---

[2006-03-27 - 1:15 p.m.] - the giant world is coming



Last January, five-year-old Aisling set her baby hand on my thigh and said, "The Giant World is coming. It's not here yet."

At that point I was hardly leaving Devon's apartment at all-- just lying spread out over her quilt, drinking her coffee, talking shop and playing SIMs, girding myself with optimism.

I'd made a decision on New Year's Eve that I was going to start to take chances, make mistakes, unwind and really participate in my life, do things right and not meet all my days, projects, relationships and sleep in the spirit of emergency maintenance. A decision to burn the triage, in short, inspired by that afore-mentioned but not very aptly-named Everything Going To Hell-- exhaustion from school, grief for my father, frustration in several of my relationships, inability to focus on projects. Not Everything Going To Hell by a long shot, but general disorderliness and panic.

I thought, then, that that would be the first thing to mention whenever I got around to explaining what was going on, the changes, the attempt to deconstruct idealism and perfectionism and to flesh out into substance, however flawed, out loud, however noisy.

The giant world is coming.


*


So now I'm 25.

Me and a fella jumped in my car and drove around all my old haunts this week. We went to my parents' house; to White's old house and past Chad's dad's house; to my father's old office building with the warehouse next door, where me and the cousins used to play with wooden planks and pieces of sheet metal and make up stories and watch Charles in Charge; to the Lion's Club Park, where as a little girl I practiced pretend katas with bamboo swords, where as a high-school kid I waded across the creek, holding up my pant legs and frowning contemplatively into the water, where my Uncle Kent and his wife were married, where Devon lost her fish; to the Jiffy for ice cream; past my old high school; to my Aunt Debbie's house and its big hill where I spent most of time as a kid, playing on the railroad track or else listening to the daily devotionals; up and down Highway 11, into Knoxville; long wet roads flanked by foothills; even down lazy Middlebrook Pike and into the Old City that held all my hope when I was seventeen, bumping over the burnt red cobblestones at the intersection of North Central and West Jackson; across the renovated Gay Street bridge and then back across the Henley Street Bridge; down Cumberland Avenue beside the Unitarian Universalist church, the Heska Amuna synagogue, the Church of Jesus Christ Scientist, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Temple Beth El, the Nicholas; down to McKay's Used Books and back; alongside the glittering brown Tennessee River on Neyland Drive; beneath the Sunsphere. The soundtrack was old mixed CDs and bluegrass. It was like following old breadcrumbs of wistfulness.

For these past two years I have felt like something left too long on a windowsill, a bowl of milk at one point perfect but now soured. Ruined.

But driving all these old roads I realized that really nothing has changed. All these places and the years amidst form a long unbroken line of longing; devastated, sick with hope; photographs of water, avenues, comrades, car windows, leaves of kudzu.

I realized that I've been slowly deconstructed these past few years-- in the sense of what I am and what I can do, what I probably will do-- a crisis of everything, as Mel would say, although maybe I said that first, I can never keep up-- but that the heart of what I want is the same. I had thought that that old familiar restlessness was done for, chipped away at by failures and tiredness; but as it turns out I only left it behind, as a placeholder, smeared all over the highway, mailed to friends, tucked away in the Waffle House, Toronto, Lenoir City, South Carolina, etc.

Five years ago, when I was twenty and Joshua Chasez was twenty-five, I promised myself that I would be everything I was going to be by the time I turned twenty-five, solid and realized, just like he was-- with his faggy pants, long curled hair, unshaven face, full into his art, finally indulging in a complete idea of himself.

And here I am, having turned twenty-five on Tuesday, almost graduated, with enough resources to do most of what I want, a posse of brilliant gorgeous associates, six house plants and a DVD burner.

Solid and realized: still crazy after all these years, still waiting on the roadside. Nothing is gone.


*


dude, a brief break-down of events:

1. I went to Italy. Sal, my Italian professor, told me I should go and then helped me get the money together. Details are forthcoming-- not in the way I usually mean, ie, they are not actually forthcoming, but in a real way, since I got an $800 grant to put together a travel narrative about it all. In summary, the month I spent traveling around the peninsula was an incredible learning experience, but I squandered much of my time on loneliness, actual physical sickness and confused impulses. As 'Doqz says, it's not where you go, but who you're with. Next time, it'll be unimaginably perfect. What with the hills and streets and wine and you guys all being there.

Any hills and any streets, wine or coffee or bottled water or whatever, and you guys being there.

2. I launched into my last year of University study. Half-assed efforts to succeed have reached new levels. There's a weird mix of resentment, indifference, gratitude, regret and anxiety. More on that later, probably, as the end encroaches, finally, oh my god, finally.

3. re: September's end, which has haunted this journal for half a year, there were exciting developments in the area of apostasy.

Having left Christianity behind at the ripe sagacious age of eleven, and having since dabbled in paganism, Kabbalah, animism and humanism, I have regardless maintained a fairly consistent idea of God and of my access to God these many years.

At the end of September, however, many setbacks, all piled up over months previous, culminated in the realization that maybe I don't know everything and I am not on a path, and my abiding confidence in my access to God is, in fact, foolishness, delusion, hubris.

I confronted God directly that evening, which I hadn't done since adolescence; sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, hands knotted in the bedspread, weeping, telling God that I was open and ready, listening (see above, re: deconstructed), asking what I should do and for something, anything, a sign or gust of wind in any direction, an invisible weightless hand on my brow. Nothing came, not even dreams. I woke in the morning with no belief.

So me and atheism sat together on the sofa, staring blearily at the coffee table, hungover, feeling honestly and completely alone for the first time in my life. And I thought, Well, what now, empty of everything?

I thought about suicide for the first time in years. Not deciding that I would, but wondering if I would, touching the tip of my tongue to it. Listless. Do we keep going? How do we keep going with no help? With no one here with us?

And sitting there in the morning, in the living room of my parents' house, I filled with a flinty resolve-- a hard understanding that I could and would continue to move forward with nothing by my own steam; no god, no cosmic network, only my own purposes and appetites, regardless of their relative spiritual collateral.

Since then, atheism and I have parted ways, whether I just don't have the heart for it or my brain isn't wired that way, or I feel that it is a histrionic worldview, I don't know. I have joined the agnostic legions. There will eventually be developments, I'm sure, but for now I'm setting God aside and concentrating all my analytic energies on sociology, economics and science fiction.

The important, lasting conclusion of my apostasy is the knowledge that (a) maybe there is nothing, but whatever, and (b) for good or ill, I'll never kill myself. I am driven.

4. I fell in love with a nice man, which has thrown my lesbian lifestyle into some disarray, but really I wasn't doing much with it anyway. I thought about having some kind of sexual identity crisis, but then I decided against it, what with the religious apostasy, schoolwork and family struggles already.

It's been a strange new experience. A cautious slackening of secrets; a new array of physical gestures and speech patterns; 40X more laughing, and an unforseen conjuction of a new sort of focus, energy and calmness. More on that later, maybe. See above, re: fella and also re: coffee or bottled water or whatever.

5. My hair is a thousand feet long, but now I brush it, so it's not like Middle School all over again. Also, anime is cool.

I forget everything else.


All my love.