Tonight I'm Someone Else

by Chelsea Hodson

  The bite marks on my shoulder, his voice: Good luck hiding that, and I didn’t care, because it was the only proof I didn’t dream the whole thing up. He was real, his mouth was real, and it had marked me in a moment of rapture. It was over much more quickly than it began, but when I turned in the mirror the next day, he was still a little bit mine.

  The performance of wealth can’t work on me if I refuse to watch. If I cover my eyes and my heart at last, at last.

  I was miserable when I was too poor to go to the doctor, too poor to buy more than one meal a day. But, at the same time, everything I bought was accompanied by a new promise, a new possible version of myself—me with a clean home, new clothes, a toned body, a respectable level of mental health. I remember buying five-inch leather wedge shoes for $300 because I fell in love with them on the Internet.

  I copyedited an art magazine for free, for credit, for my résumé. It took me about twelve hours over the span of a few days. I was happy to do it, just to see my name on something (that old American urge). But then, the real payment: an invitation to the launch party at the Bowery Hotel. Finally, a reason to wear the five-inch leather wedges.

  My feet hurt by the time I got there, but everyone was so fabulous, thank god I’d worn something besides my oversize James Dean T-shirt and black leggings. I saw one person I knew who worked at Acne Studios, and he introduced me to girls who worked at Opening Ceremony, but I already knew that because I’d seen their faces on the website, modeling the newest clothes.

  I made my way to the bar to get the free cocktail that was made especially for the event. I saw Chloë Sevigny get one, and then Terry Richardson. By the time I got to the bar, the bartender told me they’d just run out of the free cocktail. I ordered a whiskey Coke and paid $15 and left a $1 tip and tried to make my drink last all night.

  Someone I met introduced me to a painter who had recently appeared on a reality show. We flirted and he bought me another drink, and then I was drunk enough to spend the last of my cash on a third. I felt overwhelmed by the star power of the room, felt like a fake, so I welcomed his attention. An hour later, the party died down and we decided to walk back to the L together. As we walked up Third Avenue, we saw a sign for a fortune-teller—$5 FACE READING. He took my hand, and we walked in.

  The fortune-teller looked at my black clothes and told me, You are an artist and you are very sad. I forget what she told the painter. It was a bad reading, but it was a strangely intimate act. The painter smiled at me as the fortune-teller looked for something to say. It was the kind of thing that bonds you forever. But in New York, you can make a friend like that, do something you’ve never done with anyone, have the best of intentions to see each other, and then disappear. We stood very close on the packed L train at two in the morning, and then he kissed me on the cheek when I got off at Lorimer Street, and I never saw him again—in person or on television.

  You were in my dream but not in my life.

  In my freshman year of college, I’d very often stay up all night every Sunday and go straight into Monday unslept. It just didn’t affect me; it was as if I didn’t need sleep at all. My friend across the hall with the half-shaved head would come into my dorm room, and we’d do our homework together with all the lights on. Sometimes I’d go downstairs to get a sugar-free Red Bull from the vending machine, sometimes I’d just snack until morning. I never remember feeling the pain of not sleeping. I just remember the joy of being awake with my friend when everyone else had given up.

  I attribute much of my personality to spending so much of my childhood on camping trips. My parents hated spending money on flying and hotel rooms, but they also just wanted to be outdoors in nature, not depending on anyone but themselves and their car and their tent and their gas stove. I’ve slept on one-inch foam pads on hard gravel soil, so now I can sleep anywhere. I’ve gone days without a real shower, so now I rarely feel dirty. I’ve spent days without spending money, so now I see how it can be done.

  Floating down muddy rivers in a life vest with my feet first, I never knew what I was going to find. I used to howl like a coyote into the canyon just to hear what kind of noises I could make. I used to stay up late with my father and his friends under the moonlight just to see who drank the worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle.

  I often have dreams in which I want to wake up but can’t. I want to be alive but can’t. I want to stop spending money but won’t. I want to live my actual life, not my pretend life, but I just keep swimming through my mind, living on debt and hope.

