That’s the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it’s so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.
Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a “good-bye” or “thank-you,” cashiers are apt to say, “Have a blessed day.” This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne. “Get it off me!” I always want to scream. “Quick, before I start wearing ties with short-sleeved shirts!
After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading,” I often say to Hugh. “I promise that on the next page you’ll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that.
I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.
I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant it’s probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it’s the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick.
When visitors leave, I feel like an actor watching the audience file out of the theater, and it was no different with my sisters. The show over, Hugh and I returned to lesser versions of ourselves. We’re not a horrible couple, but we have our share of fights, the type that can start with a misplaced sock and suddenly be about everything. “I haven’t liked you since 2002,” he hissed during a recent argument over which airport security line was moving the fastest.
I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on.
I’m not a misogynist. I’m a misanthrope. I hate everyone equally.
Real trouble doesn’t walk around with a ponytail. It doesn’t have a Mohawk or special shoelace patterns. Real trouble has a bad complexion and a Windbreaker.
I think about death all the time, but only in a romantic, self-serving way, beginning, most often, with my tragic illness and ending with my funeral. I see my brother squatting beside my grave, so racked by guilt that he’s unable to stand. “If only I’d paid him back that twenty-five thousand dollars I borrowed,” he says. I see Hugh, drying his eyes on the sleeve of his suit jacket, then crying even harder when he remembers I bought it for him.
At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe?
The nice thing about crowds is that someone can throw a bottle and you don’t take it personally.
Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change goals.
It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it. I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but “Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!
I am optimistic that things will fall into place, and one day I’ll be sitting in New York City with correct bus fare in my pocket.
In imagining myself as modest, mysterious, and fiercely intelligent, I’m forced to realize that, in real life, I am none of these qualities. Nobody dreams of the things he already has.
You’re not supposed to talk about your good deeds, I know. It effectively negates them and in the process makes people hate you.
Honestly, though, does choice even come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright?
Use the word “y’all,” and before you knew it, you’d find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat. Along with grits and hush puppies, the abbreviated form of you all was a dangerous step on an insidious path leading straight to the doors of the Baptist church.
Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they?