The Butterfly Lamp

This morning I am at a coffee shop waiting for a friend I do not particularly want to see, though I am feeling unusually charitable towards her today. Towards everyone, really. And yet, I am almost sad and I feel that tears are somewhere very close by.

I think my life is about to take a strange and wondrous turn. But this has me scared. It is both terrifying and beautiful to see how divergent my life has become from the plans that were made for it- by me, my mother, my teachers, anyone who cared to impose a guess on me of what I ought to do.

This randomness permeates me utterly. And it is a great and terrible beauty. I like this coffee shop because of its atmosphere. On the window sills there are various knick knacks. An old folk artish looking lighthouse, about a foot tall. A blue jug. An African mask. The ugliest birdhouse I have ever seen. And a copper lamp that's it's own screened in room. It has four tall sides where butterflies and plants snake upwards. The top is geometric and the whole thing looks it was made by someone who likes Frank Lloyd Wright houses. You can put a candle inside. I wonder if anyone will ever put a candle inside this one again, or if they ever did.

Tomorrow afternoon my boyfriend is going to come and visit me. We'll talk and sit around my apartment together like we do every weekend. We'll have the same complaints about our jobs and the 90 or so miles of distance between us. And we'll trade the same jokes, which is our way of saying, we're still us, right? Right. And he will tell me about his week, and he will ask about mine. And I'll remember that lamp, and wonder if I should bring it up. Because it might change in the telling, or I might just fail to convey it utterly, and I want the lamp to remain what it is. Here, just like it is in the windowsill, innocent, our relationship utterly hermetic.

I might risk the lamp for him, though. We'll have to see. I like that phrase, I'll see or we'll see. In parent speak, learned in my childhood, I found it simply meant, 'no but not no right now in order to prevent you from pitching a huge fit.' Now in my childless universe, it means that we leave room for the moment to surprise us.

I think I am coming to terms with not knowing how it ends. I might even like it. The randomness of everything, though, brings me to tears. Things feel so full of possibility that they, by necessity, fold themselves into a metaphor that is day to day sized. And the metaphor is this. That I have met a beautiful woman with shining tears in her eyes. They look like tiny diamonds floating on a lake. And we understand eachother. There is something she wanted to tell me all along, but could not. I had to find it out myself, and now that I have, we are reconciled, she and I, and I am welcome back again to this place that is so expansive it could break your heart.

You too, cookie?

I'm having a minor meltdown today. I just feel so get-drunk-and-watch-Billy-Wilder- movies. As Addison DeWitt from "All About Eve" would say, "you're maudlin and full of self-pity. You're magnificent." Maybe I'll just sit in my apartment playing Leibestraum over and over again, knocking ice and whiskey against the side of a highball glass.

I feel like I can't actually quit school like I want. I feel afraid of my future, like it's all scary and uncertain. I feel terrified that I'm not good at anything. What am I going to do outside school? I feel panicked. Today is a day where I think, who am I kidding. I'm no writer, I'm no nothing. Not a scholar not a student, I'm not anything or anyone. I feel like I don't have anything to give the world or myself. And I wish I did.

I skipped class this morning. Another class I hate- jesus, which one don't I at this point?

I feel like my life right now is fraught with failure everywhere I look. This isn't who I wanted to be at 25. I wanted to be more successful, smarter, something.

I'm feeling just a profound sense of rejection from the world lately. I feel like someone who doesn't fit in anywhere. Where is my sense of home? School doesn't want me- no vocation seems to want me. I just don't belong anywhere. And I'm scared I'm not going to find anywhere to belong. Ever.

I think I'm coming to resent people whom I suspect of knowing what they're doing. People who have careers and families. I think I might hate them a little. Because the nature of their lives makes me feel deficient. They occupy spaces that I would like to go, and maybe places in which I would also like to take up residence. But for some reason I can't book tickets there to save my life. Why do they get to go and I don't? It makes having a mortgage seem as exotic as finally taking that trip to Europe.

