Marta ~ May 24

 

My room on the Upper West Side would be the site of my full-time writing life, starting now. Starting no more 9-5. 

 

It was a good time to start things. The air was fresh, the brighter light after winter was welcome and I was back in the city after 3 years in L.A., to me a soul-destroying place of haze, automobiles and dusty exotic plants in parking lots. 

 

But the city was The City and I buckled down. I read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim on Tinker Creek, and thought: I didn't know you could write like that; I can write like that. And I took the #1IRT subway north as far as it went to Van Cortlandt Park because I wanted to see as much nature all at once as I could and wandered in woodsy places in my long rippling apple-green cotton skirt and came home and wrote "Small Runaway," two pages that felt new and strong and like maybe I could be the writer I wanted to be. 

 

And there were other things too during those months: the search for someone to fall in love with; the quest for the most exciting transformative and right way to eat no matter how difficult; new age explorations via meditation attempts, fasting and the Samuel Weiser bookstore where the answers were laid out in book after book after book on things I had never heard of or never taken seriously. 

 

All so different from the years with the boy left behind in Los Angeles, years that were all about pot and music, even as I strained always for something more. The straining all done on my own time, until it was all my own time. 

 

I had to demand a great deal from my newly-returned city months because I had nothing to start with. I arrived empty-handed and wanted a life right away. Everybody else had a life. I better get one. Though of course I never thought that in words. 

 

I moved fast: some boys, a carpentry apprenticeship for a couple of weeks, a career in rehabbing thrown-out furniture from the streets that surely would have blossomed if my roommate hadn't said no, a little political activism the highlight of which was a meeting in Grace Paley's kitchen, a solo hitchhiking trip through Nova Scotia seeking wild horizons that turned out never to be wild enough, and then the yoga place down in Chelsea that I kept coming back to, a place where the leader wasn't going anywhere because he had something he was sure of, a place that was always happy to see me, a place that talked about things that I recognized as true, until I said, I'll make this the most important thing because it promises happiness, and I moved in.