jumping out of my skin (aka my longest, confused-est blog post ever so get a cup of tea before you start reading)

For the last handful of days, I have been quietly, solitarily feeling like I want to jump out of my own skin.

There have been a couple of triggers. First to the draw: I reached the point in my novella when I knew, from the outset of picking this story back up, that I wanted to start fresh, yet when the time came to do that, I didn’t know what to write. For years, I’ve been writing nonfiction because I felt I just didn’t have fiction in me anymore. I’d had plenty of it as a teenager, when I had a hell of a lot of emotions inside me and found that I could do something productive with them by channeling that intensity of emotion into stories about entirely other things (as I once blogged about here). I’d had a bit of it as a college student, but at that point I began to write fiction with some basis in my real life—using it as a way to process, at age 19, the revelation that I had a condition that would make it hard for me to get pregnant and the grief caused, though well before I actually wanted to become one, by the thought of possibly never being a mother—I, whose nurturing nature the students I led on outdoor trips both in high school and college credited by nicknaming Mom. In my mid-twenties, as though sprinkled with fairy dust, I suddenly found real fiction again. I was driving home one day, I can’t remember now from where but I’d guess from his place—from the house of the guy I’d been in unrequited love with for so long—and I was hit with this thought that it was time to leave him. To just axe him from my life. That he was a drug and I needed to go cold-turkey to un-addict myself. It took me another year or two to do that in real life, but that day, I’d come running up the stairs of the apartment, thrown myself on my bed, and started typing out a fictional attempt. I’d taking that one thought—of just up and leaving—and created a crazy and exhilarating scene around it, of a character just waking up and deciding to leave her life one day without thought or planning. From there the story changed in purpose; it became about the journey, about the act of discovery and the self-discovery it can inspire; it became about figuring out what “home” meant; and what love was. The fact that it started with leaving a guy—whom the main character actually still loved—caused confusion. Some readers saw the story to be about running out on something, someone, and they saw that as weak; I saw the story as about reaching out toward something, about re-animating a stagnant life, which I—great believer in independence and making oneself happy before one can be any good to anyone else—saw as so strong. For years, I puzzled over how to resolve the conflict, until two or so ago I decided to remove the boyfriend altogether, which I started doing—but then I hit a scene that would have to be redone through and through to work without him, and I got stumped, and I felt I had no more fiction in me to replace it with. Thus when I joined my writing class last May, I had zero intention of writing fiction; I firmly believed by then that my only skill lay in writing nonfiction, and that nonfiction was worthy of being read too. But my classmates were all writing novels, and as I listened to them talk about arcs of stories and developing characters and I heard their openness to changing the plot if it would add tension to the story or fill in some gap—I felt inspired. I felt I could learn from them what I needed to find fiction at my fingertips again. So I put my memoir chapters away and pulled out that old beloved work of fiction. I believed I had some wisdom gained since last working on it that would help me bring it to fuller life. I’d now been through something like the character had—the thrill of up and moving somewhere new, the falling in love with the place, the feeling alive because of it—and I could use that to enhance the book. Yet I’d chosen to leave that place to pursue other opportunities, to go to graduate school, to start a new career that I was so excited about—because I believed in that career, I really cared about it, and I felt I could make a real impact on it. That’s, perhaps, the first line of thinking that felled me. I believed that what I was doing meant something to others. I could see that it did. I could see the tangible impact I was making on an organization that was making a tangible impact on its community—on low-income families and children and schools. And that’s where I started to feel torn. Doing this job took so much out of me, took away my time for the things that make an impact on me; but I felt guilty resenting it for that. I have always had a complicated nature—extrovert and introvert, people-lover and solitude-needer. In this job, so demanding of the gregarious and giving side of me, I learned how badly I need the balance of my parts to exist. I learned, too, that despite my ability to bring real skill to the realm of hands-on, direct-service work in education, despite my desire to do so to feel more connected to the end customer—the students, the wonderfully aspirant, phenomenally challenged by life circumstances, but willing to work at it children; despite all that, I am an academic at heart, an intellectual, and I need to work in my brain too—something I don’t get to much at all in this job. And this understanding that the work that satisfies the heart does not satisfy the mind perplexed the hell out of me, and that I think was amplified by another one of the triggers that set in this week: this one’s called pressure: this one is my and my family’s belief that one should do something of value.

