Life in LA

The Thing of It

I got in a car accident tonight.

I was driving from the yoga studio to school and, at the intersection of Venice Blvd and Sepulveda, the woman in front of me stopped fast because the person in front of her stopped fast and I rear-ended her car. I had looked down for a second, at the stereo or my phone, I don't remember, and when I looked up her car seemed to be approaching mine at about 30 mph. I slammed on the brakes but it was too late and I hit her pretty hard.

My hood smashed upwards, the black metal buckling easily. All the shit in my car slid off the seats and onto the floorboards, my school books and yoga bag, my coffee mug and my purse, my head snapped forward and then backward and I quickly turned off the stereo. Silence, I needed silence. I'd been listening to Peter, Bjorn & John, thinking about how I'm going to see them at the Roxy tomorrow night, I was singing along, I think, track 6, I think.

We pulled off to the side, to the parking lot of a Shell station, this woman and I, and I got out of my car, my legs a little shaky. I could feel my breath already quick and shallow, a lump at the back of my throat, pricks of tears welling, breathe, breathe, you can do this, don't cry yet, breathe, breathe. Her car was fine. Mine is pretty fucked. She was nice. We exchanged information.

She took a long time filling hers out, searching for her insurance card, huddled over in the car seat, scribbling down various numbers and information. Leave, leave, please just leave so I can sob in peace. It was welling up. She finally handed me a piece of paper and I gave her one in return. Will you be okay? Do you want me to stay? No, no, I'm fine, really. Thank you.

I sunk back into my car, pulled the door closed, and let out a sob. I held my phone in my hand, my thumb ready to depress any button.

And it all came crashing down. It swelled up and crashed down like a fucking tsunami. What the fuck am I doing any of this for? What is the point of all of this? All day I'd been a little sad, could feel the weight of things slightly pressing down, and all day I'd been fighting it. It's okay, Claire, I whispered in my head all day, it's okay. You can do this. You're already doing it. It's working, you're changing, you're getting better. All day I told myself these things, held my head high, took calm, even breaths.

But suddenly sitting there in the car, my phone in hand, it all came crashing down, this thing that I'm fighting every day, all the time. In that moment, phone in hand, sitting there, 28 years old on a cool Los Angeles night, my thumb ready to press a button, the button that will connect me to that person, that person that you call when something like this happens.

Except I don't have that person anymore. They're all gone. I'm nobody's most important person and I don't have a most important person. The tears were streaming down my cheeks at this point. They're, in fact streaming down my cheeks as I write this. This is it. This is the thing of it.

The thing that leads me to those moments where every part of me inside is screaming, the thing that leads me to 10pm baths, that scalding water being the closest thing I can get to feeling held. I'm nobody's most important person. I'm nobody's most important person. I'm nobody's most important person.

I fight this all day. It's okay, I keep telling myself. It's okay to feel alone, to feel unattached. It's okay to want to attach to someone. It's okay to want to be loved. It's okay to get a little hopeful about this week's crush, it doesn't make me a bad person, it's okay.

Except it's not okay. I hate myself. In these moments I hate myself so much. I can't think of one person I know who is no one's special person. I can't think of one friend of mine who isn't a daughter or a sister or a wife or a girlfriend, can't think of one person who wouldn't have that one to call if they got in a car accident or found out that they had cancer or if they won the lottery.

And I hate myself for feeling the way I do. I feel like there's something wrong with me because I'm no one's special person. Like I'm damaged or just no good, like I'm not worthy of being someone's most important person. Like I did something wrong.

I called my girlfriends. I called Kristin and Timbre and Lydia. Timbre was there within 15 minutes, a big hug, I didn't even have to tell her why I was so upset, she knew. And she was so wonderful, so loving, she handled the tow-truck guy, made the decisions, had him take my car to her house, gave me her husband's car so that I could make it to class to hand in a paper, told me I could have the car til next week, anything sweetie, anything you need. I cried on my way to school in her husband's car, feeling so loved by her.

In the car with her, leading the tow truck to her house, I started crying and telling her about my client last night, my client who had a break-through, the biggest in the 7 months we've been seeing each other, and I cried telling Timbre how proud I was of her, this client, and of myself for helping her get there, and how amazed I am by this progress, my relationship with her, and I realized that I was telling her about my client in this moment because it is one of the few things that I feel validates me as a person right now.

