Second Thoughts

I am standing at a number of edges--17 years of schooling, 20-some-odd years of childhood (when, exactly, does childhood end?), and I am trying to see them as beginnings. I suppose that you are required to leap when you reach the edge of something, but that seems like a cliche, like something out of Grand Canyon or a self-help guide to living a more exciting life with abandon. A beginning isn't always a glamorous leap into the void, though what lies ahead for me is completely unclear and feels shrouded. I prefer to avoid the metaphors and go with Emily Dickinson: "I dwell in possibility."

I've always been a person who tends to burn bridges, and I couldn't say why. Once again I find myself lacking any bit of sentimentality for what I'm leaving, and something of a reserved hopefulness for what comes ahead. I never understand it when people cling to the past, though it's interesting that most of the fiction I write tries to rewrite my own past with characters who are smarter and have the insight that I have now. They live easily the life I wish I had: more poetically, more insightfully, and, cliches be damned, with more abandon. Metaphors and resonant images come out of the woodwork. The world has a careful architect who places things just so, who clips down conversation to a bare-bones poetic minimum. I've always read fiction with some vicarious intent, I think.

How I translate those characters' qualities into my own future is what I'm most interested to see. My imagination paints the next year in New York as a world in which I can live and act like them. My desire to let loose and live a little more recklessly speaks to the tendency I am having to reinhabit some childlike (or perhaps childish) past that I never had.

In the meantime, I've got to decide which artifacts from my growing up to keep, and which to pitch. I've also been amused that I'm now giving many of the clothes I've worn for the last 6 years back to Goodwill, where I bought them.

We leave Wednesday.