Riverine (23 page)

I read most of Jory’s posts, not necessarily because I was interested in or envious of her unfettered pursuit of what I would call leisure activities, but because I was fascinated by the end goal: a core knowledge about herself that undoubtedly awaited her at day 365 like a wrapped gift. Santa presenting Jory with her true self by firelight. I was fascinated by the very concept of her journey toward that true spirit, as if it were something that could simply be revealed or discovered or unearthed, if only one knew its whereabouts and proximity to the body. “I know that everything I write is a documented intention to manifest a result somewhere in my life … either now or down the road,” she writes. “There are no wrong paths,” she writes, attributing the sentiment to Oprah.
But aren’t there?
I wondered.

I read Jory’s posts and wondered how she would measure her success. On one hand, I wished I possessed her certainty that each day’s experience, and by extension its write-up on her blog, was leading to a positive, conclusive, tangible end. That there was somehow sense to be made from experience, or the accumulation of choices and circumstances. But what I noticed most often about Jory’s posts was that they were iterations of the same thematic point: she was on a quest for missing pieces; she was clearing the fog; she was staring into a mirror waiting for her own image to speak or blink or sing; she was opening the hatch and letting all the world in for as long as there were pieces of herself left to gather. There was no mistaking that she did not perceive herself as
whole
. And the missing pieces—well, they could have been anywhere. Pieces of this whole self could even be other selves. They could be Earl Grey tea or headstands or sleeping until noon. They could be scattered along the Appalachian Trail, or they could be sitting on her nightstand all this time in the form of the one book that had gone unread all these years, or they could be in the bottle of pills that she saved for emergencies only.

Jory seemed to know for sure that a person ought to be whole. A person ought to be somehow circular and transparent and known, and the individual, as the maintainer of the person’s whole self, is simply tasked with finding what is missing. She’s charged with putting the sphere back together and keeping all the curved glass parts clear of debris. When this is achieved, the moment when all the dust is wiped clean before new dust can settle on any of the round, puzzled-together pieces, then and only then is the self made whole. Somewhere a bell rings and someone snaps a picture—#selfie #me, finally #whole.

By the conclusion of her yearlong journey, if she were to leave a trail of bread crumbs that marked her daily path, I would expect Jory’s search for self in all directions to have taken on a likeness to a Jackson Pollock painting—all lines and motion, but little sense. What would Jory see in a Pollockesque visual representation of her year? Would a pattern or answer emerge? Would she see chaos? Would she feel like a different person? Failing at a palpable takeaway, would she accept instead something beautiful created in the wake of her disciplined pursuit?

Rachel Kushner poses a similar notion in her novel
The Flamethrowers
. Reno, the book’s protagonist, endeavors to achieve artistic success by photographing the patterns created by tracks she makes racing her motorbike. This allows her to combine two things she loves—velocity and motorbikes. By taking a good look at these markings from the top-down view of a camera’s lens, she assumes they will somehow make an unintended sense. They will transform Reno’s physical experience of racing across the desert into art, thus memorializing and intellectualizing the individual tracks themselves. She will take the sum of the tracks’ parts and project meaning onto the experience as a whole. Like Reno’s photographs, Jory’s blogging journey—a daily foray into the physical and digital worlds in search of parts of herself, the shedding of the job, the act of looking for the “self” regardless of what is actually found, of pinning down the day’s most important themes through the titles of her blog posts—will become a collective personal truth that stands apart from the intention and the individual “tracks” that sweep across the desert sand of that year of life. A new idea, the year’s summary, a result of the exploration of the self, will be retroactively applied to Jory’s experience. She will likely intuit and internalize wisdom—making sense of the things that happened during the course of that year after they’ve occurred.