  How can I trust love if I can’t ever truly touch it? I can touch a body, a face, a man, I can even feel a heart beating—what other proof of life is there? But physicality is not love. Bruises on a shoulder blade, a body on my body, a paycheck, a love letter—all innocent symptoms of a hungry disease. I starve myself until I can’t. I love until I die.

  I look to America for ideas and fall short. As a woman, I think I’m supposed to be fit but waifish, nurturing but alluring, innocent but independent, beautiful but without trying. I think I’m supposed to have children and be married and own a house by now, I think I’m supposed to make art a hobby instead of a reason to live—that would be best for money for security for buying things I think I’m supposed to want.

  I once loved so hard I almost lost everything, including his life, including my own. Only then did I realize: perhaps love’s physicality is death itself. I think I was taught that love, in its ideal form, is like a newborn baby: full of possibility, still warm from the heated privacy of the womb. But I think, at the end of my life, I won’t see a figure cloaked in black velvet or a swirling void waiting to take me—I will see the face of love. It will be a recognizable light, the one that lived behind all those other faces I knew up close, the light I suspected but could never prove. When I see the face of love, I won’t be afraid. I will see what I’ve been searching for all my life.

  Near Miss

  Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move.

  —ROLAND BARTHES, A Lover’s Discourse

  Do you wanna play? Sam asked, using a jump rope to tie a butcher knife to his ceiling fan. His invented game had a name I no longer recall, but I looked at Julian, sitting on the couch, then back at Sam, standing barefoot on his coffee table, and I said, Sure.

  It seemed like the type of thing that might occur more naturally at night, after a few drinks, but this was a Saturday afternoon, and the three of us hadn’t even had coffee yet. Sam’s house was alongside a dirt road in Tucson, near the University of Arizona, where I hoped to study journalism. I’d seen Sam sing at a basement show a few months prior and had fallen in love with the drummer, Julian, but called him something less suspicious—my friend. I’d borrowed my mother’s minivan to drive the two hours from Phoenix to spend the day with them.

  Sam tightened the knot around the butcher knife’s handle as I took my seat next to Julian on the couch. Are you ready? Sam asked, and I said, No, but he pulled the fan’s metal chain and rushed to his seat. Keep your hands on the couch, he said. That’s the rule.

  Arms at our sides, we watched as the knife picked up speed and the rope became stiff, pointing at us like an accusation. I averted my gaze from the knife to Julian, and, for a moment, I thought he might look back. The knife seemed like a kind of placeholder, an object standing in for the badness of the world, which had not yet reached us, not all the way. We brought it closer.

  Schopenhauer wrote, The scenes of our life resemble pictures in rough mosaic: they are ineffective from close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful. He argued that attaining a goal was beside the point—it’s the ad interim which makes up our lives, that time leading up to the thing we thought we wanted.

  The summer in between high school and college seemed disposable, and I woke up each day ready to waste it. I regarded college as the moment my life would finally begin. I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t smart enough, I wasn’t in love enough, but time slowed as the knif
e made lap after lap pointed toward our foreheads. Julian had said we should make it the Best Summer Ever, and maybe this was that, I couldn’t tell.

  I expected Julian to love me back, I expected to acquire him, as in the object of my affection—a phrase I’ve always hated for its implication of ownership. It’s a lie designed to give hope—someday, perhaps I would hold him in my hands and keep him forever. However, never having him might have been just as useful (Schopenhauer: To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is). I hoped for the end result, even though I couldn’t define it, because I thought it was the only important thing. I’d been taught that all those days before I got what I wanted were hours to be hurried not valued.

  We weren’t sure how tightly the rope held the knife, if it would slip, when. I think it glittered each time it passed the sun in the window, but perhaps it only glitters now, when I try to see it again. Laughter, destruction, injury, love—listing them here, they appear distinct, as separate entities, but that’s not right. The time in which we waited—that was the great equalizer, in which one consequence replaced another. Anything could happen, so, for a moment, everything did.

