I’ve been writing here since I was 16 years old, and have a ten-year backlog of entries to show for it, some of which are still on my old AOL server. I was introduced to the internet four years before that, in 1993. I was immediately hooked – I’d always been into computers, having grown up with them from a young age, but the internet was different than playing Webster on my IIC. For a shy and awkward teenager, the idea that I could type my thoughts, that I could communicate without having to look someone in the eye was a total goddamn relief.
I had little webpages from the beginning, but the incarnation of this page – the web journal – began in 1996 or 1997, after I was searching for information on the musical RENT and came across rebekah.org (now sadly defunct). I’d always been a writer and a private journaler, but the idea that I could compose my thoughts and publish them publically appealed to the secret exhibitionist in me. I was in early high school by this time, and though I had friends, I felt no one understood me. I was a total typical teenager who thought everything I was feeling was insanely unusual, if evidenced by the Google summation I plugged in about the site that haunts me to this day. (A very unusual life? A tempermental actress/writer?) I thought if people in my high school read my site, they’d like me better. I think them liking me was a moot point, as everyone in high school is too involved in themselves to actively think about liking other people. (A generalization.)
But I kept writing, and I wrote and I wrote, and soon, my writing became less diary-like and more abstract. I wrote through several relationships and major break-ups, in different states and cities, through sickness and health and tantrums and sleepness nights. (The latter much like this one.) Not once, even as the modern blog came onto the scene and people started up pages and shut them down and rennamed them and went on hiatus and came back and went on hiatus again, did I stop writing.
This site became an unusual constant; even if I was only writing every few weeks, at least it was there. It was the only thing I felt was solely mine – it wasn’t directly influenced by other people. No one else was involved. It was my baby, and I nurtured it through bad writing and pictures of my cats. In the back of my mind, I knew I’d have to take a break sometime, but I always pictured it happening only if the whole internet crashed or something equally as apocalyptic.
But, here I am, nearly 10 years later, and I’m finally deciding that I need a rest from not only this site, but the entire internet. Sometime in the last few months, the internet I loved so dearly became a burden. People I never speak to in real life know my personal details because I post them on the internet. People who don’t speak to me in real life, even though I’d like them to, check up on me here. People I don’t want to speak to check up on me. You Google my name, and you know everything about me – what I look like, who I date, what I eat, what I did last weekend, what I’m doing this weekend, what a mess I was from 2002-2003, how happy I was in 2000, who my friends are, who my pets are, what my living room looks like. This used to be exciting to me – I have trouble opening up in person. Give me a few drinks, and I’ll say a few (regrettable) things, but I mostly hold things tight to my chest. The idea that I could open up through this medium used to comfort me, but now the exposure feels exhausting. I’m no longer interested in opening my wounds in public. I rarely post on my Livejournal anymore, and if you can’t open your wounds on Livejournal, why are you even on the internet, right?
I don’t know if this is a permanent feeling. I doubt it. The internet, and this site, are habits, nearly addictive, and weaning will be difficult. But here is my hiatus message, for you. It’s 5 AM on a Monday, and I’m supposed to be somewhere (a class) in a few hours, but I don’t think I’ll be making it in today. I have the type of clarity that comes with coughing all night, and then finally giving up, making tea, watching the sunrise, and evaluating the brain. My brain spends too much time on things that were, and will never be again. There’s too much space wasted on things that should be, but aren’t. The more time I spend on the internet, the more hours I dig up graves, the more wistful I become for times and places that weren’t nearly as wonderful as I imagine them to be.
I’ll be back, but not for a little bit here. Maybe a month, maybe the end of the summer – I can’t tell you. I’ll be less active on e-mail, too, though I’ll still be checking. I’ll still be writing, too, though not here, and maybe not anywhere on the internet. If you want to know how I’m doing, please ask. I’d like to know how you’re doing. Thanks for reading, and all that.
The picture’s from a really pretty summer afternoon in Duluth. I was in the house alone, and drinking tea. That was one of my favorite windows in the house, and though it wasn’t in the most accessible place (between a desk and a sound booth, above a low couch). I spent a lot of time leaning out of it, looking at the lake.
You can e-mail me at zosia AT zosiablue.com. I’ll still be updating my Flickr page. See you soon.
1. Start cooking every night again. Which means buying groceries I’ll actually cook instead of six bottles of condiments I’ll never use. (Hi, pickle relish.)
