"The Young and the Jobless" — Afterward

I had many thoughts on my way back home from work today. There I was at 8 p.m. again, at my usual appointment: the one empty seat on the train.

I sat there listlessly, crammed in between two other bodies, my brain unable to process the stress of the day. I was like a hot coal, and any thought that touched me quickly evaporated into the atmosphere, leaving behind this terrible think, black line of choking smoke.

I thought about earlier that day when I asked the editor to push a deadline once again. She wrote back that it was fine but that I’d really need to start following them from now on. Unfair, I thought, and instead, I asked her to decrease my writing assignments for the year by half, because I had no time anymore. A fine demand since I’m not getting paid for these articles anyway.

She didn’t have time to reply before I left the office, but on the way back, I felt the infinite abyss of not knowing how she’d respond. F#@&.

My chest felt tight all of a sudden. I breathed in, and nothing came in — the air stopped short at my shoulders, disappearing in pain.

I’d had breathing problems all day long again. I knew it was stress and fatigue. My body has a knack for making up stuff to steer me back into the right path again when it feels slighted about something — in this case, the lack of sleep (due to a hilarious conversation with my roomie in our kitchen last night, about headless hens and the endless dilemma of butter vs. margarine) and the high levels of cortisol that poisoned my system today.

But I couldn’t take the lack of breath any longer. In an instant, I got mad, then suddenly I really did say ‘fuck it’ in all its glory inside my head. Fuck it, and fuck it again. All of it.

I rested my head against the back of the seat and breathed in, in and out again, in and out, visualizing the stress dropping on each side, like dryer sheets, smoothly, softly, one after another. And then, I was there … that feeling, that deep realization that nothing, nobody really can touch you, that your spirit runs so deep, it is the abyss itself.

It was quite amazing, and I sat there, wide-eyed I felt, and still in my seat, in the same position (for the whole length of the trip as it turned out), processing what was happening with my mind turned off. And yet a myriad thoughts filled my head at that moment, all beautiful, all profound, all lessons through the lessons i’ve accumulated in this life — like a string, tying its pearls together.

I thought about my dad, as i often do when I reach that inner peace. He came to my mind first, there sitting at the ancient kitchen table in Greece, looking at me squarely under the fluorescent light, narrowing his left eye a bit as he always did. “There are NO free meals,” he tells me, still watching me ominously. He isn’t mad; he’s a philosopher. And this is just another lesson of economics that he feels applies to life.

Years later, I’m sitting in Econ. Not understanding a thing again, despite being weeks away from exams. It’s the 86th day, I’m biting into my bologna sandwich, and we’re talking about meals.

I come back now, and look around me on the train, just to make sure I’m still here. A young man in a hoodie is reading from a leaflet; an old couple looks bored, resting their empty glances ahead on the window. I’m comforted. I sit into myself again and continue my journey.

“Let it go, Natalia,” he says. “Let it go.” It’s Jim now, the healer. In the dim-lit bar, I’m lying on the table, and he’s walking around me, his voice falling clear as crystal. I want to let it go, and I feel it already seeping away from me, away with the meditative tunes wafting around us.

But then, I’m here on the train again. “No free meals,” says Dad, his eye still on me, and he breaks his bread. “Why did he give me that session?” I ask myself again in the mirror and tug on the black circles under my eyes. “He only talks to me about guy things — you know, about women and money. He’s given many women sessions,” says Mark now, then sips his wine and looks away. The glass is cold behind my back, and I wish I’d sat where he had, then I could have a view instead. His glasses perched up on his cheeks, he looks back at me again. “Did they sleep with him?” I ask with a smirk. “They did,” he admits and sips again.

If I were a parent, I’d hate to have a daughter. I’d love her to bits, mind you, but knowing all the crazy things that I’ve done in my life and seeing as to how I’m still alive and intact somehow makes me want to really believe the healer’s assessment. (He holds my hands in his palm now and tells me, “Your spirit is really strong — your soul is so big, your body’s in it instead of the other way around. And you’ve got an amazing angel always over you.”)

Yes, thank you. But the farthest most kids go when it comes to angels is their love of angel-hair pasta. Thus, I believe I’d be either really overprotective (in which case, the little girl will grow up screwed up anyway) or I’d lose my mind. But that’s the future. I can’t even imagine having a kid.

These moments on the train are all I know, and at these times, I feel that nothing else holds as much clarity as what I sense and feel right then. It’s the infinity of truth, and I have a longing to share it with someone. Bottle it up and open it up again, release it later, when I know that I’ll be back, off the train, out of the journey, back trapped within the walls of my body, feeling tiny, so small that I almost lose touch with myself and try to step out of my body so I can watch me interact and assess how I’m doing. But I can’t trap it. It’s pure, it’s independent. It’s elusive.

