where we call home.

Autumn Perspective Now, moving in, cartons on the floor, the radio playing to bare walls, picture hooks left stranded in the unsoiled squares where paintings were, and something reminding us this is like all other moving days; finding the dirty ends of someone else's life, hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit, and burned out matches in a corner; things not preserved, but never swept away like fragments of disturbing dreams we stumble on all day... in ordering our lives, we will discard them, scrub clean the floorboards of this our home lest refuse from the lives we did not lead become in some strange, frightening way, our own. And we have plans that will not tolerate our fears -- a year laid out like rooms in a new house -- the dusty wine glasses rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves sagging with the heavy winter books. Seeing the room always as it will be, we are content to dust and wait. We will return from the dark and silent streets, arms full of books and food, anxious as we always are in winter; and looking for the Good Life we have made. I see myself then: tense, solemn, in high heeled shoes that pinch, not basking in the light of goals fulfilled, but looking back to now and seeing a lazy, sunburned, sandaled girl in a bare room, full of promise and feeling envious. Now we plan, postponing, pushing our lives forward into the future -- as if, when the room contains us and all our treasured junk we will have filled whatever gap it is that makes us wander, discontented from ourselves. The room will not change: a rug, or armchair, or new coat of paint wont make much difference; our eyes are fickle but we remain the same beneath our suntans, pale, frightened, dreaming ourselves backward and forward in time, dreaming our dreaming selves. I look forward and see myself looking back.

Erica Mann Jong "Becoming Light" © 1994 Harper Collins Publishers.