I know I'm going to get through this. But it's so hard. I know that I won't always be alone, that I will one day be someone's most important person. I know that the work I'm doing right now will make me all the more important.

But fuck, it's hard.

So Begins My Life

Today was one of those days....the good kind. Like the ones I've had a few times over the last few months...the ones that fill me up in the best way possible...the ones that remind me of how strong I am, of how much I want this life, of how much I am this life.

I worked all day, progress notes, expense reports, client referrals, a little light myspacing, some homework, a painfully boring 2 hour Department of Rehab meeting. And then off to the clinic for two hours of supervision, going over my client load, my grandparents group, my individual clients - their progress and my concerns and findings. Everything stacked back to back to back. Walking out of supervision and into the breakroom, setting down my bag and being handed a room slip for my seven o'clock client, stepping out of the breakroom, greeting my client in the waiting room, walking down the hallway to our room, closing that door behind me, the two of us face to face, our relationship tangible, filling up the whole room.

Driving home, winding around the curves in the marina, boat sails clinking in the night air, my client's story, her strength and progress so lucid, still in me somehow, everything about that room, those moments, about what I've chosen to do, am doing, filling me up in a new way. At home, pulling the car into the garage, my home, my little home that is all mine. Walking up the steps to my little deck with my flowering plants that I watered this morning, before the thunder showers. In the house, the heater on, kicking off my heels, feeding the cats. I'm in the kitchen, making a breakfast casserole for the morning, cubes of whole wheat bread and bell peppers, tomatoes, veggie sausage, jalapenos, eggs and milk and gruyere, covering it to sit overnight, to bake in the morning, and then I'm pulling on my running shoes, picking up the ipod.

I'm grabbing a video to return, shutting the door behind me. It's nine o'clock and I'm running down Venice Blvd, my feet pounding the sidewalk, I'm flying past the parked cars and empty brown paper bags crumpled in the shrubs. It's nine o'clock on a Tuesday night and I'm twenty eight years old and I'm running down a city street in Los Angeles. My heart is pounding and I'm listening to the same Of Montreal song on repeat. I feel like I can run forever and I want to. I want to keep on running down the darkened streets, my feet pounding harder and harder. I feel so fucking strong. I'm running into the video store, slapping the dvd onto the counter. Tim who works in the deli and who spent Christmas eve at my house last year is talking to the girl behind the counter. I blow him a kiss and am out the door again, pounding across Windward Circle, past the Townhouse and out onto Ocean Front Walk, swerving around the people walking their dogs, the music is blasting in my ears, driving me on, I can't get enough. I want to run for fucking ever.

Out onto the pier, my feet pounding up the little slope and then it evens out and I'm running straight out into the ocean, the lamplights lining the way, the sky a dark greygreenblack, clouds rushing across, the little lights curving up the coast as far as I can see. I'm twenty-eight years old and I'm running straight into my life, as far out as I can go, and I never want to stop, feel like I could go forever.

I Was Never Young

I'm EXHAUSTED.

I think I've mentioned this before, but my friend Matt Dawson is the bassist in the band Of Montreal. They played three sold out shows here in LA this past weekend and I went to all of them. It was so much fun...and so exhausting. Not to mention that I gave Matt & his girlfriend my bed for the last three nights and hence, spent my sleeping hours on the couch with the cats who woke me up on the hour with hissing spats, furious door pawing, and frantic toy chasing.

I cannot imagine being a rockstar. I think I would survive for about three days before I reached some kind of point-of-no-return-exhaustion-pinnacle. I always think my life is hectic, with school and my two jobs and my clients and yoga and friends...but watching these guys perform three crazy shows night after night, after rushing Matt & Pamela around to recording studios and sound checks, after watching them field weird fans, and navigating the interior of the kind-of-trashed tour bus, my life with my pets and plants and misty canals seems pretty serene.

Anyway, I'm so proud of Matt & so excited for him. We've been friends since high school and it's really exciting to see someone I've known for so long achieving this level of success. Check them out if you haven't. Here's a recent pitchfork review of their latest album.

One of the more interesting things about going to these shows this weekend was that I was completely sober. On one hand it was completely fine and I didn't really think about...and on the other hand it was really kind of strange to be rockin' out without a beer in my hand. But all in all, I feel really good about the not drinking. It's a month today since I've had a drink.

