(no subject)

Every holiday, every time of year involuntarily brings up memories of its previous incarnations. "Memories" isn't quite the right word; they aren't stories, exactly. They're quasi-sensations: the look of my room, my house, Annapolis in summer at dusk, the same desire to avoid anxiety or sadness by wandering around town, going to bookstores, going to parties. I always felt mercenary in that way, like someone who hadn't found her place yet. Nothing quite fit--the jobs, the people I hung out with, the places I lived. (It's still like that, only slightly less so.)

Example A: the rainy memorial day weekend after graduation. I read Zeno's Conscience and wondered why I was going to study psychology. Afraid of the world ending and dirty bombs in Times Square, sore from moving my books, afraid that menstrual cramps were signs of some awful disease, and my days were numbered (in a sense, your days are numbered when you don't know who you're going to be), afraid of the New Jersey gentrified neighbors who wanted to keep students from living next door and showed up at 7 in the morning threatening to impound my dog, afraid my coworkers resented the dachshund and my hour-long lunches by the water. It was the first time in my life I ever felt young and beautiful.

I had no idea what the shape of the world was; I still don't. (That portion of The Road to San Giovanni about the shape of the world always disappoints me, but its premise is fabulous.) Upheavals were geological changes (like emotions in that Proust quote)--because changes in what one can do and feel are changes in the world and in one's self.