In her posts, Jory refers to her blog as a trial run for more serious writing—not an uncommon goal for bloggers and diarists. What if Jory writes a book about her experience that then pushes outward into a readership, creating its own ripple effect that is then entirely separate from the writer? To write the book, Jory will have to further assess and consider her experience. New thoughts will mix with old, while time passes on the clock that measures the distance between the experience itself and the ever-changing memory of the experience. Decorative language will be added to make the account of the experience richer and more interesting and more meaningful. Lines will be drawn in the sand. Pictures will be taken from above. Look, here is what happened. Here’s who I am. Sort of.

III

I suppose I could have said that I was between jobs, or that I was changing careers. That I’d been distracted by the curious landscape of southern Quebec—the odd roadside businesses barely hanging on, situated between sad-looking homes whose architecture couldn’t be associated with any decade’s style that I knew. That something was about to happen, though I couldn’t say what. I could have said that I was temporarily unemployed, unsure of what I’d hoped to find waiting for me in Vermont. Unsure, too, of whether I was the same as I was before I’d moved, or changed. Whether a new place could actually open the door to a new me. I wanted to be changed. I wanted to be whole. I wanted to think that a simple change of place had that power, or that the work I’d begun to put into writing, having found myself friendless in my new state and inspired by the topography and the very idea of the opportunity to reinvent myself, was leading me to my true self. (
Are you a vegetarian?
people asked me in Vermont.
Are you a locavore or a vegan or a pescatarian?
they asked.
Perhaps
, I thought in reply. Perhaps I would be one of those things here. I could, after all, be anything here. Say it and it became true. A new place certainly presented that opportunity. It’s the classic reason for moving to New York: to be someone. And sometimes, to be someone
else
, place equated to anonymity.) In Vermont I had tried many things besides writing (not shaving my armpits for three months, foraging for mushrooms and ramps, yoga on a paddleboard, indoor surfing class, acting as if I liked other people’s dogs, sewing, cross-country skiing, a planter garden on my balcony, relearning French, life drawing and drinking classes—at the same time), and only the writing had stuck. I had told Mike that we needed to get away, though we had only recently arrived in our new state, and now I was coming back from Montreal empty-handed.

I could have said that a melon color had been wrenched loose in my life by writer Maggie Nelson’s fascination with blue. That I had to have it, the way Nelson had to have blue pieces of glass, which somehow made sense in her life where she could not. Melon-colored Eames chairs, melon-tinted lipstick, a ream of melon and cream damask fabric that never got used for anything, salmon nigiri. That melon did not often occur in nature, at least not in the lush green of Vermont’s Champlain Valley, where I now lived, was a fact I lamented. I found myself quickly disappointed. Barely charmed by tiger lilies. Appalled at cantaloupe’s watered-down orangey color. I could have said that in Montreal, a man stood next to me at the corner of Rue Saint Laurent and Saint Paul, smoking, his cigarette clinging at an angle such as I had never seen before to lips such as I had never seen before. And that it changed me, and that his mouth was the embodiment of melon. They were the same. That it was my job to explain how this could be so. Pam Houston, another writer, calls these “glimmers.” I don’t like the word, because it sounds too sweet in my foul mouth, but I know what she is saying. She’s talking about those moments and images that strike you midsternum. All of life’s messiness and mystery somehow looking back at you in them, with answers toward which language only groped. It was the part of life—experience—that prompted us to do our darnedest with words. The things worth writing about. I had seen these all my life, but I hadn’t made sense of them until I came to Vermont. In Vermont, I wrote. I looked. I listened. I questioned. I formulated tentative answers. I settled into words, and like an old favorite chair’s, their comfort was familiar.

I rode in the passenger seat of our rented car as we neared customs. As our turn for readmittance into the United States approached, Mike muttered, “You can’t wear sunglasses through customs. What are you thinking?”

He is a pro at travel, packs his suitcase expertly in the dark to catch 5:00 a.m. flights for work, breezes through airport security without a snag. He has systems of efficiency, not unlike
The Accidental Tourist
’s Macon Leary. And Mike has no patience for those less practiced, those who can’t keep up, can’t fold a pair of pants into a pocket-sized, wrinkle-free contraption, can’t pass through customs unmolested.