I haven't even really been thinking about it that much. Been doing lots and lots of yoga and lots of walking and stairs. I feel great. I definitely don't miss hangovers. I still haven't decided how I'm going to handle it all...if/when I'll go back to drinking. Matt and I had a few conversations about it over the weekend...he quit drinking for about a year. I guess I just want to kind of reset my ideas about and my relationship with alcohol.

The best thing so far about sobriety has been the way it's really changed the landscape of my days. I somehow have much more and much less time. I have much more time because where I would normally have a drink or two around 7pm, thus hindering any real productivity for the rest of the night, I now have an entire evening to do all kinds of mental tasks like reading and writing and homework. But somehow, that's made me feel like I have less time.

ALL I want to do these days is write. I've been working on my book again and it's all I want to do. I think about it a lot. Earlier this month I was trying to write every day and it was going well for a couple of weeks but then my schedule just got in the way. I just feel this urgency these days, this welling up inside, this insistence to do everything all at once, all of it, right now.

Well, most of the time I feel that. Right now all I want to do is go home and sleep in my bed (with the cats locked out).

File this post under boring-checking-in-too-tired-to-write-anything-more-poignant-than-a-plug-for-my-friend's-band.

JANUARY 24

January 24. My mother died ten years ago today. That thought at once leaves me breathless and numb.

Let me say it again: my mother died ten years ago today.

My father's voice blurry through the phone lines. I was drunk. It was almost four in the morning and I was in a strange house in New Jersey. My bare feet were cold on the hardwood floor. It was January. There was snow outside the windows, the phone was pressed hard to my ear, as if to keep myself from swaying. My father's voice. Honey, she's gone. You didn't make it in time. Did he really say that part? You didn't make it in time? Or was that my voice echoing through the phone lines? My mother was dead.

Ten years. I'm going to take the day off, I think. I'm going to call in sick to work, I think. I think I'll stay here at my desk in my little house and I'll drink coffee and I'll write to her. I think I'll go to yoga this afternoon, my favorite class. I'll probably cry during shavasana. I'm not sure what I'll do after that. I don't think I want to go to school tonight. I think I'll take this whole day off.

And then that will be it. Then I'll stop building my life around this shit. Ten years. It's enough. Enough to let go. I was. I am. I will be. Enough. I've had enough. I'm done with these days for a while. These deathdays, these dead parent days. I've exhausted it all in so many ways. It's exhausted me.

Let me insert my favorite Jamaica Kincaid quote here. I've used this so many times I know it by heart.

What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, and if they can't go on and on, then they must go, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you can survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go.

It just starts to seem absurd. This happens to all of us. We all lose people. All the time. We will die. All of our parents will die. Our siblings will die. Our best friends will die. Our children will die. Why can't everybody just get used to it? How can it be this huge each time? How can this thing that will happen to all of us, over and over and over again, become this defining moment in our lives? This loss, so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you can survive this kind of loss. It's atonishing and beautiful and terrible.

She has been gone for ten years now. That is lifetimes and breaths and heartbreaks and losses and moves and identities and sky scrapers and palm trees and sighes and baths and soft sounds ago.

Ten years without a mother. Ten years of learning how tear myself apart and put myself back together. Ten years of trying to catch her laugh in mine. Ten years of learning how to cook, how to stand up straight, how to remind myself to be nice to myself. Ten years.

Paul asked me yesterday on the phone if I think I'm doing what my mom would want me to be doing with my life. My breath disappeared. I couldn't answer.

I'll answer now. Yes. Yes, I think I'm doing what my mother would have wanted me to be doing with my life. I'm doing more than she ever would have imagined.

I'm twenty-eight years old and I live in Los Angeles. My whole life is happening right now.

Quiet This Roiling Fury Within

I just ate three Luna bars in a row. In quick succession, actually. For dinner. And I ate one around 4 o'clock as well. That makes four Luna bars in the last four hours. Two Chocolate Peppermint Stick ones and Two Nutz Over Chocolate ones.

I haven't had a drink in 17 days.

Until today, and the Luna bars, I hadn't had any sugar in 10 days.

I've never really talked about it. My drinking. Problem. I've talked about it with my therapist a little bit. I've talked about it with some of my friends. Most of whom have the same problem. I certainly haven't written about it.

I started drinking regularly, heavily, the summer after my mother died. I was nineteen years old. I had dropped out of college and was living at home with my Dad. We spent our days trying to figure out how to live our lives without my mother. At night I worked in a little cafe. Every evening after we had swept the floors and wiped down the counters, I would join the rest of the staff, a motley assortment of late teen & early twenties fuck-ups, and we would traipse across the square to this dingy little piano bar.