When working in textbook publishing, there was one spell when I was putting in longer hours than my usual 9 to 5; I was working into the evening and maybe a little on the weekends. I was in a new job at a top-selling publisher that I discovered, upon getting there, was a huge mess. Twenty percent of the staff—hating the work culture—quit in my first six months. Coming into a workplace where everyone was stressed out and miserable was stressful and miserable for me as well; it made it hard to make friends there or enjoy the work. But despite that, I have always held myself to high standards, so I was taking the time outside of the workday that I felt was required to produce quality work. Until my roommate commented one day that I didn’t work in a hospital; no one was going to die if I wasn’t there at all hours to create the world’s best textbook. And that comment both relieved me of some anxiety and stayed with me. Back then I did regular volunteer work that had great meaning; I was deeply involved and influential in a handful of young people’s lives. Three of them, now in their early twenties, I’m still in touch with; one will be my little brother for life. When I made the switch to working full-time in the realm of serving low-income youth, it was because I believed I had a skill set to make a more systemic impact on their education and opportunities than I was doing individually with a few of my tutees. But having stayed in it for three years despite disliking what I do all day most days (which is go to meetings) and how many frenzied hours a day I do it has been about something else too—it’s also been about feeling validated by doing something of value. I remember what it was like to not feel that way at work (no kid dreams of growing up to be a textbook editor, I used to say), and I don’t want to try that again.

But I worry that there is something else underlying my sense that I can’t walk away from such important, community-altering work. I worry that there is the legacy of a family in which everyone else has done something of great value—at least as measured by their field and, in some cases, as measured by the broader world. To start with, I have a grandfather who just after finishing his PhD, at the ripe young age of 24, designed the detonator of a horrifyingly deadly atomic bomb that did bring an end to a horrible world war and that kicked off nuclear deterrence, to which my grandfather remained committed as a chemistry professor at universities like Brown, Princeton, and Harvard and as science advisor to the president. And if that’s not enough to live up to, my other grandfather generated in his biochemistry lab something called a proteinoid microsphere—a replica of how the first cell on earth formed. In his mind, he solved the origin of life—a field of study that my father, as a physicist, also worked on. Both were also university professors for their entire careers, though primarily (phew) at public state institutions. And let’s not forget about the ladies! One of my grandmothers earned a PhD in chemistry from Harvard (in 1950! Go Grandma!) and was a professor at Trinity College and Wellesley, dedicating her career to getting more women into science. Maybe she came by it honestly: her mother had an MD! (Though she only used it for about two years.) Her father was an organic chemist who published prolific research in German and English, shares a patent on Chlortrimeton (which I loved taking when sick as a child), and helped develop the birth control pill. My other grandmother didn’t work after having children, but she too had a graduate degree—a master’s in pharmacology, which made sense for the daughter of a biochemist who had built not one but two pharmacy empires, first in Russia (where the czar was one of his biggest fans) and then, from scratch after fleeing the Bolsheviks, in Shanghai, where his (now Chinese-owned) pharmaceutical company today has 14 manufacturing plants and was the second-largest in China until bought out by the largest. Yup. And then there’s my mom, who did amble a bit through her career, after not completing her PhD in biology spending ten years being a truly outstanding potter before getting into education reform, a career in which she has excelled as a researcher despite her lack of any appropriate qualifications (PhD or teaching experience) and has become the deputy director of the country’s leading research center on dropout prevention. Mm hm. Thankfully my brother—ever the wonder boy growing up, considered by our teachers a true Renaissance Man and better at absolutely everything academic than anyone else with whom we went to what’s considered the best school in the Southeast, plus a good athlete and painter and pretty decent guitarist—has become a truly awesome dad and is deeply in love with his wife in addition to being a math professor at one of Madrid’s most prestigious universities and who keeps, despite being an outsider (and, according to him, not of the same caliber as a US mathematician), getting government grants for his work because he is considered top-notch in the country he lives in.