  Then the fan’s blades turned at top speed, and the knife slipped and darted toward my love—I mean my friend—and missed him by a few inches, stabbed the couch cushion instead. We gasped, said, Oh my god, and covered our mouths with our hands. We couldn’t stop laughing at how close we’d been.

  I ached for so many things then, I thought I could feel my bones still growing some nights, the way I did when I was a child. I longed for the future as if it would arrive in a clearly labeled box just for me, as if I could open it in midair as it hurled itself toward my shoulder. I failed to value its obscurity then, and I’m still failing, even now.

  The inevitability of the knife simplified everything: each anatomy was available to ruin, each law was breakable. That’s what made the world so beautiful, so seemingly new within its impossible history. I forgot that sometimes.

  The New Love

  You look away: the new love!

  You look back,—the new love!

  —ARTHUR RIMBAUD, “To a Reason”

  I went to San Diego and I didn’t tell anyone

  Only my boyfriend, Cody, and his friend with the Corolla knew where we were going—we didn’t have maps or the right kind of phones, just a highway we thought looked right. San Diego was eight hours away, so we left Tucson in the afternoon and, by sunset, realized we’d gone the long way. The two-lane highway wound up steep khaki-colored mountains where the radio turned to static and our phones went useless. The sun met the asphalt that met our eyes as we curled around each unprotected cliff—one wrong turn and we’d know. I was in the backseat, gazing at Cody’s head in front of me in the passenger seat. I saw the way hot air roared through his open window and then his hair and then mine and I thought that meant whatever happened to him also happened to me and that must mean we were bound.

  The day before, I’d taken notes in a lecture hall for my Psychology 101 class. My teacher walked up and down the aisles with a hands-free pop star–style microphone that clipped to her ear and hovered just above her mouth. She discussed the power of suggestion—the phenomenon of students experiencing the symptoms they read about. For example, she said, referencing a chapter we’d read the week prior, you’re not actually depressed, you only think you are.

  She also taught us the term peak experience, which psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote about in his book Toward a Psychology of Being. While collecting data in 1968, Maslow prompted a group of students to write about their own experiences by saying: I would like you to think of the most wonderful experience or experiences of your life: happiest moments, ecstatic moments, moments of rapture, perhaps from being in love, or from listening to music or suddenly “being hit” by a book or painting. Symptoms include loss of judgment to time and space, feeling whole and harmonious, and complete mindfulness of the present moment without the influence of past or expected future experiences. Sitting in the lecture hall, I couldn’t remember ever feeling that way.

  Our friend in San Diego answered the door with a little green bird perched on his shoulder. Behind him, a group of people sat on the floor, smoking cigarettes. I watched the bird move from his shoulder to his shirt collar and then disappear under the fabric, and our friend said, He likes the warmth of my armpit, and then, Let’s go to Coronado Island. We loaded up two cars full of people and went to see about the salt we’d been smelling.

  The hotel for rich people sat there like a prop as we walked around it to get to the beach. I kept waiting for someone in uniform to come out and tell us to go home or be quiet, but no one did. We were left alone with the fog on the beach, and I didn’t need to feel the cold water for myself—I sat in the sand, watching everyone else hurry toward it.

  I’ve tried before to write about Cody emerging from the fog, but I always end up cutting it out. This time, maybe I can get it right: I think it was his shoulder that first cut through the haze and made him identifiable. I think loving him that year was one of the best things I ever did. I think, at first, he was just a shape, like a memory recalled too many times—each time, he was a new story with a different ending—but as he got closer, I think the lights from the hotel made his face glow and I felt as if I was seeing him for the very first time. I think I’m having a peak experience, I said, and he asked, What’s that?