I drank vodka tonics. I leaned my lithe young body up against the bar, the liquor numbing, my dead mother disappearing, my stance softening. It was easy. It was easy. It was very easy.

I fell in love that summer. He was a few years older than me. He'd just lost his younger brother. We sat next to each other on bar stools and knew that we knew things about each other that we didn't have to explain. We drank drink after drink.

I used to drive home drunk, can barely remember the winding curves of the wide suburban Atlanta roads, the moonlit magnolia trees and gently hanging wisteria. I remember my mattress, my body thudding heavily across it, shoes left on, feet dangling. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

We drove to New Orleans in the middle of the night one night. We weren't sure if we were in love so we drove all night, through Alabama and Mississipi, dawn breaking as we entered Louisiana. We got a hotel room on Bourbon Street and we sat on the balcony watching the sun break over the rooftops. We were drinking red wine out of tumblers. I looked over at him, the morning light fresh and pale across our faces. I loved him. I knew it then.

We stayed there for three days. We drank and we fucked and we lay, tangled in the sheets, numb and soft from quaaludes and red wine. Nine months later we were living in Manhattan together, in a fifth floor walk up in the East Village. We lived there for four years. We were both bartenders. We drank and we drank and we drank. At night he lined up empty beer bottles along the base of the front door...a homemade burglar alarm. Sometimes, stumbling drunkenly to bed I kicked into them, the sound of hollow glass ringing through our little apartment.

I'm eating another Luna bar now. It's going to make me sick but I don't really care. It's a Chai Tea flavored one and not nearly as tasty as the chocolate ones.

Almost everyone I know drinks. And they drink a lot. There have only been a few times in the last ten years when I felt like my drinking was really out of sync with those in my social circle. After my Dad died and J. Ryan and I started dating my drinking amount didn't waver. It remained pretty steady at five to six days a week, 1-2 drinks on an average night, 5-6 drinks on a social night. We made it into more of a hobby by attempting to become something of a wine connoissuer couple. We went up to Los Olivos every 5 weeks or so, touring the vineyards, bringing home cases of wine to stock our little wine refrigerator with. It was fun and sophisticated and made drinking into a real activity, an event.

Ugh. Fuck. I can't believe I ate that last Luna bar. I feel sick now.

But that's my problem. I've always been like this. As much as I can get, as often as I can get it. I was a pack-a-day smoker from day one. I can still remember how much I loved that first cigarette. I was never going to be a social smoker. It was going to be cigarette after cigarette after cigarette and if it wasn't cigarette after cigarette then it was going to be drink after drink after drink and when I stopped that 17 days ago it became chocolate after cookie after candy after chocolate after cookie after candy after anything, fucking anything, just put it in my mouth.

So I quit that too. After a week of no drinking and bingeing on chocolate and sweets I threw it all out and went to Whole Foods and spent $150 on vegetables and vitamins and healthy soy products. I've been going to yoga or walking or doing the steps every day. When I really want to scream, when I really want to break something, when I really want to rip myself open and tear out my insides, I take a bath. And I sit there in the scalding water, candles lit all around, steam rising up, and I cry.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this yet. I've gone to a few AA meetings with a sober friend and while it helped in some ways, especially that first week, I'm not sure that AA is for me. I don't know how long I'm going to go exactly. My substance abuse class teacher asked us to give something up for the quarter, some kind of vice or habit, and I'd already gone almost a week at that point so I said what the hell and comitted to ten weeks of sobriety. I gave up sugar too...or at least any kind of sweets. I guess I just fucked that up with the Luna bar binge. How pathetic. I binged on fucking Luna bars.

So yeah. That's what's going on around here. A lot of baths and a lot of not drinking. It could be worse.

Ten Years

So, a week from today it will be ten years since my mother died.

Part of me can't believe I just wrote that sentence. Another part of me is completely numb to it.

