Turning 26
Point Judith, Rhode Island
I was struggling to keep pace with the other students in class. I was 18 and hell-bent on becoming a journalist. But there was one thing standing in the way, one fatal distinction holding me back when I was certain (then) that I could write, that I’d been born to do precisely that.
I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, write as quickly as they did. During the last half hour of every class, we were to put together a completed article with the scraps of details we were given on a subject or incident. They wrote quickly, precisely, while I labored over every word, and thought more about the time passing than I did on what was being written. When I’d given up, convinced I was handicapped in the very field I thought I was meant to pursue, I approached the professor after class, begging for a solution. I told him I just couldn’t come up with an article that quickly, that I needed more time. He just laughed and said, “Don’t think, just write.”
I was furious. I was convinced his advice violated every code in the writer’s world. He was dismissive, casual… and, disturbingly sure of himself. I believed writers had to struggle with their answers, their beliefs, their ‘certainties’ because nothing to a writer was, after all, certain. And definitely not quick. His answer was one of the main reasons why I walked into the counselor’s office shortly afterwards and requested that I leave the program. She reminded me it was a limited enrollment program, that once I left I couldn’t re-enter. I said that was completely fine by me. Back then, I was far less hesitant in answering that still, gentle voice in me. I questioned it less, followed it more, with a will that was hardly ever tampered with or weakened. And it was there too, that spring, before I married him. It was the first time I rebelled against it. And since then, the trust between us has never been the same. She’s never spoken to me as loudly and as gently as she did then.
And now that I need it, badly, that voice, her instruction, her rebellions that led me where I needed to be led, it’s got me thinking. Maybe my professor wasn’t so wrong. When it comes to stumbling on those words, that voice that I need, that I miss badly, maybe I need to write without thinking, let it find passage in hands that are led more my impulse and less by thought. It is the only avenue I can think of, the only way of recovering what I feel I’ve lost in 9 months of trying to bend myself into fitting in a city that wasn’t meant for me, a pace of time that was slowly killing me. I wish I could erase everything I’ve written in the past 9 months. But maybe, even those rushed, weak entries I’ve recorded here mean something. If anything, they’ll serve to remind me, for a long time, what will never work for me.
Waking Up in a Room
I’ve only been on the road since last Tuesday, but it feels as if it’s the only thing I’ve known my whole life. Saturday evening I slept in a trembling white van, the wild wind from the ocean behind me urging me to stay awake, and I did, for most of the night, watching the revolving light from the short lighthouse before me, who watched me too, in her own, distracted way. There were others sleeping in their cars beside me. One man slept in a tiny Honda, another slept in a large, elaborate sprinter. (I had meant to drive on to New Haven at sunset, to cut the hours of driving for the next day, but I couldn’t get myself to leave.)
At 6 in the morning, I turned the van around and watched the sun rising over the sea while I laid in the bed by the rear window. I meant to leave then, to begin the drive back South early. Instead, I drove north, to another part of Rhode Island and lingered for hours by the shore, collecting stones, reading, watching the water, the surfers. I could not leave. Then I did. And it killed me. This morning, I woke up in a room with a gold-rimmed desk, a bed large enough for three, and the old, hand-painted lamp that’s been in my room since my mother first took me to live at my grandmas.
For the past few years, I’ve been caught in a tug of war that sends me home on the road for days, weeks, months if I am lucky, then pulls me back to anchored places that are no good for me. Truth is, I can get no real ‘work’ done on the road. I try, but I just can’t. I need to stay put if I want to compose anything worthwhile. But, the awful hell about it is that I am only my true self out there, in the place where nothing serious can be done. I’ve only my false, hurried self to work with when I am anchored, and my true self when there’s no chance of getting any work out of me.
The Drive Back
I was on my way back South when I called my good friend Gilbert, told him I was hours away from DC and torturing myself for having come back too soon. My divorce hearing is on Tuesday, I told him. I had one more day. I could have had one more day on the road. I needed more time beside the water, another evening of laying in a van being rocked like crazy by the winds from the ocean. Just one more I kept repeating. And he, being the voice of dry logic and reason that he’s always been told me any time would have felt ‘too soon,’ that eventually we all have to come back and tend to whatever it is we left unfinished.
I told him he didn’t understand. From his view, this was just another one of my impulsive runaways. To him, leaving was meant to be something timed, with a beginning and an end; something you can lose yourself in but only for so long. It’s not a matter of question, to return or not. You do it obediently, if not willingly, when the time is up and the real world calls you. But what if the road’s as real to me as anything I know, what if I need it in the same way others need children, homes, a career? Why can’t it be taken just as seriously? And if not by others, than by me, who knows how badly I need it.
There’s so much to say about the road, and here I am, just writing, not thinking, wanting to get it all down and then some. I miss that moment when my hands used to come across some truth by accident, like money on a sidewalk, a familiar face in someplace unfamiliar. I believe truth only ever comes to me that way, when I am most unprepared, least guarded, most open to the possibility of chance.
Problem is, the road’s a lot like love. When you go for it, you give it all you’ve got and you don’t come back whole. There’s no way to travel sincerely and return whole. Changed. Better, perhaps, but missing something. I leave parts of me everywhere. That’s why it made all the sense to me when I first began making art to sell it on the street, among travelers. It gave me a feeling that I was spreading parts of me everywhere, as if I was doing what I’d do if I were on the road during all those months I couldn’t get to it myself. I’d be anchored somewhere and still sending off parts of me to other places.