  I went to Los Angeles and I didn’t tell anyone

  Goodbyes bored and embarrassed me—I didn’t make a show of the move, I just shipped a few boxes and moved in with someone from the Internet. I thought living on Sunset Boulevard seemed glamorous, but each morning I awoke to a new layer of black soot on the windowsill. My address ended with a fraction, my room was painted lime green, and my bed folded back into the wall like a lie. One day, my roommate bought a taxidermy wolf in a howling position, and when I encountered it for the first time, in the middle of the night, I thought I must be dreaming.

  My friend got married in the Los Angeles River, which turned out to be just a concrete ditch with a stream—an afterthought—trickling through it. That day, my friend’s therapist played the role of ordained minister and said, The thing about him is he turns everything into art. His wife wore a gold dress that glittered in the daylight. I wore a bow tie and met a man from New York who also wore a bow tie and that was enough for us to end up in my lime-green room together that night. When I turned to him, I saw the moon gave my bed a suggestion of fullness, gave that man a kind of halo.

  I’d been trying to turn my life into art, but I wasn’t sure what form it should take. I played guitar with half-callused fingers; I found a discarded headboard on the side of the road and tied a hundred rope knots around it. I rented a studio so I could feel like an artist, and that worked for a while. I taped parts of essays to the wall in order to liberate them from my hard drive—to see them as whole. Rearranging them felt good, throwing them away felt even better. I was getting closer to saving only the most rapturous moments of my life. I disposed of memories until everything served me.

  Isn’t this where James Dean stood in that knife-fight scene? the man from the wedding asked, and I said, I think so. We could see the entire city from the Griffith Observatory, but we still took the elevator to ascend one floor higher. In line for the telescope, he squeezed my arm in segments, up and down, until I asked him what he was doing and he said, I want to understand this little arm.

  When we reached the front of the telescope line, an employee said the winds were too strong to see Jupiter clearly, but look if you want. We wanted. The crisp outline of the planet appeared, then faded.

  My roommate asked to take my portrait in the living room. Okay, now look out the window, he said. I watched the neon sign at the hardware store light up as the sun went down. The traffic, ugly as ever, made its sweeping sounds. Okay, now look back at me.

  I once wrote a birthday poem for the man in the fog. After I read it aloud, I could tell he didn’t get i
t and maybe didn’t even like it, but a year later, he calls, says he found it when he moved and it is so beautiful now.

  When the sand gets in our eyes, we blame the shifting of the ground; we feel the world adding itself up. The old love was a meadow where deer approached if you stayed still long enough. The old love was a staring contest in which blinking meant you were still playing. The old love was a basket of fruit begging to be painted, and sometimes we did paint it.

  I went to Phoenix and I didn’t tell anyone

  I didn’t want to see people in my hometown; I was tired of asking the same three questions and listening to three inevitable answers. I thought I could just see my family and that’d be it—I watched my little cousin watch my mother sew a clear vinyl square into a piece of red fabric before draping it over a card table. See? my mother said, pointing. Now it’s a house.

  My mother was always so gentle with me when I felt depressed—I’d have my blinds closed and lights out in the middle of the afternoon, weeping over some middle-school injustice—and she’d sit at my bedside, asking if I wanted to talk about it. Sometimes I did, but other times I really, really didn’t. She’d always say I’d feel better if I talked about it, but I wasn’t sure she could know that. I liked the intensity of emotion, even if it was bad, and that’s how I am now, too. Talking it out or walking it off dissipates whatever I’m feeling, and soon after that, it’s really gone.

  When I was in third grade, my friend’s mother was a judge with her own courtroom, so our Girl Scout troop went to see her in action. When she used the gavel, we wanted to cheer, but we knew enough to stay quiet. Our troop leader took us back outside when we were done and said, See? You can be anything you want to be. But we weren’t looking at her. We were watching the handcuffed men step off the bus, we were making eye contact. One of the men stuck his tongue out, aimed his crotch at us, and thrust against the morning air. Another called out, Don’t end up like me, girls. In straight-faced unison: We won’t.