Ten years. Ten fucking years. It's hard for me to even think about the last ten years in one gulp. I get fragments and moments and phases and it seems like forever and it seems like a week. Flashes of such random things...a hotel bed in Maine, the cold inside a parked car in Vermont, a bar on the corner of Avenue A and 7th Street, the slums of Manila, the 405, my shaved head, my tattoos still scabbed with fresh blood, yoga, and the ocean, the feel of someone's hand on the bare skin of my lower back, a boiling pot of water, the plants that hung in the window of my 5th St. apartment in New York, a pair of shoes I used to wear to my old bartending job, my breath in plumes as I walk up Third Avenue, driving a U-Haul out of Atlanta, a book propped open on a futon mattress, myself doubled over in tears, another me drunk stumbling home, and another me laughing, laughing. Ten years.

Every year on January 24, I try to do something special. Every year I write her a letter. Every year it makes me cry. Even when I think it won't. You can read some of them here: The Deathday Letters. They're hard for me to look at. They're burningly earnest and young and painful.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do this year. This year of all years. Ten years later. It's a Wednesday. I'm scheduled to work. I'm scheduled to attend a suicide prevention training seminar in the morning, work the rest of the day. I've got my favorite yoga class that afternoon. I've got Human Sexuality class that night from 7-9:30. It's a full day, one of my fullest every week.

I've thought about taking off of work, calling in sick to class. I've thought about going somewhere for the day. I've thought about cooking a feast for friends. I've thought about rounding up all the amazing women in my life. I've thought about being alone. I've thought about just going about my normal routine: this is Claire ten years later.

None of it strikes me. None of it sounds like the thing I want to do. I don't know...

Perhaps it's just that I don't want it to be the ten years since my mother died.

Life in LA

So, I've made some changes around here. Bit of a new format, updated about page, photos, etc. I also have a new list of all things LA.

It's been interesting to make these changes. I realized that doing so is very symbolic of my recent feelings about Los Angeles.

I chose the title for this blog so arbitrarily. It was back in June of 2003. I'd been living here in Los Angeles for almost a year. I moved here from Manhattan with my then boyfriend M. We'd lived in a five-floor walk up in the East Village for four years. I moved into that apartment a few weeks before I turned twenty. New York was like nothing I'd ever experienced.

That first summer on Avenue B I had insomnia - the only time I've ever really had it. I stayed up to watch the sunrise every morning, sitting on the futon couch in our little living room, smoking cigarette after cigarette, journal cracked open on my lap, pen scribbling, scribbling. The Chrysler building twinkled in the distance and I waited for the sky to turn from black to green to yellow to rose. Only then did my eyelids grow heavy, my breath shallow. I remember staring out the window at the city skyline and thinking that I would never leave Manhattan.

It was devastating to move to Los Angeles. After four years in New York I was sure that I'd never leave. I remember driving through the Holland Tunnel in the moving truck with M, tears running down my cheeks, turn around, turn around, turn around.

My Dad was sick. All sorts of things. Heart problems, lung problems, clots and hips. He'd wanted me to move to LA for years. All the time I'd lived in Manhattan, I'd been flying out to LA every six months. Always on JetBlue, into the Long Beach airport where you walk down the stairs from the airplane, out onto the tarmac, the warm Santa Ana winds lifting your shirt, palm trees in the distance, the streets, Fifth Avenue, the buildings and people, feeling far, far away.

And then after September 11 the idea of leaving Manhattan for a while seemed more appealing. Funny that I've never written about that here...September 11. I stood on my roof that morning, a cup of coffee in my hand, disbelief and shock thudding through my veins, watching the towers burn, and eventually fall. And after that things changed. The city wasn't the same anymore. I wasn't the same anymore. None of us were.

And so when M suggested that we finally think about moving to LA, I sighed in resignation, as though it weren't even really up to me. There were suddenly too many reasons to leave. I remember the catch in my father's voice as he tried to express his excitement, his gratitude. I remember crying as I walked home from my Time Out New York internship one day after they'd asked me to apply for an editorial position and I'd quietly declined. I remember that long drive through the Holland Tunnel, coming up into the harsh light and smog, the city, the buildings, Manhattan behind us.

The long drive across the country, wide roads and fields and fields and fields. The wind in Kansas. The mountains in Colorado. My temple against the window, eyes anywhere but here. I-10 into Los Angeles, the traffic and smog, I was shaking my head, my heart was breaking. M had long grown impatient with my resistance. We unloaded the truck in under an hour, everything into my father's garage. It had taken us two days in New York, up and down the five flights, boxes and lamps and blankets, the stifling summer heat. My Dad took us out for steaks that first night here. We drank martinis and toasted to our new city. The liquor was bitter in my mouth.

