Nearly a year has passed since I've moved back to NYC full time after years in our long-distance relationship, cheating on it constantly with the moist welcome of London, and occasional romps with the dark nights of Rome. Then there is perfect couture of Paris, of course, but we don't speak of those things. At least we don't commit them to paper.
So, I have to decide again. Should I stay or should I go?
I have fantasies. In one of them, I'm living in a cottage somewhere. A thatched roof is involved, something from "A Quiet Man," sans the wife-beating John Wayne, who I would have knifed then used same to eat my supper. In my close-up, there are many suspensions of disbelief. There is no mention of how I make a living, for starters. Or how I've managed to start an organic garden when I've killed every plant I've ever had but a cactus that thrives on neglect. My cottage is all about absence. Absence of appointment reminders, the need to find my glasses, and tourists blocking the door of the train. I'm wearing white, and it's slimming.
I find my cottage fantasy best in small doses, as reality seeps in quickly on this one, seeing as I had a brief stint in a hellish bucolic atmosphere in a past life in a New England town called West Springfield, which had no adjacent North, South or East, nor even an over-arching Springfield. Those hamlets, apparently, had been abandoned for towns with roads. I made it until mud season when I stepped into the driveway and my leg sank a foot into the ground, taking my Joan and David kidskin flat with it. I removed the other, stuck it in the hole, showered, and drove away, not stopping until I got to a town with street lights and a Gap.
Disappearing, in truth, is the narrative thread of all my fantasies and has been one of the high points of my nomadic life. I love the blank slate of what's next, the potential before it's been dulled by habit, numbing routines and the mental exhaustion of ducking other's expectations for my life.
This co-exists with a rabid hatred of moving companies, a distrust of realtors and their over-scented bodies, and anxiety about approval processes that morphs at warp speed into rage as someone decides whether or not to allow me to be gouged for 600 square feet living under a flamenco dancer.
But, for now, it's all good. There's still time to imagine a life of Zen nothingness. Of changing without change. I think I will wear white.
