VISION

I am betrayed when my intuition is wrong. When I didn’t see the contours of things. When someone keeps me guessing.

I know this is a failure of the spirit, and that it does little for me to anticipate so much. I know that this habit of wanting so badly for things to work out in exactly one way makes me small and boring. I know that I want to be big and terrifying.

But I have lived too safely. I have too often not said what I meant to say. I have abandoned what was true for what I knew would work. I have shied away from the grandest of gestures: Stepping into a void and falling on my face. And in this cowardice, I have missed the substance of something that I could feel knocking around somewhere in the universe, just out of sight.

We cling to each other—to each other’s bodies and stories and mirages of each other’s bodies and stories—out of love and out of fear. I know this. I want to know what you will do because I suspect that whatever I will do will not be brave enough. I want to be beside you, as you live out my version of your story. Hang on, I’m coming.

A failure of the spirit. I hear in a workshop, on the grotesque mask, that failure is part of it. All of it. That we must take the big hulking risks, otherwise who gives a shit. In the container of this workshop, I take them. And in my life, I start to take small steps. I begin to be a little more outspoken. I don’t modulate every hour. It feels good. I let go of this pathetic hope for control, this sad idea that I can manipulate my way into a life that will keep me safe from all terror, all sadness, and all alienation. I listen, instead, to the demented voice that I have felt scratching at my intestinal walls since I was a toddler. RAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!! (It carries on like that every day.( EEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKKK!!! (Really. And it hisses and cackles. All the time.)

For one whole year, probably longer, my stomach hurt so bad, on and on with no reprieve, that I finally went in to the hospital for a colonoscopy. I counted backwards from ten and they stuck a camera up my ass. I woke up on a gurney and told my girlfriend at the time, who stood by my bedside as I bobbed my head, still high from the anesthesia, that I was ready to move to California, like she dreamed of, a homecoming for her. It was a risk of a kind for me; I was jumping into a bit of unknown. But in other ways, this was familiar territory, I had moved a million times before. I had put on different masks. This time, The One Who Lives with Her Girlfriend in Southern California. Still, with my hairnet on in the hospital bed, letting the drugs run through me and soften the screeching voice for a while, I didn’t say aloud what I meant, and knew was true: I’m so scared of myself and I don’t know who I’ll become. Take me away.

It turns out I needed to eat more fiber. It turns out the produce in California is top notch. I ate and ate. I stood in the sun. I waded through an existential fog, intensely anxious about something I could not name. In the passenger seat, I would clutch the side of the car.

—

Now, I’m back in New York, and I like to lie in bed for hours in the morning, and think about greek yogurt parfait and dancing and death and error. I like to go over the possibilities of my day, and with any luck, any luck at all, look no further. I improvise.

Oops! Oh! Yessss. More. I’m so sorry—it’s really like that. How much of this whole thing can be pleasure? How greedy can I get for the feeling of this thing? I don’t know anything! More!

We’re all going to die. That’s the only thing I can tell you about your future. S, the acting workshop teacher, told all of us this right at the beginning. Let’s just put that on the table. This will all be over soon. So let’s get on with it. It’s not nihilism, but a more daring kind of love. All your freaky little things you have knocking around in there. Get them out. I want to see.