Welcome!

While in NYC I ran into a woman I had met once before. We chatted about LA and she said I should call her friend MW. I did and we arranged to meet for a snack with a few other people before they went off to a film. Seated across from me was a woman named Jessica. She mentioned that she was playing with her band Monday night. I asked what the name of the band was, and she said “the Chapin Sisters.” Boing went my head. The Chapin Sisters is actually the only LA band that I could have named, should I have been asked, because another member of the band, Lilly, is one of the best friends of my stepsister, and Felicia had told me to look them up just days earlier. Big Big City. Small Small World.

I’m so hungry for beauty. It feels like I only get tastes, and I need a long lingering meal. I need regular feeding. I need to ingest and produce beauty. Lots and lots of it. I need the contrast of colors, dramatic vistas, small details. I need to live in a beautiful space, I need to go to beautiful places. Beauty equals hope. Turning the corner and seeing something gorgeous makes the future not just bearable but potentially delightful.

My father had said he would drive me to the airport. Instead he offered me cash. I’m not interested in cab fare, what I want is a ride. I want to be taken, to be cared for, to be worth an hour or two of traffic. Maybe he’s just afraid of being trapped in a car with me an my anger. I don’t blame him if that’s the reason, but I think it is just an inconvenience. When I was a teenager it was glamorous to be offered cab fare, now it feels like a dismissal. His new wife is reaching out to me, asked me to stay.

My life isn’t really anywhere at the moment. And may not be for some time. Until I have a home I’m unrooted, ungrounded. I’m on a god-quest, something else that fills my father with disdain. I want faith that is not intellectual, but is grounded in a feeling of purpose, however unknown or unknowable. I want to believe that there is a love and care in the universe. Or something. I’m not sure, but I have believed in faith for so long without having it, and I want the real thing. In Los Angeles I was praying and meditating every day, consciously working on my spiritual self. Or rather working to accept that I am a spiritual being. My mind is not so much my friend. I believe that as it gets better trained it will serve me better. But I am a long way from having a trained mind. Talking to Alison was helpful, I need to do more of that.

I’ve felt loved in New York. But also the same struggle. The same insurrmountableness of the city. I’ve never understood the appeal of Brooklyn without children, and yet I spent years there. And would probably have to do so again if I moved back. There’s love here, but there’s no committment, no partnership. I’m always left wanting more.

In LA I felt like I would be able to make a committment to myself. There’s no one to turn to, I don’t expect anything from anyone, and I can be grateful for small gestures from strangers. In New York I need more. I needed my family to help me get a home, I needed my lover to be my partner. I only wanted what was freely given, but then it turned out that that wasn’t enough, that I deserve cake instead of crumbs. NYC could be cake, but mostly it’s been crumbs.

But I’m terrified of going back. I keep telling myself that nobody in New York would help me with my business anymore than anyone in LA, that all anyone here can offer are words, and those come down a telephone line as across a dinner table, but it’s still scary. LA is the reality of my life laid bare. I do not have a home. I can take care of myself but there’s no room for error or luxury. I do not have a partner or a family.

Rambling.

The future is unknown. I do know that I had moments this summer where I was filled with a sense of being ok, a sense that the future may not be a matter of my worst nightmares unfolding but might rather be something entirely unknown to me, and better than I had ever dreamed.

But tonight feels like the night before I went back to Paris when I was 17. I didn’t want to stay, but I didn’t want to go back. The last time I had a home was before I left–a month after my 16th birthday. I’ve now spent more time without a home than with one. A home meaning a place that I choose to be, a place I belong, that I am not passing through. When I moved to Park Slope I thought I was just passing through. It was a great way-station. I knew the limits of the space. I knew I could make it homey, but that it wasn’t really home. I was always having to shed things to keep from being overwhelmed. When I moved there I had stuff scattered around, at my father’s, at family friends, in storage. Over the years I’ve gotten rid of almost everything. I’ve given away most everything I had of my mother’s, all my books, everything from my childhood. I’ve thrown away every last scrap of paper associated with all my years of education. I’ve weeded through photos, paring them down until there’s little more than a shoebox. I’ve thrown away furniture and fabric. I’ve given things away endlessly. And all the time I was screaming to be able to put down roots.

I don’t want clutter. I don’t have any clutter. But things are meaningful. The slow accumulation of meaningful things can be a big part of building a life. It is a huge part of making a home.

My father’s guestroom is so small. I’m sitting in a tiny chair in the corner. There is no place to unpack. It is a space that seems restful and welcoming, but more for a nap than a weekend.

There’s some planning I need to do. I’ve been working on a mission statement. What’s important? I caught myself the other day saying “If I have a child” and I was horrified. I am going to be a great parent. Even if it has to be through fostering or some other method. Not that I’ve given up on the real deal yet–partnership, family, etc., but that may be out of my hands. I hope not. I’ve wasted alot of time thinking that I had all the time in the world, but I don’t. But if that doesn’t happen I don’t want to give up on parenting. And I want to have a home, and I want to live somewhere beautiful. So that may mean that I have to live in the middle of nowhere. Which means that I may have to figure out how to make a living in a new way.

I’m going to try and think positive. Banish the negative for a while. Catch it.

I want to be free.

My lower back has been stiff since I got here. Could be because I’ve been exercising and then stopped. Could be because of the travel itself, or the tension. Some say that the lower down the pain, the older the trauma. That would make sense. And it’s not really pain, more of a stiffness and a soreness, which is how my childhood feels to me now. Lots of love, but also neglect. Damaged people trying to do better. More than anything else, what I am remembering now is the pressure. The pressure to make my parents feel better, to make them feel as tho they were doing a good job, and that I was OK. Sometimes I feel as tho if it had just been ok not to be OK that I would be OK today. But I’m not. I am in many ways, and getting better all the time, but it’s hard to have people around who are angry that I’m not better already, that I’m not further along. It’s hard to be told that it is too late–that I should have done x,y, and z in the past. It’s hard to be gentle with myself when I believe that that is true. It’s true about real estate and it is true about love.

I can’t sleep. I’m surrounded by my father’s home, which screams money. And I can’t help connecting this luxury, these acres of marble, leather and persian carpets to my own state of homelessness. My down payment is in the details. He told me once that if I wanted a nice place to live in New York that I should have been a banker. This trip is painful. I love New York. I love walking. Even the stretch of Broadway between Chambers and Canal is interesting. But if I have to start my life again, I’d rather it be somewhere where I can be a newcomer, somewhere where I haven’t demonstrated what a failure I am. I want New York, but New York doesn’t want me. And I can’t take the rejection. In LA it somehow feels less shameful to rent a shabby room. And I can hold out hope for a one-bedroom, something that was entirely beyond me in New York. The work I will have to do there is different. I’m realizing that I might well not have a child, and that I may be alone. I have to grieve my losses and find a way to be in the world differently. I’m not sure I can do it. I’m not sure if that kind of life is worth living, at least for me. But I’m not capable of partnership. The first thing that has to go is my self pity. And the first thing I have to find is God.