2002-08-28 11:51 a.m.
simple pleasures

It's remarkable how we live; we find ourselves in a hundred different shards across the moments of our lives, then refuse them into a coherent whole down the line.

I'm breathing a hefty sigh of relief tonight because I realized I'm bringing together two moments in this next little while, two steps of uncertainty and joy...living in Athens and my first weekend here.

When I left Atlanta for Athens, GA, I was running away. I'd been living and breathing theater for five years (four in school, one out) and the weight of it, the need for approval that I buried into each audition was too damn much to put up with, every little tap dance I did, every rejection I got. Even doing improv was about impressing my costars, not enjoying what I was doing or reveling in the craft and hilarity and chaos we could create onstage.

So I went to Athens, found an apartment all to myself (my first personal space after 5+ years of roommates and shared lives)...and I became a local in no time. I wrote for Flagpole as much as I could and went to plenty of shows, but I spent a lot of my time watching TV, cooking, enjoying the silence of it, having beers on the porch with Darius, my neighbor, playing with Mike's (the trucker a few doors down) German Shepherd. For a while, it was good, if lonely.

But then, I'm always lonely.

Nothing said that as much as my first weekend here. D was out of town, working a convention through his job at DC Comics.

I landed at LaGuardia alone, took a cab to my boarding house, dropped off my stuff, and took the F train (which I remembered from one of my prior visits) into Manhattan, getting off at 42nd St./5th Ave.

I remember seeing the lions in front of the public library and humming the incidental music from the opening of Ghostbusters. I remember eating my first NYC hot dog (rubbery and overboiled), getting my cell phone, walking though the masses of people on the streets on a Friday afternoon. I remember running back to the boarding house to get my phone turned on so I could let everyone know I was okay.

I remember the careless ease of sleeping with April in that room. No love, no sunlight (there were no windows), just a wild insistence followed by relief and smiles and candlelight (love those Virgin Mary candles).

But those first few days and the four months I spent in Athens, there was a common thread: no responsibility, beyond my bills or existing obligations (some of which were released). Simple pleasures, nothing but discovery, fleshing my thoughts out aloud, singing songs softly and watching strangers perk up and smile at my ease and sheepishness as I returned their looks, grinning impishly.

Living above Amy, my new landlord, feels like a return to that mode...a release from the tightness of uncomfortable living situations, self-reliance and self-amusement, and new spaces to explore and fill with the right energy. I might clear the space first if I can find a sage stick to smoke it out with. There's a lot of history there, and I know her dad was working on my apartment when her mom got terminally ill with cancer.

But that's for next month (10/1). Tonight's simple pleasures, my little gifts I gave myself tonight?

A large espresso ($.55) and a rice pudding from the Mexican bakery, and a stack of new comics. A little kid's grin on my face, poring over the pages, new writers creating fresh thrills for my kid's mind.

Tomorrow, I can think about Ivy and Sibyl and Mark, their hearts open and bleeding, begging me for structure, and with that structure, release. Tomorrow.

But for now, just let me have this moment. Kitty Pryde just fell through the floor of her mother's apartment, for the first time all over again. And the softness of my futon tells my subconscious that I can fly. Maybe I will tonight.

Amy lent me her copy of The Brooklyn Reader, and some moments of the ferry ride and the borough struck me right between the eyes, from the eyes of another:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of the flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping.
Play'd the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

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