Needless to say, despite my being a very strong individualist who has, within her family, always done things her own way, I can still succumb to wondering why I have so little clue about what I should be doing with my life when the rest of the family seems so clear on their paths. (If only I’d been into science!) And I can question my ability to pull off even art—even the totally self-indulgent creative writing I came out here to do.

There’s a pretty easy summation for all this rambling, and that’s that last week I fell deep in a hole called self-doubt. This, I think, is inevitable when you’re going through an early-life crisis, which I feel that I am. So I’m not holding myself at any fault for being deep in it. I am just trying, right now, to acknowledge it. I feel lost. At a loss. Unsure of what should or could come next for me. And desperate to find it.

I was hoping to find my way out of the foggy place I’m in right now through exactly what I’m doing—giving it some time and space to rattle around inside me and then putting it on paper and, in so doing, exhaling it. But the reason that process isn’t working in my fiction right now is that I’m living something similar to what the character’s going through and I’m not finding my way out of it. She radically alters her life to break the bounds—to take control in a way that she was starting to feel she couldn’t—to overcome that sense of being locked in to what you have. I’ve been trying to do that in my real life for three years now and I can’t make it work. I have applied for endless other jobs and not gotten any of them; I have looked for apartments in San Francisco commuting neighborhoods and not found a single one I can afford—first because of my non-profit salary and now, with that having finally gone up, because of the rising prices in this seemingly (and understandably) most desirous of all cities in the US. So I’m jumping out of my skin because I believe I know how to live a life richly and yet I’m failing to be able to do that in the place I really with all my heart want to do it. Which is making me not just jump out of my skin but want to jump ship altogether. But that IS the weak way to go. I don’t want to skip out on anything; I want to do as I did when I left Boston: wrap things up neatly, leave happy, walk toward the next thing strong. That’s why I came to New Mexico for a few weeks, took a leave of absence rather than just up and quitting my job. Yet last week, two weeks into this blessed time off, the prospect of ever going back to the insanity of that job paralyzed me. I don’t want the life I have right now, and I do feel stuck in it. Thankfully I have five more weeks to try to figure out a fix.  

writer's block

This is the exact note that had me pacing around the house yesterday, unable to put any words to the page:

“The writing is wonderful. When you write as well as you do, the issue becomes not the writing and its technical workings but what you choose to write.”

The note was one of many (the closing paragraph of a full page of text) from my writing teacher in response to my third submission—and first of fiction—to her class, and I wasn’t overlooking the rest, I’d just found them simpler to address. She’d written this particular declaration in the context of pushing me to open up my character’s feeling, to share more of her interior self. She’d made the same comment on both my memoir submissions, so I had accepted that I clearly have some walls up that I have to bring down if I have any chance of writing something emotionally compelling to anyone else. Over the past few days, I hadn’t had any trouble peppering my story with emotional descriptions as I’d been asked. But as I reviewed the various notes from classmates and my teacher on the novella pages I’ve been revising this week, I kept getting stuck on the tail end of that note. What you choose to write.

This, I remember, is why I switched to writing nonfiction in the first place. In my view, nonfiction is really about craft. There’s no futzing with the plot—you have to stick to the facts of what’s really happened, or at least what you know of them—so the artfulness lies in the rest, in the shaping of something like a hunk of clay into a vase, or a saucer, or a sculptural work. But maybe switching to nonfiction had been the cheater’s way out. Maybe I’d been in this very spot with this same work of fiction before and ducked out.

The challenge with the story I’m writing is that it’s always been one part fiction, two parts truth. Write what you know is the first rule of writing, and sometimes I’m mystified by how authors write entire books that aren’t about anything from their own life. Maybe it’s because in writer years I’m still relatively young; maybe I don’t have enough wisdom accumulated yet to know how to depict something I haven’t seen or known for myself.  But it is a sense of having gained some wisdom that’s gotten me into this fiction-writing mindset in the first place. In reality, right now I’m hoping to tell the same story in two ways—a novel and a memoir—where the former lets me be playful, pushes my creativity, builds up my art and the latter uses my craft to express who I am myself. Both require wisdom, an understanding of the deeper meanings of things that happen in life. Both require keen attention to the technical refinements of writing. Only the former requires me to choose—from endless possible plots—every inch of what I write.