When I was little, I liked to hide things in corners, roll up scraps of paper or bubble gum wrappers into tiny balls and shove them in cracks on the brick wall or bury them under pine cones. It felt nice. Like I was taking care of my own piece of the world, then storing it safe forever where nobody would find it. And later, no matter what I was doing, whether I was at home or at school or perhaps swinging wildly at the playground, there would be a litter of precious little things lining the trail of my own world that nobody knew existed. And they were safe, and only I knew about them. Nobody could take that away. (Because I would never reveal their locations, even if they asked.)

Some have commented on the surprising twists that my writing takes sometimes, and I’ve wondered too why I do that. Was it the novels I read throughout school? Or was I perhaps trying to escape something? I thought about it on the train again. And remember how I said in a previous entry that everything repeats in this world, everything mirrors everything else? Well, I thought about my interactions with people. The closer I get to the truth, the farther I am from sharing it. I’ll be right next to them, and I will turn to look at them, and I see them, all the time, even  through the thick mortar wall between us. But they can’t see me. They don’t know it. Try to reach and you can touch me, and I’ll laugh and feel warm under your caress, but that vein of truth that runs inside me is so far away.

So it’s always been. When I try to share something I care about, a switch in me turns off. “Get it over with quickly, so we can go on,” something  inside me hisses, turning away as if in shame, as if angry that I even had the nerve to attempt to make a connection with someone else. As if I’m whoring myself out, giving a part of myself up by offering up a scrap of sentiment.

Other times, I’ll boil with feeling alone in my room, whether it’s about singing or some strange scientific concept that I’ve stumbled upon and felt inspired by. But come time to share that with someone, that thing inside me draws the black blinds shut as if it’s suddenly winter, expelling only the leftovers of fall — the bare facts, which fall short on the cold doorsteps.

But then, despite the impudence of my inner being and the constant cold shoulder at my attempts to adjust, something inside me bubbles: I laugh. “I love you, silly” I tell it, jokingly, endearingly, sitting on that same doorstep, outstretching a hand with long fingernails, offering up a daisy, enticing it to come hither. “Ya, whatever,” the little witch responds from inside. “Too late,” she throws out, as if she’s mad at me again.

I drop my hand, and leave the daisy on the stoop. It’s OK that you’re like this, I want to say. I love you anyway.

The beauty of a private life is that nobody has to understand. You’re all alone in there, free to fight and chuckle, to choose the grass or the marble steps, to linger on every stoop of childhood memory and uncover every hidden treasure behind the brick wall. Free as infinity, and that’s why I don’t mind it when I walk by the stoop again a few days later, and her flower is still lying there in the same position as I left it.

Tomorrow may suck, and I’ve been holding my breath all weekend to find out.

I wonder if that has to do anything with the mysterious breathing problems I’ve had on and off since stress and the real world collided when I graduated college… .

I have been in a cook’s block for a while now.

Culinary constipation, I call it (and it alliterates).

That sounds gross, I know, but I just can’t find the energy to cook anymore. Instead, I find myself sneaking in cheap sushi for lunch and eating leftovers for dinner more times in the week than I can count on one hand. And if I feel pangs about going broke, I make it to the store long enough to pick up hummus and turkey slices for a wrap.

This isn’t good, because I believe that nutrition is a really important part of life. We have one body and one soul, and eating the right foods nourishes both. It helps the mind too, to stay sharp and active. And with the stresses of the job these days, now is the time to eat well.

In fact, thinking about food now, I would say that it’ a really important part of life, close to kindness, awareness and religion. And yes, I’m not religious, but by the latter I mean beliefs that guide your life, whether it’s your closeness to God or your morals.

Lately, it amazes me how the body is like a well-oiled machine. Feed it the proper things, it sends messages to the mind about weight loss and metabolism, all on its own. And the mind works together with the body to process what you put in and give you energy or store what you don’t need for later.

It’s kind of cool, and I feel like we — the me that you know and the you that you know better — is only a fraction of what we really are. We are just the facade. My voice you hear and the movements you see me make, even the words you’re reading now, aren’t my doing. Not just my doing, I mean. Science and art are both helping my body, soul and mind here. And that’s also why it turns out that no school subject was ever any less important than the other, after all. Each catered to a specific part of you, working to cultivate it, so that you can become more whole — ugh: even math and science.

***

I ate fish and brown rice with flaxseeds tonight, corn, green beans in tomato sauce, an organic carrot and some tangerines. I felt so alive and full of energy afterward. I worked out too in the morning and ate a good breakfast, then read for most of the day. I also danced in my room a bit and caught up with some friends. At night, my roommate’s date picked us up, and we went to see a play. It wasn’t the best play, and the guy was kind of blah, and when we came back, I wished we were out doing something else — dancing, having a glass of wine.

