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02.28.04 - 7:09 p.m.
"the black creative intellectual must get busy where [she] is.....if...she wants to be famous and celebrated, she has landed in the wrong orchestra pit." - h.j. spillers
goin' back
447.5 miles. 10 hrs. 2 days. safe.
exhausted.disoriented, but glad. i did it. i rented a car, and drove on my first solo road-trip to attend a symposium at what could be called my 'mothersoul' (bad latin translation for where i spent 4 of the hardest years of my life). i haven't been back there since 2000. and, i just couldn't get over how much i'd trained myself to believe i no longer needed to visit, that i no longer had to return to this place to renew my fascination that somehow i survived what a famed alum once called a side of paradise. i never doubted it was paradise, then. my gawd, i hardly ever went home when school was in session mostly because i had nicer housing arrangements there than i had growing up; not to mention some degree of freedom from guilt. or at least it wasn't in my face, in the face of my mother nagging me about how fallen and wicked i'd become. it was there that i first put on makeup, drank alcohol, tried cigarettes, wore intricate braids, showed cleavage, dated, had sex, everything that symbolizes transition into indepedent adulthood. on the drive there i passed a branch of a local bank where i'd opened my first bank account 13 years ago. i can't recount the terror and anxiety of those four years in this one entry (already documented in at least 10 handwritten journals from that time). the gratitude for the privilege to be there, the certainty that i'd fail out any day. what came back full force was the awe of the sheer WEALTH of its surroundings. intimidated is not the word to describe my encounters with the tidal wave of knowledge about how the other half lived. a member of that half, my first roommate, hailed from switzerland, was the daughter of an 1960s alum, called her daddy up for a car and a computer within the first week of being there (she needed them, she complained because everyone else had one). i wasn't one of everyone else, and in fact wrote most of my papers in campus computer lab until well into my junior year. the neighborhood stores aligning northern campus include talbots,j.crew, laura ashley mother and child, and the highest grossing ann taylor branch in the northeast. so i remember then as a time of looking but being unable to touch. wanting, but knowing i wasn't allowed. and this time, i could walk by those stores and not feel in the least less than. at times i found myself laughing at the realization that i didn't need them. i didn't need to buy anything in there to prove my acceptableness or desirability to be on the campus. and even my token gesture of trying to fit in, by choosing to suck up extra money to renting a room at the n____ inn where all the moneyed students would have their parents stay whenever they came to visit - well even that wasn't much of the thrill that i thought it would be. all the above is reportage - i haven't gotten to how i felt - for one thing, i walked around kind of dazed trying to remember the stores that "used to be there"... or even coffee shops (small world) and other novelties that had just opened up a decade ago. [would like to report i had my first caffe latte and initiation to expresso drinks there]. and i must have told at least 5 people behind various store counters that 'when i was a student'.... yes, the students all looked so young, and i know i can't possibly go back to that time. i wouldn't want to. i did feel sadness because i wish i could have been the reassuring angel that i sorely needed back then, to give me a hug in my loneliness and tell me that i didn't need to waste so much stupid energy into organizations (bickering, rushes, and other types of superficial mass movements that i didn't have the strength not to resist participating in. although i had the disgust later to drop out). i could have been me. and i could have gotten to know me better then. or stayed busy being the me i would become...the intellectual, thinking, speaking, critical inquiry me who has, at times such a marvelous take on the world. i held so much anger towards myself then, so much dissatisfaction...and worst of all so much self-sabotage. binging, purging, exercising, laxatives, hiding, trying to catch up. burn out. when i went back this time i wasn't holding that part of me foremost in my mind...like i didn't go through the ritual (which i did once) of walking past so many of the bathrooms at the residential colleges that i purged in...or the places where i bought food at the oddest hours....or even the student health center where i spent nights at the infirmary - the first flirtation with danger 10 advil. the second, 12 nytol. and that was just in my first semester :-( i didn't feel the need to - and that wasn't an act of denial on my part that those events ever happened. i'm not over it; but, hell i'm not in it more than relief, i feel freedom in the space of such less troubled possibility....and rather than walking around that campus, so distressed at my potential to fuck everything up and lose it all, i honestly felt and understood that what I want is MINE for the taking, whenever i am ready... that i'm ENTITLED to WHATEVER THE FUCK i WANT there! this time memories returned, not in a haunting fashion (as in living through the shit again) but in flashback fashions - a jolt in a blink - [HOT DAMN! i just remembered that i walked through all three floors of the library without going to the bathroom, or rather, remembering that (As a central location) i purged in those bathrooms like an obligatory drive by] and so, when one goes back without purging on the mind, what does one do? my mind was so clear. not sad. i felt young, not old. young, as in on the brink of the start of a new career (whenever the hell i finish this damn dissertation)...but not old, in regret, at the end of a wasted time/life. in my current life i miss those deep deep deep friendships that sustained me back then. and it was odd, visiting and not having fiona,anita, rachel, aimee, heather, tara, becca, anna, kara, karen, lily, chanin, courtney, jessica, isabelle, ivan, doug, todd, so many many people whose love felt so thick...the best example i can use is the dry erase message board that used to hang outside my dormroom door. and how very happy it made me to come home, and see a 'hello message' from a friend who'd dropped by to visit on their way to class. god, visible love. why wasn't that love enough to eliminate the friggin waste of time that food and body image sucked out of my life. and now that i'm here, and have beaten that beast away to a safe distance...now that i have time for the love, why isn't it here. can that p'love last me a life time? or at least for now...in a place where the snow still hasn't thawed, where i'm feeling so disconnected because only jrf knows any of the goings on in my life (thank goodness i have someone to call when i arrived and when i returned to say i made it!). but, she doesn't know even know the majority of the mess. my time away showed me that bare naked gritty survival (hah, i even walked by a restaurant where i purposely bounced a check, because i was so desperate for food and without money one december)is no longer my modus operandi. make no mistake, i'm still clawing to survive, the fight has taken on a different timbre. hard to explain, but i know i've changed. so, when and how can i get busy, since iknow that i can?
MUSIC: nina simone
READING: "raising the dead" by s.p. holland
FEELING:anew
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