been homeless for so long, I cannot suppress the instinctual urge to “settle.” It sort of feels like drowning.
I used to think that I was a person who knew myself impossibly well. I am not a superficial person, but somehow all of myself, in all its complexity, floated to the surface long ago. I have taken pride in the fact that I can wear it all at once and with transparency. If there was nothing else, it was that I knew myself– it was a quality that most people could not purport to have.
And now– like I found myself reciting over my dead paintings the other night– “I have nothing, I have nothing at all.”
I am leaving Spartanburg with more doubts about the nature of my identity than I have ever had before. While I, of course, have no plans to seek marriage, my consideration of it is proof enough that something inside me has turned, melted one of those pillars of opinion that never seem to erode within me. I don’t know if I am an artist. I don’t know that I belong in New York, or anywhere else for that matter.
I have nothing.
And strangely, this nothingness, this scraped bare nothingness, is quite possibly the most incredible gift that Spartanburg has been able to give. It is an opportunity for reconsideration. And I may very well carry it into my future, let it inform the future’s most difficult task: namely, creating a home that really feels like home, a home that is indubitably my own.