The trick, for me, in writing autobiographically inspired fiction is which plot to shape. Though I started this particular piece ten or so years ago on the spur of a moment, taking a strongly felt emotion and putting it into a character’s life in one vivid scene and then feeling out where that took me, I picked it up again to rewrite because I felt that over the past decade I’d learned a thing or two and could make the story say more, mean more. What was once an adventure tale could become a work of strength and insight. I’d taken the first step toward choosing something meaningful to write: I’d settled on a point to make.

Except that I’m really still living the thing the story is about. When, a few years ago, I decided to pick this story back up, I thought I could conquer it from a place of clarity because the real-life narrative from which the first scene unfolded had long ago come to an end and, with it, I had come to some clear conclusions about love, life, and self-care. But in deciding to adapt the story to my more recent understandings of the world, I have to bring in new content—those daunting new plot choices—and because right now the content of my personal life is muddled, as I struggle to figure out just what life I want to be living, my insights are changing—or at least fogging up for a bit. That leaves me (about eighty pages in) confused about what I really have to say with this story and at a total loss for how the plot of the story should unfold next. No wonder that the suggestion that my craft doesn’t compare to my art just yet caused me some stress.

Thankfully, having that craft plus this extended period of time to work it into art means I still have a shot at producing something satisfying with this story. And if that’s not what I end up doing, I woke up this morning thinking, so be it; I can always work this struggle into my memoir. :)

this time alone

 

Though I’ve been gone from home for a week now, today was only my second day alone—as loving a good roadtrip runs in the family so my mom came along for the drive to New Mexico and stayed through Thanksgiving. That leaves me with at least a month ahead of time to myself—which is both exhilarating, given how much unwinding and reviving I need to do from my last few months (years?) at work, and a little intimidating. I am, after all, known for my chattiness; am I really going to survive not talking with anyone in person for so long?!

I do have my reasons for submitting myself to this possible torture. First off, my job is incredibly people-intensive, and because I take people-work pretty darn seriously, I put a lot of energy into it, which seems to drain me emotionally and sometimes leaves me not wanting to deal with people after work. Given what a people person I am at heart, I don’t like ever feeling that I don’t want to see people! So I’m hoping that this solitary time will get me feeling good and ready to spend lots of time with people when I get back. In addition, I wanted to spend significant time alone in a new place because the character in the novel/novella I’m working on does that, and I’ve been needing to find new content for some of the early chapters and figured what better way to dig it up than through direct experience?

Thankfully writing and editing can fill a lot of the day. So far, I’ve written blog posts and fiction daily—and today I’ve edited three graduate school personal statements for other people and applied to one dream job for myself. I’ve also read half a novel in the past 24 hours. All that productivity makes me feel ok about not having touched my other project for this time off, which is a memoir that I love the first chapter of but really need to figure out an approach to the rest of. But I’ve decided to be flexible about my writing goals. As long as I get a good amount of fiction-writing done, I’ll be happy. Because in addition to all the pages I’m filling, something else really good is happening, which is that I feel I’m coming back to life.

One of the main reasons I’ve had a love-hate relationship with this job that makes me so proud and so exhausted all at once is that it’s felt impossible to have an emotional life while holding it. Partly that’s because work that revolves around social need is emotional work; even though I don’t serve the youth directly, my staff do, and they bring their stresses and concerns to me to support; plus, trying to strategically tackle some of the major life challenges that so many of our youth face takes some serious compassion and drive. Expending so much emotional energy at work does make me feel a shortage of it in my personal life. More severely, though, I think the lack of an emotional life results from the long, chaotic hours—which leave me with less than enough energized free time with which to be with others. And then there’s the fact that I live 30 miles from most of my friends, and the few who do live nearby also work too much—and they all have husbands, which limits their free time to some extent. Which is all to say that during the week, I often spend my time outside of work alone.