And I felt it on the drive back to Great Falls yesterday. It was a long, endless drive. There was nothing pretty to look at all day. All you had was the asphalt and a terrible incident when a red bird flew right into my windshield and died instantly, its dead body flying through the speeding cars behind me before landing hard against the ground. Did it mean something? That I’d killed a beautiful bird on my way back to where I didn’t belong? Should I have turned around? I know these are the kind of incidents that most people think nothing of, and my thinking of it may sound too superstitious. But I can’t help it. I killed that bird by driving back. And my own bird was sitting right next to me in the van when it happened. It must mean something. It has to.
On Running Away
It took me too long to leave. I couldn’t do it at 17 and neither at 21. I wanted my life to play more like a Dorothy Allison novel, where a strong female character with unwavering resolve leaves her town behind and goes on in her own way. Problem is I left too late and when I did, I kept turning my head back too much. I kept looking, even when the town was no longer there in the rearview to gape at. And during that time where most women shelf their pasts and work obsessively towards a dream they harbored beside their intention to leave, I held mine in my pocket, carried it everywhere, brought it along with me through every pursuit of a dream and every failed attempt to forget all about that dream. It was right where I could reach for it, and I reached for it often.
Sure I wish I’d done earlier what I finally did this week, at the age of 26, to rebel comfortably, with certainty and a steady gaze facing forward. I’ve rebelled plenty before, but always, with too much caution, plenty of apology and guilt. This time felt different. And I returned more sure than I’d ever been of where it is I belong, and where it is I’ll never be welcomed.
But sometimes, I think I leave places I shouldn’t be leaving, or I leave them too soon. I guess there’s something romantic in it for me, this fleeting image of a traveling woman on her own, suddenly appearing, just as suddenly leaving. Maybe there’s a man, a traveler like me, and he’s just worked up the courage to come over except by the time he does I am leaving or I’ve left. The disappearing woman. A mystery in every place she arrives in, as if she means to stay only long enough for her arrival to be felt, questions to rise around her. She’s a vague, restless shape. Sometimes she wants to speak. Most times, all she wants is to be left alone, remain hidden. But she wants her departure to be felt. That’s important. It could be the only reason she travels. Not to be seen, but to have her absence noticed.
Everything I Want
What if it’s right there, on this gold-rimmed desk with polished wood and it’s as simple as reaching my hand out to it and claiming it for myself. Problem isn’t that it’s not close enough to reach, but that I haven’t been honest with myself about what it is I want. It’s as stupid as fumbling in the dark for an item and someone asking me what I’m looking for and I say, I don’t know, I just need to find it. and he’ll ask what is it? And I just can’t say. For the life of me I can’t say what it is.
But the road helps. It helps me figure out what that it is. And if I haven’t figured it out by now, after all this time traveling, it’s because the it keeps changing. I discover it, pursue it, then start searching for something else. Either I haven’t had the courage to stick with what it is I’ve discovered or I haven’t truly found what it is yet and this restless searching isn’t for nothing, isn’t a coward running away from the ‘work’ but an honest attempt to keep looking, keep asking.
Half-Pain, Half-Healing
There’s an invisible border along the road, in almost every travel I’ve made. The first portion — those long, quiet miles leading up to the border — is when all that’s been shoved down inside of me in the past months rises up and makes me want to turn the car around, lay down on my grandma’s couch, watch tv, and forget all about my plans to leave. It’s unbearable most of the time, and like always, I feel incredibly stupid for leaving, again, for taking myself willingly towards the cliff where no barrier stands before me and the incoming storm. I could have stayed at the foot of the mountain, bored but incredibly safe, instead I took myself up where I thought I’d see something more beautiful, sense life more strongly, and I would, except there’s a storm now and nothing to be seen except a trail of thick white fog and an urgent rain that keeps my eyes shut strong against it. I ask yourself why can’t I just be normal and stay where everyone else stays. Why come up here? And just when my resolve is nearly finished and I’m thinking seriously about making it back down, the storm begins to clear and parts of the deep cliff and wild sea that I haven’t seen before suddenly appear. The fog begins to travel north and, like a parting curtain, surprises you with a dance and a song. Long stems of wheat begin to dance in harmony with the wind. A lighthouse finds you and spins its light your way. And you understand. You know.
From Last Year’s Birthday Entry
“I take a step to towards a possibility, then retreat towards a familiar hell.”
“I want to say everything. Because of that, I end up saying nothing. I want to do everything, and end up with nothing done well.”
“When I look inside me, I see only voids and voids, and the memories of what once stood in their place. I do not think of all that I can fill it with now. I try but often fail to see them as spaces waiting to be filled with something worthy. I don’t see their potential to be, but only what they are, now. And that’s how I got stuck, by focusing only on what was missing, and not what has passed to make room for something greater. I see what I am now, and cannot imagine the future to be any different. If I wake up to a dark morning, I imagine a thousand more to come. If I waste the day away without getting anything done, I imagine many more like it. If I am unheard, I assume the same silence for the rest of my life. I make permanent whatever I am suffering through, though if I’ve learned anything from life it is that everything is impermanent, the bad, the good, the precious goes in the end.”
“One day, I’ll find the words and the way to tell my story, truthfully. But now, it feels like I’ve only managed to touch the hem of my pain, just barely, like the horse before the concrete wall. I am so close to my ruin, and, just as close to my salvation. There’s despair, and just as much hope. I am tugged in both directions, one day I am pulled to the right, the next day I’m pulled to the left. Or no, maybe it’s me that does the walking back and forth. I take a step to towards a possibility, then retreat towards a familiar hell. But one day, and soon enough, I’ll have to choose. I cannot remain stuck in this permanent migration between hope and hell, what can be, and what has passed.”
***
“That depends on what you mean by ‘lived.’ If you spend one night in some town, did you live there? What about two nights? Or a whole week? … I thought. “If you unpack all your things,” I said.
-Jeannette Wells, The Glass Castle
