I feel I should spend some time thinking about, or writing about, the time I spent in the Bay Area last week. It’s difficult for me to think back on the week with any coherence; what is important to me about the last week is not something I find I can easily verbalise. A couple people have asked me what I did and I’ve told them about the food I ate, a couple places I went....Cities make me feel odd; there’s this instantaneous and irresistible impulse to at once dissolve into the crowd and to stand apart from it....what’s true is that I look at this world and want everything, but I am just one person; and the prayer I have is that I will never become insensate, no matter how frustrating it is to want all things all at once, or at times to be so content as to almost become want, and being want, to satisfy that insistence at the same time. I don’t know--part of me wants to make sense of what I’m thinking to other people and some of me is resigned to the idea that I am a complete singular, and there are some things of my own experience that can only ever belong to me.
I guess keeping a blog and updating irregularly resists what I’ve just written; but I always do have a hope that somewhere someone knows or can know. I don’t want to become closed off to possibility. I’m afraid of becoming too comfortable--I have spent a lot of time, I have spent a lot of energy attempting to arrive at a certain peace with myself. But whenever I begin to think in larger terms, whenever I think to myself--this is my life, is this what I want?--I become intensely desirous that the best of what my life will come to, that the best of what I can offer this world, has not yet manifested itself. “I’d like to think the best of me is still hiding up my sleeve.”
I like being alone. Sometimes I step back from my own dissatisfaction and realize that even if I had the choice I wouldn’t change my life. I feel very unfinished. I’m floundering in depths that might swallow me. This world is very hungry. I feel unarmed. So I turn, again and again, to the only things I know I’ve been born to do--to write and to love. I worry for the people I will meet at times. I am not easy to be friends with. I know. I know, too, that I write this blog just to get out of my own head. I don’t believe with any conviction that anyone is reading this; I’m okay with it; I like being alone. But I, too, recognize, that I was probably born to be part of something larger.
Time passes very slowly; life is very regular, discontent to be cherished. I’ve been wondering a lot, especially spending so much time under the thicket of wires in SF, if anything can truly be mine, if I can hold anything close to my heart, or if some things happen to intercept with me, and move on in their own time, without regard to me. Still, I am that way, I suppose, to others. Sometimes, too, I think I am only full of love or admiration and, being so full of it, I, without discretion or politeness, choose a target for it, just to let it out, just to express it. I wonder if anything I’ve ever loved has anything to do with the thing itself. I’m not very comfortable with myself right now. I’m wondering too much, I have too little to hold onto. I think later I may look back and wonder at myself in the same way that others would wonder at me now if they read my writing; if they could inhabit my head....There is a type of person who waits for someone to discover her sadness or her unhappiness and to drop into her life and open up other doors, to help her “out” of that sadness, to make her happy or to rescue her from herself. I am not waiting for anyone but myself. I recognize that if anything is to be slayed I’ll have to hold my own sword. I’m always, looking, though, to others for directions, feeling at the same time so alienated from them that I question whether or not I can take their example at all. I do believe that I share a lot with people; I have met a few kindred spirits in my lifetime; but at times the distance is so overwhelming, and strips me of so much, and though I wish to be alone, I have the impulse to reach out to someone. When there is no easy answer, I know it’s my fault. I know I have made my life much more difficult than it needs to be. I know I worry needlessly, annoyingly. I know that when I am sad it has little to do with anything that is actually happening. That my longings could be answered if I would change myself to meet them. But my stubbornness is stubborn even in that--its stubbornness and I feel sick without wanting to be cured. Still, I recognize that there is one.
I spent a lot of time alone in San Francisco, and I spent a lot of time with friends. Somehow what I remember most is always the time I spend in my own head. I love public transportation; I love sitting in the back of a bus and watching what passes outside without having to worry about where to go, about traffic, about all the things that clutter my regular life; I love the wails of the underground, the eerie shaking and the way it bends around curves, enters in and out of darkness without warning; I love sighting the sides of people’s faces from behind other faces, I love the smells of hot metal and lint, takeout grease, the smell of air that hasn’t seen the other side of buildings for a long time. I like the separate weather systems of the subway stations. I think I knew this would happen to me; I had some presentiments of it even while I was abroad of it in a way that I often glimpse my own future, because I do, for all the wondering, know myself quite well....but all the time I used BART I think I was really on the tube, I think I was really in London and still full of hope for myself. I’m sure this resignation will pass, just like other periods. But also, I think I will always be nostalgic for those months I spent apart from all responsibility besides keeping myself alive and safe.
San Francisco...for a reason I don’t know, I miss you. I miss your city-hardened people, the grey dankness of your streets, and the thickets of cable intersecting the sky; I miss your row houses, I miss looking out over the water, I miss the benevolent fog rolling in and out. Mostly, I think, I miss your otherness, that you remind me of being abroad because you will not be home; I miss your foreignness. I wish I could love you for yourself. But there is a charm, too, to the semi-rural and green of San Juan that will always feel like home to me. There is a part of me, too, that I left abroad, which I will not recover. It is lucky, then, that I can love with my heart cut into many pieces, so that even what I cannot have or what I cannot keep may remain dear to me....
title from The Changing Light by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
