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Location: Home.
Concern: My eyesight.
Listening: "Dirty Epic" ~ Underworld.

Just spoke with the crew up in Los Angeles and am considering rearranging my plans for the evening, as they're apparently steeped in D&D. While I don't mind sitting in a corner with my laptop and writing--sometimes I actually prefer to play the observer--I was more in the mood to grab a few rolls of film and try my hand at some candid shots, and a gaming session might not be the best place for this. However, I've just recalled that my camera is up there as well as my laptop, so odds are I'll be at Williams' door at some point tonight.

The sudden desire to fiddle with my Pentax was engendered while I was going back through Peter's homepage this afternoon, admiring the usual shots. I started to wonder what I could manage to grab of the world and hold still for myself and my curiosity was off and running.

Anais Nin might have had a different view on this sudden determination to work with my camera. In a lengthy quote I transcribed in a journal that I suddenly can't find, she told Henry Miller that her analyst had theorized that she filled the spaces in her life through constant reinvention of self. Something along the lines of: "When my father failed me, I became the caretaker--when Henry left me, I became the writer--without Rank, I become the analyst...". I read this first in my sophomore year of college and found it such a disturbingly perfect description of my own reactions to interactions postponed or severed that I made it one of the two quotes that typically begin my bound journals (the other is from "Virginia Woolf", Indigo Girls: We're all the same: the men of anger and the women of the page.). When Austin and I split, I became the studious hedonist (unconsciously fulfilling the prophecy he had set forth and I had rebelled against: When you grow up, you're going to be just like me.). When I left Fred, I plunged into my creative work and sat up for nights on end, producing reams of poetry for my advanced workshop. When I left Phil, I nurtured a passion for automotives as well as a reluctance to hold my tongue when I knew I should. When Bret and I split, I became the debater. Logic was my haven whereas before, I delighted in deliberately defying it to prove human reason completely untrustworthy. I left Roby and read voraciously, absorbing every trivial fact and well-turned phrase I could get my eyes on for possible use at a later date. And now, with Peter in Pennsylvania and faced with a relatively empty house for another ten days, I feel driven to pick up my camera and fill at the very least the physical spaces of the photographer and the ubiquitous clicks of the shutter.

But here I am still, smoking half-cigarettes from the ashtray and watching the sun fall, caught somehow between our apartment building and the pink Spanish-style across Esperanza. At 7:45, the reflection bursts, orange and excruciatingly bright, against our windows. It reminds me of how weak my vision has seemed lately and, because this frightens me, I light up again and try to think of something else--like how this trip has functioned in the context of my perceptions of self.

After leaving Roby, but before meeting Peter, I lived here at 1260 with Lucifer and Baghera and a laptop. I was virtually alone in my own space for a longer span than I had ever been before, and I was surprised to realize that I actually enjoyed it. I had always thought of myself as an emotionally solitary but socially tribal creature--while I have always had few truly close friends, one could usually find me in the kitchen at Imperial, cooking spaghetti dinner for the house, or watching Space Ghost Coast-To-Coast with the raver-boys on Orchard. I thrive on connections, no matter how superficial, because they feed my seemingly boundless curiosity about people. Granted, nine times out of ten, these very connections reinforce my conclusion that I just don't really like people, but they're absolutely necessary nonetheless. However, the time I spent alone from May to mid-December gave me a chance to do a great deal of mental and spiritual housecleaning and I actually believe that those six and a half months were the most beneficial of my life. I spent a lot of time getting to know myself, unravelling the tighter knots of my psyche, and determining which influences in my life were beneficial and which were destructive--and taking action on those determinations. I didn't become involved with anyone until late October and then only casually, deliberately holding my newfound tranquility away from those interactions to preserve it. Thus, when I met Peter, I was more completely at peace than at any other time in my adult life--a fact that I think has made all the difference in how he and I related. I didn't need anything when I met Peter. I wasn't looking for anything or anyone in particular. I was willing to accept anything he brought to my table purely for what it was and not for what I wished it would be one day--and I can't really speak for him, but I think that's what both of us needed, finally, after everything that had come before.

When I first learned about this trip, I was apprehensive at the notion of the first time that we had really spent apart since Christmas being for three and a half weeks. I was simultaneously anxious for Peter to spend time with his family (a feeling that intensified when his mother was diagnosed)and disturbed at the idea of the separation. I rebelled against this disturbance because I thought it indicated some form of weakness on my part--a dependence that had sprung up when I wasn't paying attention, and which would eventually lead me into the ways of the co-dependent. I suspected something of betraying me internally, of stripping me of some portion of my much-vaunted independence, and I started howling liked I used to when thirteen-year old boys told me I couldn't play touch football. I finally drove myself into this remarkable little frenzy that had reached critical mass by the night before Peter left. And then...and then, I quieted. I stepped back and dared to be still for just a few minutes and realized that nothing fell apart internally or externally if I admitted that I would miss him.

My God. It's full of stars.

While he's been gone, I've ventured up into Los Angeles every night in search of the "other life" that I've written about--and I found it precisely where I left it, carrying on very well without me, thank you. The circles I used to move in have been supplemented with new faces, younger faces, some of whom also went to my college and to some of whom, I realized after a few conversations, I am something of a minor myth. DeWit (who graduated in 2000) and I have sat for hours in his room, sharing stories, piecing together a genealogy of the Southern Cal "counterculture"--a chronology of freaks and shady escapades that always ended up linking because someone visited the campus on the weekend of that legendary party at Colonial or someone lived in the honors dorm where there had been a scandal during my year or someone had seen a tag on a callbox and recognized it years later on a stray notebook. The strands of circumstance, tying together another "family" of sorts. He told me about the last days of the artists' community I lived in; I told him about the prostitution ring someone ran out of the dorm he later lived in. His parties were billed to me (a not-so-recent graduate at the time) as the ultimate in excess. I was the girl who seemed to know everybody and then disappeared.

Right where I left it. These past two weeks have been satisfying on a number of levels. I've reconnected with my friends. I've been fawned over at LARP's as the prodigal daughter, informed of my notoriety by the following generation of "eccentric" 'SC prodigies, bombarded with offers of dinner and drinks and nights spent just hanging out and catching up...and yet, I usually end the evenings wishing myself curled in bed with Peter reading by low light next to me. I now know that I can slip back into the current any time I want to--and I know that I just don't want to.