We lived in my Dad's condo in Orange County for two months while we looked for an apartment. Everyday we searched Craig's List, drove the long drive up the 605 to the 101, exited on Franklin, walked through apartment after apartment. We finally found an amazing place on Ivar Hill, just across the street from the Alto Nido which is featured in the opening shot of Sunset Blvd. Our place was in a building rumored to have been Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s guesthouse. It was gorgeous and strange with French windows and hardwood floors, great columns into the living room, a fireplace, and a wide, wonderful kitchen.

There was a beautiful tree outside the kitchen windows which produced fat, waxy, yellow flowers that lit the air with a soft fragrance. I sat out on the backsteps at night, smoking a cigarette, a bottle of beer on the railing next to me, condensation bleeding into the wood. The view led down into Hollywood, palm trees and the Capitol Records building, Sunset Boulevard and the soft spreading out of Los Angeles.

Life in LA, I thought to myself. It was strange and beautiful, quiet and clear, even the haze thinning into something simple that I could understand. And the light. There is a light in Southern California that I have never seen anywhere else. A light that comes off the ocean and settles down over the basin of the city. It's a light I can't even describe. It's a breath, a glance, white-blue and temperate.

And after he died, after I had moved out of that beautiful apartment on Ivar Hill, after I was tied to no one, all my things already in boxes, after it would have been so easy to move back to New York, to friends and a life that had not quite dissipated, after all of that, I moved to Venice Beach.

I found this little apartment on the canals. Windows facing every direction and plants breathing softly in the nighttime kitchen darkness, the hum of the refrigerator, and a passing car on Pacific Avenue.

Momentum and Possibility

Anyone who knows me at all probably knows that I like to drive. I actually LOVE to drive. I think it's one of my top five favorite things in the world to do, in fact.

Just this morning I was sitting at a light at the corner of Washington and Lincoln Boulevards and I was watching the cars in the turning lanes whiz through the intersection and I had the thought that I so often have when I'm driving: What a fucking privilege that we get to do this! For fuck's sake! I can't believe we get to get in these little machines and travel at enormous speeds, transporting ourselves from one place to another. It seriously just blows my mind sometimes.

I've loved it ever since I started driving. My father loved driving too, loved the mechanics of the thing, the privilege of that kind of power. And he taught me to drive, instilling this kind of magic into the experience. I learned how to drive in his big black Lincon Towncar. I had begged to take the wheel of my mother's Acura, already knew I wanted speed, and as much of it as I could handle, but my Dad said that if I could learn how to drive the Lincoln, then I could drive anything.

One of my favorite driving memories takes place when I was about nine years old. My father would pick me up from elementary school in the Lincoln and on the way home, about three miles from our house he would do "the trick." The trick involved some pretty serious calculations and quite a few afternoons of trial and error. The trick involved my father accelerating to about 65 mph on this long flat stretch of Heards Ferry Road for about thirty seconds and then just before we hit the bottom of the hill he'd take his foot off the gas. The trick was that if he'd timed it just right, when we hit the bottom of the hill and he took his foot off the gas, we could coast all the way up the hill, reaching the crest and rounding a corner to make a right onto Heards Drive - just before we lost momentum - and then we'd coast all the way down the hill and into the garage without once having to press the gas.

I remember holding my breath as we coasted up the hill. Oh, please have timed it right! The feeling of making it into the garage, the shared look between my father and me as he shifted the car into park. There was nothing like it.

As soon as my father started giving me driving lessons when I was fifteen I was addicted. I thought about driving all the time. I dreamed about it. I asked to drive everywhere we went. On Friday nights when my parents went out to the movies or a party my best friend Caitlin and I would sneak out in the Lincoln. It had one of those door codes to unlock it and so my Dad always left the keys in the ignition. It was like his little private room, that car. Keys in the ignition, pack of Benson & Hedges on the dashboard, radio tuned to the jazz station. I can viscerally remember punching in the code on the door (my mother's birthday) and sliding in against that soft black leather, the steering wheel huge and luminous before me, adjusting the mirrors, the seat, just like my Dad showed me, Caitlin reaching for the cigarettes, her fingernails, oval and a little ragged, as she pressed in the lighter, the feel of the car humming to life at the turn of the key, carefully,  oh-so carefully, backing down the steep driveway, both hands on the wheel, my heart pounding, foot so gentle on the brake, cigarette smoke drifting in a thin stream out the cracked window.