But I’m glad we didn’t go. It’s been a really nice, slow day, and that too, like food, is essential. It feeds another part of you, the part that dreads Mondays, struggles to run from life’s daily stresses, dreams of other paths, diverts your attention to that other choice you could have made instead, and when the day is over, turns inward for solace before you let your eyelids fall.

It’s not regretful, this part of you, just filled with wonder. And nothing nourishes wonder more than solitude.

My face is in terrible condition.

When I don’t eat well, forget to sleep and stop exercising altogether, the powerful trio makes its absence known, leaving me with a dry, ashy complexion that adds years to my face and tons of ugly little marks remindful of the terrible teenage years.

OK, now I made me sound really ugly, but I’m not that bad … thanks to CoverGirl.

But even she stopped doing her job today, and by mid-afternoon, I was standing under the fluorescent light in front of the bathroom mirror at work, studying the under-eye circles that pushed through the powder and ebbed darkly into my face.

So then, this is recovery weekend. I will wash off this makeup after I write this, bury my face into my pillow and sleep into the tired afternoon tomorrow. Then I’ll wake up, eat whole grains, a salad for lunch and steak for dinner, and then I’ll read for much of the day. I’m looking forward.

A date with myself. Finally.

You know, New York doesn’t lend itself to quiet and relaxation. The hardest thing about living here is maintaining the balance. On the days when I’m not out seeing things, meeting new people, getting involved in random political campaigns, attending lectures or volunteering, I’m inside embracing the much-craved-for silence — whose invisible cloak of fragility unnerves me as I embrace it, and it threatens to burst with the powerful possibility that I’m missing a lot out there.

But you can’t wear yourself thin like that, I keep reminding myself and pull the cloak aside. You have to remember that life happens, and if you show up tired and cloudy eyed for it, you’ll miss it anyway, even if you’re standing right in the center of it. And so, that’s why this weekend is for recovery. I know that New York will happen out there, but I’ll be checked out, sitting inside and only glancing at it once in a while pass me by once in a while from my window as reassurance that it’s still there and will remain there until Monday.

For now, it’s Blossom Dearie that sings to me about taking Manhattan, and I let her go on while take my time off and do my own thing away from the frenzy of this city.

OK, so I went on this date tonight. And it was fine. It was different. It was different because I had absolutely no hint of inhibition like I usually have.I don’t know why.

Ususally I’m way too awkward, awkward to the point that I can’t be my real self. It’s all in my head, and they can’t tell that I’m not being very open, but I know it, and it makes me feel unsettled, as if I were a dog and someone just went and rubbed my coat the wrong way, leaving it warped and … unsettled.

But tonight I was totally fine. Too fine and I liked that. We went to a wine bar, then followed it by our local one. At the first one, I talked. And talked, and talked. Way too much. It was great, and the guy was interested in what I was saying, I could tell. In the second one, I talked more. Not as much as at first — I added questions here to get him talking too — and it was good. But I don’t know if I talked too much, and if I did, it’s OK, because it was worth it. Then we had to go.

I imagined mysef at his place, cuddling with his cats on his couch. It was a random thought. But it’s how it goes. He lives two blocks down. I wonder, will I actually see it? In the future?

Who knows. He had some business travel early this week. I have some more dates lined up. “I’ll text you,” he said. Weird. Text me? OK.

I was thinking today, it’s so nice to be a woman. A nice one at that, open, friendly, good-looking, and living in America. Freedom to the max is what I’ve got, aside from all other blessings, and the ability to choose from many choices. So lucky I am.

That’s all. Good night. : )

I don’t have time to write tonight, because I’m waking up at 6 a.m. to hand out fliers at the subway before work. Election day is Tuesday! I wonder if we’ll win. I think we will, by sending positive thoughts out into the universe.

Night night ….

I’m really just beat tonight. It’s 5:10. Granted, it was Halloween. I dressed up as Michael Jackson. But before that, I canvased for six hours for a city council political candidate, then handed out fliers for another two hours. It was great, but it made me exhausted. So by the time I got to the beer garden to meet up with Randy, Hope, and the candidate and her assistants, I was almost asleep.

I decided to be responsible and leave at 1:30, after a really fun dance party. But on my way back home, I thought it would be great to stop by the bar and see that spiritual healer. “Just to say hi,” I said to myself. “I’ll be out in ten.”

Three and a half hours later, I’m still there, talking not to S.H. but to some random guy also sitting at the bar. When the guy gets up to go to the bathroom, S.H. (spiritual healer) tries to tell me that he’s not a good guy. However, I see right through him.

I’m not sure why I still go there.

Why do I go there? I don’t know.

I’m tired. goodnight.