Tonight I went out after dark.
It's weird. We live in this city like it's a suburb, keeping regular hours, working regular jobs, going to the gym, coming home, cooking all of our meals, and rarely going out. Husband and I see each other, and the other people who do the same things we do at the same times that we do them, but basically we exist in a social circle of two. An awesome two, from our perspective, but really just two.
So tonight I went out. For no purpose, ostensibly to walk six blocks to the superior (not to say Supreme) bodega near our ex-apartment to buy fancy-pants chocolate (and also, as it happens, some bananas), but really just to go Out. Of the house. After dark.
When I was little, living in our Little House in a Big Field (next to a Moderately Sizeable Woods featuring a Very Long Path), I used to sneak outside after dark, when everyone in the house was asleep. It felt so subversive, tiptoeing along the carpeted hallway, placing my feet just right on the stairs so they wouldn't squeak, mousing along the linoleum so as not to wake the dogs, easing open the front door and creeping on bare feet out onto the rough, wet bricks and then into the grass. I would hold my arms out and bathe in moonlight, some eight-year-old, ten-year-old, twelve-year-old pre-pagan, just excited to be alive and awake and aware in the night. When it would thunderstorm I would peel off my pajama top and let the rain touch my chest all over, dancing silently under my parents' window.
Living in our house in the middle of nowhere, I dreamed (who didn't?) of the city. A place where life happened after dark, where all the people didn't get shut up in their respectable houses from 8pm to 8am, like little dolls put in boxes for safe keeping. But now that I live here, I live exactly like that. Wake up, dawdle around the house, leave already late at 8:45 or 9, work all day in our teetery-tottery high-rise building, take the subway home (or on Wednesdays, to the gym), shut myself up inside the house around 8pm. Engage in tiny pursuits: Facebook. Television. Reading blogs. Writing blogs. Go to sleep. Rinse, repeat.
I'm happy doing it. Getting enough sleep, eating food we make ourselves, tending to ourselves during the week with a sense of obligation. Making sure we are fine. The weekends, with their long chunks of ill-defined time and seemingly limitless possibilities compressed into tiny, tiny halves of hours - spell chaos, especially in my head, but the weekdays are easily managed, seamless, content. They go down so easily.
Underneath it all, there's an underpinning of not-long-lost teen angst, the angry teenage girl shouting, "Contentment is the mind-killer! Happiness that's easy is not worth having! Where is the mighty struggle? Where is the art?"
But really, contentment and happiness are pretty great. And yet. Where is the mighty struggle? Where is the art?
In the book I'm not writing, for one. The book I'm afraid to write.
And in this city I finally live in, have lived in for quite some time, without touching it. Being here is like lying with my ear up against a wall behind which there's something momentous happening, but my ear is sealed in wax, and I can't hear it. Walking among people I can't reach, a collection of moving, talking, self-contained worlds, people who might as well be sealed in plastic bubbles as far as I'm concerned.
Which is my primary problem.
Walking out the door after dark doesn't solve anything. It doesn't remove the wax, it doesn't break through the bubbles. But it does force me to look at what I can't hear, what I can't touch. Out there, in the night, exists everything else, everything that isn't in here, holed up in our warm, brightly-lit, content apartment.
And that seems important.
Lately I've been experimenting with a depression I haven't felt in years. It scares the shit out of me, but it also feels necessary, like an ice bath. I'm trying to do this writing, trying to engage with people in these stupid, twisted, indirect, back-door ways - and desperately hoping that one day it will pay off in real interactions, which is pretty dumb - and part of that is letting the angry and the sad back in. It's looking at the shitty parts of my brain head-on and accepting them, talking to them. Going outside, after dark, and shaking hands with whatever I find there.
For the moment, I'm going to keep my shirt on.
December 2, 2011
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