I have never been someone who views being alone as being lonely. But the lack of emotional life has definitely made me know that I value having one. I feel so alive when I have people in my life to pamper. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how I am going to incorporate love into my daily life when I get back. No clear answers yet, but even after one week off I feel capable of it again, and I want it, so I need to work on it. What I probably don’t need to do is continue the pattern of the last two nights—which is watching cheesy romantic movies because in this house I have something that I haven’t had at home since high school—cable! Boy do I not need to get Mark Ruffalo and Justin Timberlake crushes going; not at all. Especially because not that long before I left I may have gotten a real-life crush started, and when you add that to all this time alone after three years of feeling emotionally out of the game, you can picture where this is going: single girl, alone in a house for a month, watching romantic movies every night: she’s going to come back to California believing that true love is right around the corner! And who knows if it will be. But at least I feel energized for it if it does turn up!

(Have I ever used so many exclamation points in a single blog post?!)

extraction

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.” – The Rolling Stones

The first time I tried—in a big-picture-of-life kind of way—I was 15 years old. A few months earlier, my parents had completed a bitter yearlong divorce that brought to an end 22 years of rocky marriage, and I was adjusting to a new lifestyle that began the day my father, driving me home from his apartment across town, told me with a strained voice that I was old enough to choose which parent to live with but there wasn’t really a choice, because he didn’t think my mother would make it if I didn’t live with her. Perhaps 15 years later, as I cried over my frustration with her ever-worsening depression, which I believed started the same year as the divorce (though he tells me it started earlier), he bemoaned his role in creating the burden he felt I’d had to carry all these years, supporting my mother through her long-lasting post-divorce bleakness of heart. Despite participating in a lot during high school—from playing tennis to being an outdoor education leader to editing the school’s literary magazine to becoming student council president my senior year—my teenage years were far from carefree; I grew up quickly due to the heart break of having parents who only communicated with each other through me, and always in angry voices, with no censorship of their feelings toward each other. It felt as though I, too, had experienced a failed marriage—loving these people so dearly, often feeling deeply loved by them, but also resenting the hell out of them for their seeming inability to work it out, or even work on it.

          
In tenth grade, I began to get blinding migraines, not long after I began to fail a class. I had, since my first year at Westminster at age five, only ever gotten As. During high school I would eventually take nine AP classes and ace the rest of them. But AP chemistry—my first introduction to chemistry of any kind, as we were placed in the class based not on previous experience with the subject but on our success in physics the previous year—was not what I had the mental capacity for at that time in my life. I found predicting the color two liquids would turn when mixed together completely irrelevant to anything. When my teacher kindly gave me a C in the class despite multiple failed tests, my unfamiliarity with struggling in school compounded with the hard-to-ignore detail that all four of my grandparents were chemists (three with PhDs in the subject) to make me feel as small as small could be—until my grandmother told me that she’d received her first D her freshman year of college and thought it was wonderful that I was getting the (in her telling of it, inevitable) experience of flailing academically out of the way so early.

Perhaps it was that visit from my grandparents, who sat at the kitchen table perusing my chemistry textbook and assuring me of how much too advanced it was for anyone’s first learning of the subject, that inspired me to hope that I might find a way to exit the intense stress that my life had become. Sometime that winter of my sophomore year, I’d gone to a lightly attended presentation in the school auditorium about a semester-long program for high school juniors on a farm in Maine. The older sister of a friend had just come back from it, and after the presentation she told me about helping the farmers birth calves on a beautiful fall day with crisp air and New England colors all around. She glowed as she described it. I decided that day that the Maine Coast Semester on Chewonki Neck in Wiscasset, Maine, would be just my ticket.

But when I looked at the application, I fretted over the cost—one semester’s tuition there was the same as a full year at Westminster, which my dad sometimes had to borrow money from his father to cover, especially now that my brother was in college. So I didn’t tell my parents about the opportunity, and I would’ve let it go altogether, except my uncle happened to call the night before the application was due, and I happened to mention the opportunity, and he happened to insist that I worry about the cost later, if I got accepted, and that I go ahead now and apply. I remember hanging up the phone in our computer room and immediately starting to type. I don’t remember what the essay question was exactly, but I wrote a response that multiple teachers later told me made them excited to meet me when I arrived. I wrote about the drive into my favorite place on earth—the town in Rhode Island where my grandparents live and where I went every summer—and I captured minute details of scenery, smells and sounds, and emotions that apparently stuck in the teachers’ minds. I don’t remember how long I had to wait to find out if I was accepted, but I do remember how certain my parents were when I told them I got in that the cost would not be a problem. Just imagine how relieved they must have been as parents to be able to give this child a breather; they too felt it would be a well-earned break.