We didn't care where we went, were content to just coast up and down the darkened streets of our town. I could feel the road flying by underneath us, the feeling of momentum and possibilty. That was all that really mattered. Momentum and possibility.

And road trips. Road trips. Another post for another day, I think.

But all this to say...I'm not quite sure really. Something about the feeling of a winding road at night, about power and privilege, momentum and possibility.

Mater

Yesterday, in class, I had to role-play my mother in a mock therapy session.

Therapist: So, what's bringing you in?

Me: Well, my life just isn't turning out the way I thought it would. I'm 58 years old and my husband is 75 and I have cancer and we have an eighteen year old daughter and none of this is going the way I thought it would. My heart almost dropped through my chair when I said the word daughter.

I was staring into the therapist's face when I said it. She was an extremely pretty woman, green-eyed with real blond hair, a giant engagement ring on one finger and nearing the end of her first trimester. She was pushing all my buttons as it was just by sitting across from me. We had met only moments before we began this excercise.

Therapist: It sounds like you really have a lot going on in your life. Can you say more about it not being what you expected?

Me: Well, I just feel very alone. I looked away at this point. I couldn't look at this woman who I imagined to have some perfect kind of life with a husband who adores her and a perfect baby on the way. I don't feel like I can really talk to my husband. I mean, he's wonderful and on top of all the bills and the hospital and my treatments but I can't talk to him. We've been sleeping in separate beds for the last two years and we blame it on his snoring and my being sick but it's not really about that.

I started rambling at this point. I don't know my own body. I look in the mirror and I don't recognize myself. I don't know how to talk to my daughter about any of this. I stuttered on this sentence, my eyes frantic, tracing the walls of the room, anywhere but to meet those warm green irises.

Fuck, why am I doing this? Why am I saying these things? Why am I doing this to myself, to this woman? I continued. I'm afraid that I am going to die. She would, in fact, die. This therapy session was taking place in the last year of her life. I am afraid that I won't have had the conversations I needed to have with my husband...my mother...my sisters...my daughter. She would not, in fact, have those conversations. My heart was dropping, had, in fact, dropped. It lay somewhere underneath my chair, like a fish caught easily and thrown onto the deck, tail lifting one last time, as if to wave goodbye, a thick red stain spreading out like pulsing silk.

The teacher called an end just in time. Before I could say this:

I'm afraid that I'll never find a way to tell my daughter how much I love her, that I'll never find a way to have a conversation with her about what it will be like after I die, what her life will be like as a motherless daughter, what it will be like for her to graduate college without her mother there, what it will be like for her to lose her father without her mother there, what it will be like for her to be 28 years old and single and living alone and not have a mother.

Fucking therapy school.

Distance

Coffee out of the mug this morning, instead of the strange little glasses I usually like it from, only because the mug holds more, myself needing more.

There was a strange wind blowing last night. Not the mercurial Santa Anas but something even deeper, sweeping in off the ocean. I woke around one, having gone to sleep only an hour before, and later than I had wanted to, had been so tired, forgotten to remove the stud earrings I had in my ears, their backs prodding my neck as I lay, flushed, against the pillow. I woke to crashing and breaking, a banging sound somewhere down in the street.

I live two blocks from the beach, my apartment, its own little unit, has windows facing every direction. There is a vacant lot just west of my bedroom walls. People walk their dogs through it and at night the winds come down from the ocean, pushing at the crack in the window next to my head. It can be deeply lulling, those ocean breezes, warm and salty, primordial and basal, but last night was something else.

The banging in the street was a garbage lid being blown open and then falling back closed, over and over again. The crashing was one of my favorite aloe plants, given to me by my friend Liz, plummeting to it's concrete death below the deck. I slipped out from beneath the covers, unlocked the doors to the patio, stepping out gingerly in my bare feet, the wind instantly lifting my thin t-shirt, reaching up to remove the hanging plants, quickly transplanting the cactus to a less precarious perch. The sky was a bright indigo, white clouds rushing across its depths. The palm trees whipped back and forth, I could see waves in the canals beyond the rooftops.

I scurried back to bed, pulling my knees to my chest, my hair threaded into ribbons and cooled by the breezes. I listened to the wind, could faintly hear the waves breaking on the beach. The world loomed immense and dark outside my little home and I curled tighter into myself, grateful to be alone.

"How does distance look?" is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved. It depends on light.

--Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red