I, on the other hand, was never quite apace with nuances such as these. I generally couldn’t find my passport, never made it through security without being pulled aside for extra screening processes. I have a permanently guilty-looking face. As we were green-lighted for the customs station, I quickly removed the sunglasses.

The customs officer, layered in bulletproof and polyester garments, leaned in, squared her jaw, and set about questioning us. What were we doing in Canada? What did we do for work?

My husband is an airline pilot, so his response was simple and straightforward. Plus, he did this all the time. Being the less-traveled of the two of us, I faltered in the face of such inquisition.

“And you? What do you do for work?” the customs officer asked, looking at me.

I squinted, barely able to make her out as anything more than an outline of black against the summer sun.

I could have said that once, during a Get Out the Vote campaign, I’d sat on a man’s couch, a terribly dirty couch in a nameless trailer park, and helped him spell his own name as he registered to vote for the first time. I was rattled, realizing then that people who could not read existed down the road from where I’d grown up. That when he insisted he write his own name with my help, rather than signing
X
, which would have been perfectly legal, his five-year-old daughter who was still in a diaper and could barely talk came to sit on my lap, and I thought for the first time that I might one day like to be a mother. And that later, it worried me that it was not my own mother’s love that prompted this thought. And worse, that I recognized, for the first time and far too late, my penchant for falling in love with strangers would be a problem. Had been a problem. That somehow I felt safer and happier and more alive with them than with people who were familiar to me. And what was that about?

I could have said that once I’d watched a half gallon of milk go bad as proof that time is change, that one thing can become another. As proof that cheese is a sublime marriage of art and nature.

I leveled my smile, hardened my eyes. I matched my face to the customs agent’s, something I’d learned that humans do to indicate trust. The long answer, the storied answer, compressed and collapsed in a blink, and I uttered rather unconfidently, “I’m a writer.” It came out sounding like a question rather than a statement.
I’m a writer
. The reply echoed in my mind. Was that what I did for a living? Well. It was a living in that I was living it. Not that I was paid, per se, not yet, but that I supposed that it was time I called myself a writer. Publicly.

The officer looked almost amused. Almost. She definitely did not believe me. Worse, I did not believe myself.

No grandmas, no vaginas, no mirrors, no accounts of postgrad summers spent traipsing through Europe, no writing about writers. These are the lessons I’ve picked up from other writers about what not to do as a writer. Among the not-to-dos, or the cautiously-to-dos, is the timing of proclaiming that necessary statement, “I am a writer.” I was struggling to own it, what with most of my friends having ignored the release of my little publications, small as they were, and my efforts at starting the first draft of a novel. Jen and Rachel, my best friends from Indianapolis, were my cheerleaders, along with Mike. But defining terms of the “writer” label was a gray area. Profession, hobby, love affair, compulsion, calling. Whatever “it” is was in question for a lot of people—namely, those without book credits and degrees behind their names, and that included me. But writers are writers before they publish books. Beginnings are locatable. They must exist somewhere.

My own beginning as a writer was in books I read and in journal pages I penned, in terrible poems and desperate letters. It was in the unrest I felt about Corey, whom I kept coming back to, writing and rewriting. It was in the river back home, in the fields. In all that had happened there, which had followed me to Vermont and flowed out of my fingers onto a computer screen. Moving to Vermont was turning out to be more of a link to the past than an escape from it. This melon syndrome, my wild crush on the mundane and the emptied out, the thrill of vaguely intimate encounters with strangers and vaguely intimate encounters with abandoned structures. I had to admit these into my persona, give them a name. Give them room to breathe. Nurture them. Write it all out in a way that meant something and held weight in the world. In a way that became more than a collection of images, more than a cross section of place and time and people.

All the answers I could have given the customs officer meant the same thing. And I hadn’t realized it until now. Writing had become more than a hobby, more than a desire. Writing, as a creative practice and an earnest attempt at art, had become greater than the fear of failing at it.