The semester I spent in Maine was affirming, nourishing, invigorating; it was life-altering. I learned skills I never expected to have—from milking cows to birthing lambs to spinning wool to chopping wood to coring trees to identifying the calls and songs of 75 types of birds. I experienced all sorts of newness—like four-foot-deep snow and sub-zero temperatures and layer upon layer of long underwear and the music of thawing snow run-off in the woods in April and the resulting forget-me-nots that covered the hillsides and canoeing from island to island on a five-day trip through Montsweag Bay and doing a solo in the woods and the regret of submerging myself in 45-degree water. I made close new friends—so close that they became committed to eliminating my migraines, and one day three of them did so by sitting on the floor of our cabin and massaging a terrible one right out of my skull while talking to me quietly. As well I bonded with nature in a new way—having always loved all aspects of the geography of the South and the northeastern ocean, now I knew of the sparkling blue diamonds that snow seems to be composed of when moonlight shines across a broad landscape of it; I knew the soft brush of hemlock needles against my skin; I knew of the time of day called the gloaming; and I knew the immense contentment of sitting quietly by a large, still bay—whether with my best friend or just my walk-man and an Indigo Girls tape.

At Chewonki I also fell in love with natural science—determining, after conducting a month-long research project in the woods, that forest ecology and natural history would be my focus in college. This decision, as well as my newfound love of New England in seasons other than just summer, propelled me a year later to apply only to colleges in the Northeast, and only to ones with environmental science programs. So much in my life since has cornered on my choice of a college and a major, but Chewonki altered the course of my life in another way that seems by far the most important.

Coming back from Chewonki was an adjustment, with only one of the friends I’d known since childhood (who attended the program alongside me) having any clue what I’d just been through. I had the summer to get used to the idea of returning to Westminster for my thirteenth year there, and by the fall, I looked forward to doing so—because extracting myself from the totally overwhelming life I was living wasn’t an escape, it was a reboot. I had learned how to reinvigorate myself.

Sometimes it can feel that life controls you, that you are locked into whatever you have. What I learned through the experience of identifying the need to do something new, and then doing it, and gaining from it along the way was that I do have enough control of my life to radically alter it when my body and spirit need to find a new approach to living in order to thrive. I reaffirmed that learning when I quit my job in Boston one random summer day seven years ago and moved to San Francisco with no job, just a whole lot of optimism. And I hope that I am reaffirming it again right now, having driven myself 1,000 miles away from a job that I love and am proud of and believe is unhealthily all-consuming in order to write a work of fiction that is about exactly these ideas of extraction and reinvigoration. But whether or not I succeed at writing this knowledge into a novel, I am so grateful that I have written it into the very veins of my skin.

from wacky to weird (New Mexico Highway 14)

Madrid, New Mexico is a far cry from the European city for which it must have been named. Just a cluster of 20 or so storefronts along Highway 14—better known in these parts as the Turquoise Trail Scenic Byway, which connects Albuquerque and Santa Fe via lush (for this state) wooded hillsides rising and dipping to reveal repeated vistas of mountain range beyond mountain range beyond mountain range—the New Mexican town looks, upon first entry from the south, like the ramshackle remains of lives long ago lived. The houses that precede the “downtown” seem strewn across the hillsides, rusted out cars and trucks and other detritus speckling the slopes around them as I am used to seeing only in the Southeast. The shops look a bit thrown together, built from whatever wood or glass was handy at the time, no architect’s or developer’s input considered. Once inside them, however, I sensed a wacky charm that makes this town a blessed respite from the suburban strip mall zone that Albuquerque seems to be. I found beautiful jewelry and a toked out, California- and Southwest-loving hippie silversmith inside one; in most of the others, identical old lady shop-keeps, with gray hair whisping around lined faces; turquoise dripping from necks, fingers, and wrists; and zany voices singing out to welcome us in. We had our best meal yet in New Mexico at the hippie’s neighbor’s restaurant, which is the first place I’ve found in this state with an ambiance just right for writing, so back I plan to come with my computer. We also enjoyed the company of the Mississippi-born waiter, who was so pleased to find that we’re from the South that he three times sat down beside us just to chat—the end revelation of which is that Madrid, NM is a boring town for a 23-year-old from anywhere to live in, even if he’s an artist and it’s a veritable colony of crazy artist types.

