made in new york

After my son goes to sleep I get a few quiet hours and despite what they sometimes bring, I relish them because the life of a mother is very loud, very full, very outside of herself and I need to find my way back inside myself. Especially now. So he goes down and I turn off all the lights except of the room I am in. Increasingly that means pitch darkness other than the glare of the computer monitor, because I am writing or reading or less proudly, watching everything I can possibly think of watching on YouTube. I never know what kind of night it’s going to be. Maybe I’ll write something about my son that gets birthed from the deepest best places inside and soars up, the way stories about him do, and saves the day and my mood. Maybe I’ll happen upon another of my “biographical notes” moods and write that, for better or worse. Maybe I’ll just thrill myself excavating musical memories on Itunes—spending a fortune getting songs I’ll be too embarrassed to play to people. Maybe I’ll read the latest magazines I’ve been piling up and plot my next (likely to be failed) workout diet regimen. But maybe just maybe none of that will happen and I will be like I am right now--overtaken by the feeling of absolute loneliness and abandonment. I wanted to, as I was writing, call it other things and make it less pathetic. Because I do feel pathetic saying that this is how I feel: abandoned and left behind. In some massive, fundamental, any way I cut it way. Left behind. It’s a feeling that is enormous and no less so for my knowing it is partly delusional… I think when you suffer this much for the loss of a place that wasn’t even a good place for you, the loss of someone who sold you out so many times, I think that fucks you up more. Because it tells you something you don’t really want to know about yourself. But this is me tonight, just wishing I were not alone in this whole mess. If my life is an occasion well I am not rising to it—that’s the feeling. It is dark and the snowing went into raining so you hear the time pacing in the sound of the tires of cars—it frames the endless silence. I know this whole thing, including these lonely panics, are The Whole Point. I know this is the fight for the life, for the good life—I’ve been here before enough to know it, I can smell it. As much as I wish someone were here, I know better; I know that would be as good as putting a gun to my head, spirit wise. And I’ve done enough of self-erasure for a lifetime. It’s just about filling in my blanks and not filling them up with someone else’s bullshit for a change. What was that cliché they said on that HBO show? That it was dedicated to the people “who have the courage to be happy.” I don’t have it, the courage, or the faith or (and this troubles me most) the inspiration. I am terrified because I don’t have these things and I wish I had someone right here to tell me it was going to be okay. But fact is, when I did, he was lying and it wasn’t okay in the end—it was the worse possible way things could be. So hey, it’s dark and cold and quiet in my apartment but I am here. Typing away. Feeling sorry for myself and saying so. Crying and staying up all nights and having trouble getting up on time. Scared shitless but showing up every day. And I’m going to hope I don’t disappoint myself after all the disappointments they have caused me. I am not going to abandon and leave myself behind. Nobody is here to tell me it’s going to be okay, because that’s not something said. That is something made. I am going to make it.