But it’s possible I never existed—how much does he remember? Was I photographed? Written down? Yes, yes. I arrange myself into different shapes until I’m unrecognizable, I write letters ’til I’m sore. This is why I hate goodbyes: I draw a circle around the thing, but never fully bull’s-eye. This is not my exit, it’s a consideration of removal. It’s another language, it’s a light not meant for us, it’s a place where everything’s about to happen—the room we both left.
I still can’t believe my father built an entire room by himself over the span of a year. It seems like the type of thing someone would start and never finish. My sister and I watched him step by step, wall by wall, and thought, When will he bring more men to help? But I don’t remember anyone coming to help after the foundation was built. One day, my parents simply had a new room in the house they’d lived in for twenty years.
I refuse to think of perfection as a useless goal. I try to be as smart as I can, as talented, as efficient, and with as little error as possible. I see now how two things can occur simultaneously: as soon as I approach something, I set myself back, I fuck up on purpose. Sometimes I just want to know what will happen if I do.
The first time one man saw my face in the daylight: Your eyes. I asked, Their greenness? and angled my chin toward the sun. No, something else.
I romanticize Erik in order to believe that it was more than a transaction: I take something, he takes something, we stay human, stay ordinary. But something happened that night—what was it? I was ready to unlearn everything, thought I’d stay dumb all week, drinking pink champagne alone in my room with the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle. But then I was outside, and outside I’m always trouble, or at least touching something that feels like trouble. I saw what he saw in me and I felt stronger for it. Accomplice: the right word for once. We were in it together.
Thinking of him, I held my mug in my left hand and the teapot in my right. As I poured the boiling water, I mistook my hand for the mug, and, for a moment, time stopped. I kept pouring until my brain caught up with my skin and I gasped so loud the world shifted and my hand was bright red and I’d done the kind of thing that lasts forever.
But here, tonight, it’s super-moon time, and I’m on the edge of the balcony, demonstrating my compassion, staying in debt, writing to my muse again, making art with the idea of his hand. Someone’s saying writing is fake work, I’m pointing at green lights when they turn, someone’s insisting it’s real work. I’m remembering buildings and headlines and all the ordinary moons renewing me. I’m like a dog—I love to hear my name in other people’s mouths; I’m like a novelist—I put it there.
I wrote to Erik for days after I left—on paper, in my mind, in my dreams. It was a dialogue, a carnival with all its lights on, a road trip and I was flying—what else did we want? I was almost done writing a book about my life when a novelist asked me, What about fiction? What about it? Erik asked me the questions of my life, and I trusted his vision of me or I trusted I could live up to it. Now all my admissions can be held against me and probably will. I like that about the world.
I can’t say what will stick, what will be written down. I watched the news at the laundromat and it was just footage of a rock where a coyote might have been the night before. Someone said they’d seen it, and that was enough. I face a screen, I imagine myself on trial. I sometimes refuse to think of my behavior as weakness, more of a mistake in timing. Most things are like that.
What is progress, anyway? I used to think it meant growing out of something, that only then could I ascend. But what of my gazing at the open door or Frida Kahlo’s painting of herself as a wounded deer? Five arrows lodged in her side, her antlers tall, her face stoic—less Look what you’ve done to me, more I put myself in the way of danger, now I have these souvenirs instead of my life.
Every time I meet someone who I think understands me, I think it must be the last time. Oh, if a muse could be a thing I already knew. Oh, if I could come alive just once in the life I already live. I signed on to a thing, and yeah, it was like a contract, but what isn’t these days? What’s the difference between affection and attention to detail? (One form of danger: two people who don’t turn from each other.)
I dreamt of him again—a feeling more than a plot, a reimagining of my throat more than a commitment, but I pulsed for him with true intention and my blue heart corrected every proof. I was glossy-eyed, splayed out surgeon style, loved-from-behind style, pressed against a couch I hadn’t seen yet. Yes, I will fall in love with a person I created. Okay, let’s say you are a gust of air—so what?
I stopped expecting nature to save me a long time ago. I remember being nine years old on the San Juan River: my father, on a hike, pointed to the ground and said, Look. I saw nothing. He picked up what looked like a bone and placed it in my hand. It was the remains of some kind of exoskeletal worm that looked as if it were made of stacked rings. He said, This whole place used to be water, and I could almost see it.
During the Depression, my grandmother and her sister used to store fruit in their living room in Missouri. They gathered all the watermelons, cantaloupes, and honeydew they could find. There was more than enough, but if they put it outside, an animal might get to it before they did. So they lined the room with heavy fruit and ate it as if they were in another time. The criteria were simple: If they were good, we carried them home.
Notes
“Pity the Animal” was originally published as a chapbook by Future Tense Books. It was republished as an Amazon Kindle Single, and again as an e-book by Emily Books.
Here, the Marina Abramović performance proposal quotes are from Marina Abramović: Artist Body, Performances 1969–1998, published by Edizioni Charta in 1998.
Here, the Marina Abramović quote that begins, It’s because I want to be a whore, is from When Marina Abramović Dies by James Westcott, published by the MIT Press in 2014.
Here, the italicized portion that begins, It is always wise to tie a bright colored ribbon, is from The Book of Wild Pets by Clifford B. Moore, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1937.
Here, the italicized portion that begins, Under no temptation, is from Trapping Wild Animals in Malay Jungles by Charles Mayer, published by Garden City Pub. Co. in 1922.
“Second Row” was originally published in The Scofield.
Sections of “I’m Only a Thousand Miles Away” were originally published under different titles in The Lifted Brow and Sundog Lit.
Most names have been changed.
ALSO BY CHELSEA HODSON
Pity the Animal
About the Author
CHELSEA HODSON earned her MFA at Bennington College and was a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices fellow. Her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Frieze, Black Warrior Review, The Lifted Brow, and more. She teaches at the Mors Tua Vita Mea workshop in Sezze Romano, Italy, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Red Letters from a Red Planet
Simple Woman
Near Miss
The New Love
The End of Longing
Pity the Animal
The Id Speaks, Mid-Decision
I’m Only a Thousand Miles Away
Swollen and Victorious
Artist Statement
Halfway Out the Door
Second Row
Leaving Me
The Id Speaks, Mid-Transformation
Small Crimes
When I Tu
rn
Notes
Also by Chelsea Hodson
About the Author
Copyright
TONIGHT I’M SOMEONE ELSE. Copyright © 2018 by Chelsea Hodson. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover design by Nicolette Seeback
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Hodson, Chelsea, author.
Title: Tonight I’m someone else: essays / Chelsea Hodson.
Description: First edition.|New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017053407|ISBN 9781250170194 (paperback)
Classification: LCC PS3608.O4747 A6 2018|DDC 814/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053407
e-ISBN 9781250170200
First Edition: June 2018
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
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