Least favorite part of my master's thesis? The Thesis Statement, or Argument, Summary...the WHY of the thing. As in, Why are you doing this thing, explain yourself. Harder yet if your thesis is a collection of short stories and poems...I managed to pull it together all under the title "Desire" but all these years later it still sounds like bullshit. It's right there in the bound copy, too, and if I had it perhaps I'd share it but probably not since the theme of my life is, quite simply, trying not to get pinned down. I don't even want to chose the restaurant, why are you making me explain my motives in life OMG. Like.
But here is the thing: In the dark dark days after I got sober (yes, another thing, but not for this blog except when I feel like it), there was a tiny pin prick of light. Don't get me wrong, pre-sobriety was the absolute worst, a living hell, but there was a period after the initial clarity (a beautiful, happy tears time) when things got too clear and my panic disorder took me on a terror track through a haunted house full of real specters, ghosts of anxiety attacks past, hammering hearts of horror, and so on. I lived in a panic attack for weeks and became barely functional. It took a long time to crawl out of that. And somewhere in it, the prick of light. Which turned out to be a star in the night sky. A star among millions of stars set up above flat expanse of desert interrupted by mesas and buttes still glowing in the last afterlight of sunset in the distance, at the red and purple terminator. I'm on a road, in a car, a good car with a bright instrument panel full of facts and technology and confidence, and I am driving, somewhere in Arizona, and I am in control and headed to points unknown. Who knows where. Cool places, no doubt. Good places full of new things. Far, far away from my apartment, sequestered in Bay Ridge, far away from publishing and what it had become, far away from the terrible, crushing sadness of the last years of NYC that were, for me, quite enough for a lifetime.
It's true you can't run from your problems--I literally couldn't--so I sought therapy and through a long process finally got here, with a little help from my former "friends" to finance this travel, visionquest, walking the earth, what have you, and I could not be more grateful for the opportunity. The fact that I am sitting in this library right now, already with almost 2,000 cross country miles under my belt (NYC > Wichita, Wichita > Houston) is frankly unbelievable.
The library idea came later. It's complicated. When I started dreaming about this trip, it was centered around the idea that I wanted it to last as long as possible, so money would be an issue. I knew I wanted to write--that the primary work I would do throughout this process would be writing, any kind of writing, including this very blog--but where? Not coffee shops unless I had to--too damn noisy. Outside somewhere? Need electricity, no, also bugs. No place where I had to spend money to spend time...so of course, libraries. However.
...
This part sucks because I have to talk about the thing and I hate talking about the thing, but fuck it, here goes. First of all, I worked in the Anschutz Science Library at KU all through undergrad, so I love libraries. I have since I first understood what they were. LOOK AT THEM. They are full of books, and soft quiet, comfy chairs, tables for working, murmurs, bright light. And if you belong, they let you take books home! As though they are crazy people! The trust! the covenant! I could go on and on. And I loved my stacks job...organizing trucks, putting away books, straightening up the tables and stacks. Clean, mindless work, tending to the knowledge. It was lovely, and I got impressive arm muscles to boot, But a science library tucked away on a safe campus in small town Lawrence is an easy place to be. And so was the downtown main library in Wichita, for most of my childhood, until an incident that happened when I was about 15. I will not go into detail about it, but a homeless patron did something disgusting to me (it was assault) and basically fractured my understanding of what a library was. As he made a run for it, I had the presence of mind to give chase and alert staff that something had just happened, but they were frozen behind the desk, there was no security, and nothing ever came of it, not even a report to the police. Writing about it now, it seems odd to me, finally, that not even the police were called. If he had done the same thing in a mall or on the street somewhere, cops would have been called. Somehow, for whatever reason, he got away with it in the library. Even writing this now makes me feel sick.
So, needless to say, librarians and I have a difference of opinion. They believe libraries belong to all citizens, I believe libraries belong to all citizens. We disagree completely on execution, however, and that is how it will stay. But I am deliberately seeking out space to write in public libraries to reset my perceptions and use them--safely--as I have the right to do. I will try to visit some main libraries, but am sticking to branches since the writing is the primary thing, not confronting old ghosts. I just hope to take the power away from the memory so that is all that it is, instead of something that pushes me to avoid public spaces I once cherished. My greater hope is to rekindle the love. It won't be pure and sweet like the old love, but maybe nothing really ever is once you become an old goat.
Early on in my therapy, when I was just emerging from the muddied depths of alcohol abuse, I took myself to brunch at a nearby restaurant that had outside seating and dynamite food. I felt free and really awake--that clarity stuff they talk about is no joke--and I was excited to tell my therapist about it because there was something about the experience that struck me strange, something that makes total sense now at the beginning of this new chapter. I fixated on the coffee cup and memories of travels from the past, especially warm memories, like the time we stayed at the Westin in downtown Chicago or another nice hotel in downtown San Francisco (that name is lost in the data purges of time)...those morning breakfasts, drinking coffee out of strange cups, after days and weeks and months and even years of drinking coffee out of the same mugs (some of mine over the years: NASA logo, varied moods of Donald Duck, Star Trek logo, Cosmosphere moonwalker in a field of wheat, glass Starbucks mugs from the old days of Barnes and Noble...), meant the world to me. It sounds small, but we rarely traveled when I was young, and my experience with travel only really started when I began dating my future husband in college. So, coffee in strange cups = a doorway swinging open to the world, the solar system, the galaxy. It is a genuine delight to me to drink coffee from strange cups. Wichita cups, Texas cups...soon enough, Arizona cups.
So, thesis. No. When people ask, I say I am traveling the country to spend time in public libraries, write, and see the sights. Hell, I'm even camping because I want to see not just one pinprick...I want to see all the stars. Every last one. But the endgame? Reset, reassess, rematch. We'll see where I end up.
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