Literally Speaking

There is a shortcut that other students had made through the yellow lawn to get to Starbucks on the first floor. I watched him carefully keep to the sidewalk until he vanished from my vantage on the third floor. I was glad he didn’t walk in the grass, reducing the stems to muddy stubbles as so many had done before him. He stood out as a beam of unannounced confidence and I closed my French book to get some coffee.

Emily came home at 5 a.m. when George was just getting up. Her waifish frame appeared rather unexpectedly in the doorway’s morning cold. She had purchased more cigarettes on the way back. George wanted to throw them out of the window again, but Emily was stalking the apartment with an annoying, regal air. He imagined she would have commanded the fire pokers to behead him if he so much as touched her Marlboro Lights.
“Did you stay here all night?” she asked.
“Usually.”
“The people you find at bars, you know, aren’t all bad.”
George wondered who she met. He followed her to the kitchen.
“Did you want me to make you any breakfast? What are you doing today?” Emily opened the fridge and poured herself some water, mixing it with Vitamin C powder, forgetting what she asked the moment she asked it.
“Read some.”
“I’m sorry?”
George intended to lock himself in the study today with the radio station on MoneyTalk and graph every damn share he owned. He could not afford another RTJ tragedy.
“Some oatmeal then? It’s cold today.”
As he would be spending the entire day indoors, this hardly mattered, but he took his place at the table, on a chilly metal chair, watching the shadows of airborne leaves dance across the wood and frost skate across his trousers.
Emily clicked on the stove. She turned on the faucet and let water run, passing her hand quickly through it like a mountaineer by a stream sifting for gold.
“Do you know I’ve never been in that bar before? It’s been there for six years and I’ve never been there before.” Emily twisted her hair behind her head before stooping for a saucepan.
George watched more leaves skitter across the table. He reached out and caught one with his thumb and forefinger. A shadow; but it passed to his hand and played in his palm like the wings of Tinkerbell.
Emily was sowing raisins and almonds in the saucepan. She looked contemplative. No, she looked pleasantly rattled; she only presented a thoughtful demeanor to steady her hands.
“What did you have?” George asked.
“What… of the drinks?”
“I go to a bar to drink.” George let go of the shadow flailing to join the other leaves in their flight.
“No, no dear George. You should be buying others drinks. Women drinks.”
“Did someone buy you a drink?”
Emily laughed. Her eyes turned green, and George involuntarily shuddered again. She was chronically shudder inducing. “They bought me Manhattan, love. They bought me the entire fucking island and all the waters around it.”
Yes. What very, very green eyes.
“Your stocks can all crash and burn because I have the island,” she said happily. She twisted around and danced like a balloon banner on a used car lot.
“Is this a re-enactment of the entitlement?” George asked grumpily.
“You mean, did I dance drunkenly on the bar? You know I never dance when I’m drunk.”
George had never seen Emily drunk.
“I was sitting like a statue,” Emily continued, “looking like a Venus.” Emily turned her face for a moment, parted her lips, elongated her neck, widened her eyes and turned to wax. George started, scrapping his chair noisily against the floor.
“Don’t do that! You do that often enough and your face will freeze like that forever,” George said.
“That’s not so terrible is it? I’m so beautiful still.”
George stayed silent, because a man should never argue the contrary; she was right anyway though it disturbed him to notice. “What the devil will you do with the island Manhattan?” he asked.
“After I finish making your oatmeal, I suppose I’ll lie down and smile. But just watch sir George. The next time you crave turkey-cranberry sandwiches, you’ll encounter a billboard a mile-high,” Emily shot up on tiptoe, her fingers-tips sparking with contact with the ceiling, “plastered with Emily in Chanel.”
George had a sudden vision of Emily sipping a martini and sprouting up like Alice in Wonderland when Alice made the mistake of snacking in the white rabbit’s house.
Emily reached over the smoking saucepan and clicked off the heat. She served his oatmeal as elegantly as anything before lighting another cigarette and leaving the kitchen. The oatmeal was fairly scanty in the way of raisins and almonds… as if the chef was unfamiliar with any particular ingredient in stomach-filling quantities. Which, of course, was the case. She certainly didn’t enjoy eating like other mammals. “Isn’t it ironic:” George whispered at Emily’s protruding vertebra, “ Her majestic billboard will weigh ten tons, and she is on the verge of disappearing.”

I do not have any sense of direction. I don’t mean that in “I don’t know what to do with my life” or “I do not know where I stand morally.” I mean that in I have no idea about north, south, east, west, or where the car is in the parking lot. I survive solely on an inherent talent that, as far as I can tell, manages to get me where I need to be despite the fact that I don’t know where I’m going. I figure that if I take the initiative to step out of my house, destiny will be on my side.

I’m in a new city. It isn’t very pedestrian friendly, but I’m not about to break down and buy a car. I figure by the time I graduate, I will have met five interesting people on the bus, five more waiting for the bus, and saved thousands of dollars in gas. Anything to keep my karma green.

I bought dresser liners and mascara. I bought more stationary and wrote a letter on a hard table in Barnes and Noble. I bought a new camera so a) my readers can see the bay and b) my listeners will have a new vlog to giggle over. (I imagine the community is getting tired over my first attempt at vlogging, though funnily enough, it remains to be the most popular page on my site. After watching it again (thinking: am I missing something? Was there a circus performance going on behind me?) I concluded that vlogs must have a guaranteed entertainment factor, and I should seriously consider writing for the camera.) I also bought a lot of green tea and some stress balls so I could deal with my credit card bill next month.

I have been thinking about direction, in general, in great depth these last few months, thinking that perhaps, although I’m heading further west than I wanted to, this road is but a detour in the grand scheme of things. I don’t only want to see the east coast. I want to see everything. I want to see Italy and France and India and Japan. I want to see Iceland and Louisiana, USA. I will not stay in one place for long. I may never find a home. This is okay with me. If only I see all I can…

Than I think, “You’re in self-denial. You pine for New York City every day. Must I be so damn cheerful about my situation?”

Yes, I suppose I do. I expect a lot. I blame my literary up-bringing for my beliefs about human potential. (Unlimited). I’ve reasoned that life isn’t worth living unless all can be done for it. I’ve written pages and pages on self discovery and our universe and the eyes in the mirror staring back at me, convinced of their animation, knowing that I can see a world beyond the convention to something of an intellectual heaven and places and freedom and freedom and freedom, but somehow blind as to how to get there.

I only close them and take another step. Than, I can never tell if I am falling or dancing. But I think I am dancing. I think, that if I am falling, I’ll find a white rabbit at the bottom. When I don’t think at all I think of him, and it doesn’t matter anyway.

I dropped the letter in the box and took the bus back to my (new) home.