My life is all theory and no practice. My brother, in contrast, is all practice with very little theorizing. Instead of contemplating the nature of the universe and the genesis of life, he found a wife and had a baby. Instead of worrying about the sustainability of modern living practices, he went out and bought a house. And I am racked with jealousy over this ability to move through moments of life without stopping to try and make each one pregnant with profundity.

Yesterday I got off the train in a foul mood. I couldn't believe another Tuesday had rolled around and that I had no one to blame for Tuesdays as they were but myself. I signed up for a marathon day thinking this would make me happy- to pack work all into one highly concentrated 14 hour period. Lesson learned. I do NOT like this approach to work anymore than I do to juice.

I walked slowly down the concrete steps at the station because I think this makes me better than others who are rushing. Near the doors, there is a dunkin donuts stand where two or three people are queuing up for coffee. They are all standing in an enormous puddle on the floor, waiting to order. And for some reason I find this deeply reassuring. It makes me almost affectionate towards these strangers. I like that they are in line for something. In a puddle no less. Human nature, in this picture, seems very solid. Coffee is worth stopping for. Waiting for. In a grimy puddle of mystery liquid at a subway station if need be.

I wanted to stop for coffee, but I didn't. Because I had no cash on me. Because I never have cash on me. Because a wallet perpetually full of cash is a hallmark of grownups with real lives and jobs and routines that include going to the dry cleaner and ATM regularly. And with this, Tuesday turned, on a dime, into a big conspiracy against me- every tableau of people on the street looked like an indictment of my delayed adulthood and ungrounded life. Even the cookie I bought three hours later to feel better didn't cut it for me. Because next to the single cookies for single individuals are boxes of cookies. Boxes of cookies imply a series of lives and mouths than can surround these cookies- a group that will be accountable as a team for seeing to the cookies' timely mass consumption. I couldn't handle a box of cookies. My life cannot accommodate that.

So this is where I'm at today. This is how bad it's become. That even the fucking cookies are against me. And I thought we were such good friends. When even the reliability of refined sugar flees from you, it is very clearly your own personal no good horrible sleep it off ides of march kind of day.

Dear John

This is a time when having a semi- secret blog that none of your friends in everyday life know about comes in handy. I have a big secret to share.

I am leaving school.

Just now, I wrote "I am quitting school" but then I deleted it and substituted in "leaving" instead. Leaving is a better way to say it. It has more agency to it. It implies that I am making a choice, looking to something else, rather than collapsing under a load too great for me.

After this year I will have a master's degree. If all goes well, that is. After that I am meant to stay for an indefinite number of years and get my PhD. When you visit the school I attend, they tell you that most graduate students finish the program in 5 years. They are lying. Most graduate students finish in 7 years if they are lucky. Nine is not unheard of.

Ever since I was young, I wanted to live a life of the mind. In fact, even as a child I did this in many ways. I wasn't very good socially. There was always a lot going on at home, and I didn't want people to know me too awfully well. They might find out what I really was- what my life was really like. And I didn't want that. Plus, I preferred to read rather than run. I couldn't get dirty because of the hell I would catch at home. So I ended up being a very bookish child who said all the right things to get her ostracized and picked on. Things like, "no, I can't get my dress dirty." or "in answer to your question, no I did not think that test was hard/unfair/stupid." I had not yet learned that when people ask you certain questions, they are engaging you in a call and response ritual rather than actually seeking information that they currently lack.

I always thought that once I got to high school things would be different. They were, of course, worse. And then I thought once I became and undergraduate things would be different. They weren't. And then I said to myself- I'm going to graduate school. And there things will most certainly be different. Then I will belong and life will start to flower as I had hoped. Things are different. But they are not flowering. In fact, now that I have experienced graduate school with all its cultish properties, unreasonable sacrifices, petty politics, and cloistered existence, the very idea of a delicate purple bloom rising from the dirt and opening its heart to the sky seems such an inappropriate metaphor as to be an ironic sight gag.