We left Madrid delighted, chipperly suspicious that we had found a place for me to source new characters for my writing and no longer set on making it to Santa Fe but instead eager to get to the next town up the Turquoise Trail—Cerrillos, home of the turquoise mine from which the rings my mother and I both bought in Madrid came. We had gotten the impression, from the repeated references that jewelry sellers in Madrid had made to this town, that Cerrillos too would be thronged with shoppers. But the only signs we saw of life in Cerrillos were parked cars and two horses stabled in the interior courtyard of one Main St. home. We saw no people as we drove from First St. to Second St. to Third St. at the backside of town; we felt spooked by the dirt roads, the falling-down storefronts, the faded signs. Cerrillos is a true ghost town—but with people clearly living it, because there were those parked cars, and there were artistic fences around the houses and a sparklingly new-looking Visitor Center. Why they would live there, in a place with literally nothing going on, we could not guess. But we didn’t stick around to find the quirky appeal this time; we left quickly, unnerved, ready to be anywhere in New Mexico other than this not quite deserted shell of a town.  

a home of one's own

It’s not a big house—the one I arrived at yesterday, where I will stay for the next month and write. It’s not big but it feels plentiful—with options and variety forgotten by this long-time one-bedroom-apartment-dweller. When you come through the front door, you find yourself standing in a large, open-ended living room, with dining room and kitchen spaces at one end. To the left there is a hallway off of which lie two bedrooms and a study, two bathrooms, and a deep open alcove that begs for an armchair and a large desert plant with which to bask under the skylight. There are, in fact, skylights everywhere, giving the home an airy feel; and it turns out that there are also nooks scattered throughout. Off the living room, tucked between the laundry room and kitchen, there is a room just big enough for two chairs and a tv beside a shelf of cookbooks. Behind the back wall of the living room, there proves to be on one side a breakfast nook, drenched in daylight from the pebble-filled back “yard” (hello, arid climate), and on the other an open stairwell, into which light pours from above, beckoning you up the carpeted steps. Here perches the one second-floor room of the house, with white walls and windows on every side, so that I can write in the warm glow of a winter sun and facing clay-tile rooftops, adobe facades, the evergreen branches of pines amidst the increasingly barren boughs of one set of deciduous trees side by side with the lush, yellow-leaved tops of others—and above and beyond all this stretches the broad, undulating rock wall that is Sandia Crest.

I came to Albuquerque to work on my writing, to create a space and time outside of my daily life in which to focus deeply on my creativity. Less than 24 hours into my stay, I can already see that I’m going to also be treated to something else soul-essential while I’m here. I’m going to remember what it is like to live in a house, with hallways and outdoor spaces and options for my habitation of it. This room I will use for writing—and maybe morning stretches in the sun. In the living room I will nestle into the comfy couch or armchairs and read books and New Yorkers, catch up on tv, perhaps write as well. If I yearn for more sun during those activities, I will sit in the breakfast nook, by the large sliding glass doors that let in so much light. I might write in the study at the front of the house, maybe even atop the guest room sofa. If I yearn for more comfort, I will go to my bedroom, with its downy-soft bed—and which has a hallway inside it! When I want to feel a sense of movement I will walk up and down the two hallways. It’s a silly thing to have missed immensely but I’ve been craving a hallway for six years now—the whole time I’ve been living alone. It’s probably the same craving that made me antsy to drive here—to just get in the car and go. It’s a little do to with momentum, a little to do with transition, a little to do with having options. It’s a lot to do with a sense of freedom—with having enough space to be all parts of me.