She was determined to not be someone who projected her regrets onto her children or had a mid-life crisis at forty-five and so needed the reminder of her twenties to be an exercise in living dangerously. This was wrapped up with the desire to read philosophy and to do it fast and do it now — she was struggling under the artificial guilt of not being a teenage savant and reading Heidegger and Kant between Pre-Calculus and Social Studies, and then going fully equipped into her twenties as some kinda cigarette-smoking literary fiction-quoting enfant terrible. Her problem was: she was too cautious. She did not do these things because she had been muddling her way through more banal, age-appropriate behavior, reading Jane Austen and the Brontes and Young Adult fantasy novels and discussing these without the oppressive knowledge of “literary analysis”; the analysis she understood was innate and an organic interchange of class/gender/history etc., but she felt the benefits of this approach had overstayed their welcome and she needed something more mentally stimulating — hence philosophy. She could also do something dangerous like approach the five man-children who sat around the dirty pool in the apartment complex and give them her better poems to function as lyrics for their dirty, weed soaked songs. But no, this was not satisfying, not even in writing. She stayed in the apartment and planned out her days obliquely.
Her favorite topic for writing was loneliness because she understood it the best. It was hard now, sometimes, when someone wonderful came home every evening before her and worked on dinner, to remember how she had felt — but the memory was conjurable by pulling out the old dreams and examining their tight insides. Travel, for instance. The one time she had gone backpacking there was a real and hazy loneliness to it, an unmoored feeling she had never felt so literally. She was moving through it: the openness of the water, the tight turn of the Israeli girl’s neck, looking out the window in the bohemian cafe, the strangeness of her social safety net and social capital being suddenly dissolved. The interior of this was basically to pass the time until she could have sex but also spread herself out on the points of many new stimuli (mist over green-soaked trees, beans and fish lumped on a paper plate) until her self was rotten and destroyed and gone.
The motive for travel had dissipated but the leftover energy of the dream hung around and she was afraid of this energy catching up to her later and making her resentful of the good things she had been given. She knew she was both weak in some fundamental ways and also an idealist; she could either take this as a writer and let the work break and flow through herself, or she would never be satisfied but also never be strong enough to fully pursue an end. The idea of a daughter – ambitious, closed-off, intellectual – replaying her former career dreams was frightening; this was not something she could handle with grace. Or perhaps it was — and as an older woman she would not see the world in dialectic and/or but the with the swirling grace of some of this, some of that. She was always best at separating the motive from the thing, anyway: she did not need a PhD from an ancient prestigious university, she needed to read philosophy or at least read more. To feel educated at a level equal to her intelligence.
In a previous conversation with the man she was now set to marry, they had agreed on a rough definition of femininity as the woman being both the harbor and the storm. To carry both cautiousness (safety) and daring (rage) inside of herself was a difficult idea but it connoted a worthy birthright — something to live up to, something to use as a framework for the shifting of herself. Her living dangerously could never, by definition of her person, be a literal thing: she went on walks around the apartment complex and planned out her days, time menacing her and falling at her feet; time as ghost, time as monster. This was her making sense of twenty-four.
the last pavilion 