This is not the life for me. I could list a million reasons why. And I have- in my head, in talking to my boyfriend, in preparing what I will tell people who ask me to explain myself. But I don't think listing all the reasons here is that important. The fact is, the fit with graduate school/academia and me is an ill one. If pressed, I would have to say that academia is decidedly too tight in the waste, too long in the leg, and makes my ass look incredibly fat.

The real problem, though, is that dreams are not like pairs of jeans. They are like a great many things, and I'm sure that all these things dreams are like have been thoroughly covered in the collected acts of toastmastery of the human race. But for me here, it does better to say what a dying dream or a leaving dream feels like. It feels like someone you know and love is dying. It feels like your dog has run away. It feels like betrayal, abandonment, and finally settles in to the stale feeling of grief.

The idea that one day I would live this particular academic life was an imaginary friend I turned to when I felt lonely as a child. It was something that gave me succor and reassured me. Like an ancient Hebrew wandering the desert with Moses, I just kept telling myself- one day you will find this place of milk and honey. And then everything will be beautiful. And you will feel right. Academia was a panacea. I wouldn't be depressed, I would be honored for my talents, I would be understood, successful, even in some strange way- popular? I pictured cocktail parties in wood paneled rooms where people sipped sherry in the afternoons in front of fireplaces. The conversation and the glasses would be sparkling and I would be proclaimed a witty fabulous treasure. In time, perhaps I would amass a cadre of students who looked up to me, and whose reputations I would mold under the shadow of my own large one.

In the outside world, people would ask me what I do and I would tell them about a project of mine. I pictured work a day suburbanites looking at me strangely as though I were a rare object. Like a piece of African tribal art someone's weird and perpetually unmarried globe trotting aunt sent them as a wedding gift from Burma. Interesting but so- foreign. I would become a living breathing conversation piece.

In the end, I got here and found out that none of this was going to be my life. My department didn't have a lot of money and people drank out of plastic tumblers at department gatherings. The fireplaces in the old renovated house where our offices were had been sealed up decades ago. One housed an old broken overhead projector someone had shoved in there for no real reason other than it was a blank space. Judging by its layers of dust, that same person may have worked for the Eisenhower campaign or known someone who had.

The dream had left me, been taken in the night, or simply passed away suddenly but peacefully in its sleep of a brain aneurysm. The point is that one day, when I felt shaky and reached for this dream for assurance and calm, it wasn't there anymore.

I will have to now reconstruct my vision for my future. From scratch out of totally new materials. I will have to build this goal out of things that I want and want to be. This presumes that there are things I am not that someday I would like to be. This is very different than the old dream, in which I am finally paid my due by a world that for so long has frightened me, a world that I felt someday would hand me an apology for all the times I wasn't allowed to play.

Seeing it this way, I wonder why my old dream didn't leave me a dear john letter. All those years together, and no notice. What would it have said?

Dear B,

This is the hardest letter I've ever had to write.

[Yeah, right, I'd say to myself at this point in the letter- they all start out that way. If it's so hard, don't write it. Stay.]

We've had a lot of years together. But it's time for me to move on now. I know a letter is a really chicken shit way to do this,

[you got that right!]

but this seems like the only way.

I know you won't believe me, but this is the best thing for both of us, if we just remember what we had- the good times- and go our separate ways.

I'm going to give you a reason because I know you want one, you deserve one, and let's face it- isn't that what these letters are for anyway?

The real reason I'm leaving, B, is that I am not real anyway. I am a figment of your imagination, a conjuring of your own mind. And when you tried to bring me to life, to make me a real boy as it were, I just dissipated. You found out the rabbit was in the hat all along and that the coin has two heads on it.

I am so sorry. I hope one day we can be friends.

~Your Dream
PS I'm taking the lamp in the living room because I bought it for reading Foucault in the evenings. I am also taking your tweed skirt suit for reasons I think you already know.