The Community Service

Re: Winter, 2010

There isn’t much more to say these days. It has all been said or heard one way or another. There’s nothing that doesn’t wash over me over the course of the week. It makes the little feeling that I conjure up on this page trite and offensive. What must it be like to have no one but God to speak of? The loneliness in this place is like the dry air of the desert in which any drop of water is eaten up immediately. By the end of the day, my lips are parched and I too go home alone.

There is a long thin room with windows at either end, one facing the nursing station, one facing the outside world. There are a few couches squeezed in along the walls and a telephone. In it is where the ladies chat, nap, huddle around, gossiping, giggling. It is the few square feet of the building that feels like it could be real. Real relationships, real laughter. I’m afraid to walk in and penetrate it. I don’t belong in that real world and they remind me so with their teasing eyes.

Most of the time she speaks of nonsense. “My saint will protect me. He is the only one who is there for me. He makes me pregnant.” I can never remember what she said more than a day ago because nothing fits into the pre-existing tracks of logic in my brain. But in the moment, her words are clear enough to pierce through the many layers of human and professional propriety I’ve accumulated, to the point when I leave trembling and ice cold. Her smile is like that of a newborn child. Her anger is that of the perpetually tortured souls in the depth of the inferno. My heart goes out to her to be shredded to pieces.

What I’ve always needed desperately is to be loved and cared for, and yet I’ve chosen a profession in which I expose my deepest wounds to those who can’t help but hurt others. Perhaps I feel that their love is more meaningful somehow because it is buried so deep in pain, anger, darkness, just a little like mine. This may be the only way I know how to love deeply.

Magic

Re: SF 2009

I wonder if trips will ever stop feeling like this: so unbearably, unrealistically intense. It somehow feels even theatrical, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end that have always meant to be. The encapsulation of what transpired into the boundaries of space and time somehow relieves it from the chaos to which I’m accustomed, as the covers of a book relieves the words on the pages. And of course, I am left again with the sadness that nothing will ever happen again in just the way it did within this story. I have a hard time believing and not believing that it was all as magical to everyone as it was to me. I suppose if I have learned anything in life it’s that it is filled with unilateral magic.

There’s nothing like traveling just to see friends. I was passed this time from one to another, like a series of trust falls without ever touching the ground in between. I’m inevitably impressed by their capacity to take care of me and absorb me into their life for just a little while. The exercise has completed its task: I trust them more than ever now. It gives me the false illusion that San Francisco is filled with nothing but warmth, friendship and good times.

A certain phrase danced at the tip of my tongue over the past few days, and it was a movingly awkward line delivered by none other than Hugh Grant in the movie Notting Hill. After Julia Roberts had spent the night, woke up terrorized by the paparazzi, and stormed out screaming at him for ruining her career, he said quietly, in that Hugh Grant sort of way: ‘I on the other hand will always be glad that you came to stay for a while.’

Classic unilateral magic…or so it seemed at the time.

Street Cred

There are many cracks in the city to fall into, for the water to run like the creases between pieces of brick on a sidewalk. I shoot glances down the avenues and streets as I pass by compulsively because they always lead somewhere I can dream – the Hudson, Ellis Island, Central Park, and the Bronx. No matter where I am, my vision can shoot that far, and I am reminded of just where I am in the world, and of the places I can still go whenever I choose. I should never be lost here. There are too many things that know too well where they are for things to be lost: the people, the storefronts, the smells. And as different as places become, everyone knows that we still share the same Park Avenue as those who might not have anything else in common with us. There is something empowering about that. But also something that puts me in my place at all times. The ladders are clearer than ever here, the distances between me and you in money, reputations, realestate, our history. It calls out to me, ‘climb!’ in the way a maze calls out to a mouse. I take pride in the lows and highs I’ve been on this climb, as we all do here.