2. Find a bike and ride it somewhere. Alternatively, find a cheap bike and buy it.
3. See at least one sunrise, on either side of the night. (Preferably waking up early.)
4. Go out and do something cool every day. That’s pretty fluid. The week of no hermiting! Or as little hermiting as possible. It would held if my chest and head weren’t full of phlegm. It’d also help if I didn’t decide to twirl around in my new skirt a bunch and fuck up my already gooshy equilibrium.
5. Find my bedroom floor!
6. Write a bunch each day.
7. Not die of a horrible disease.
I’m hoping for #7 at the least. Here is what I did this weekend: whined, sneezed, hacked, felt like I was jumping out of my skin, slept on the living room floor, went to an estate sale, went to a coffee shop and read an article on HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT AND KEEP IT OFF, took pictures of people who didn’t want their picture taken (normal weekend), made plans to go to two shows, a barbecue, a kickball game and a bonfire, and went to none because I had lung aggro +10, and had a dream about opening a door into a room that was supposed to represent the meaning of my life and seeing a plate of cheese.
But this week! Oh, boy. Just you wait.
This reminds me of Georgia, this heat and air conditioning smell. My mother’s from Atlanta, and we used to visit her family every couple of years, though the definition of family was different than most. She stayed close friends with her ex-husband’s (my brother’s father) parents and siblings, and so they became the extended family I never had in any bloodline sort of sense.
The grandmother, MeMom, as we called her, lived in a small house dwarfed by mansions on Northside Drive in Atlanta. Decades before, the land had been bought by wealthy contractors, but my grandmother refused to sell the house she’d be born in. Harry Carey lived down the street, as did Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown for a while.
The neighborhood in burning July was like walking into a movie’s idea of luxury – sprawling villas with six undrivable cars lining the driveways, fountains shooting endless cycles of water. And then there was MeMom’s little white house slouched between the villas, the siding beginning to shed a little, as if the house was shrugging and saying, “Oops.” Though I had met her husband, PawPaw, when I was young, he died before I could cement any true memory of him. MeMom lived with her son, Michael (called Apple Ed, for reasons I don’t remember) and her little white terrier, Kiwi. There was a pool in back where I was bitten by a fire ant when I was six.
I was 15 the last time we visited. Apple Ed (my Mom’s ex-husband’s brother, for those keeping track) and his son Kevin, who was a year older than me, and I went to an amphitheater to see the Temptations in concert. Kevin and I bought these silly mechanical light-up toys that looked like ice cream cones and we goofed off in the back, while Apple Ed and Mom sat in front. At one point, a little boy next to us pointed at our toys and yelled, “I want one!” His Dad was embarrassed and shushed him. I stood up and handed the boy my cone, and then said to Kevin, “You can drive, right?” Kevin, suddenly impressed by my charity, said, “Yeah, just got my license,” and so we snuck out and drove around Atlanta, past his high school, flying down huge hills with the windows up and that smell of stale air conditioning and old car in our faces.
They had a Starbuck’s in town, and I’d never been to a coffee shop, ever. I’d grown up in Germany in a town where real coffee shops didn’t exist, and then moved to a smallish city in Virginia that mirrored that German town in ways I’m still discovering. I was thrilled by the fact that I could buy coffee with whipped cream and sit outside under a colored umbrella. I was wearing a blue shirt and white shorts, and my legs were sticky with the heat. Kevin and I drank hot coffee as the sun went down, and my sinuses happily expanded under the steam, a feeling I’ve only been able to replicate with good sex.
I wanted to tell you this because Chris had some friends over today, and one of them, Tim, turned to me and said in reference to an earlier conversation, “Time, wow. It’s going so fast, isn’t it?” It’s the kind of thing everyone says. It’s the most basic of small talk, even more universal than the weather because it can be sunny in Minnesota and stormy in Algeria, but time is the same in each place, neither faster nor slower.
But for whatever reason, it isn’t small talk to me. Turn to me and say, “Where does the time go?” and I want to sit up and grab you by the lapels and yell, “I don’t fucking know! We have to stop it! What do we do?” It causes an imbalance in my ear. I want to turn my head and slap my temple, as if to shake out memories like water.
Today the memory that flowed was being 15 in Atlanta on a muggy sweet afternoon, and the way Kevin looked at me when I gave the kid my cheap light-up toy. I didn’t think I was doing anything special, but he looked as if I’d just healed the universe. I felt like I could heal the universe then. My touch was slow, and it involved a lot of driving in cars and drinking coffee on patios, but I was pretty convinced that there wasn’t much I couldn’t fix.
There are minutes when I still feel like this, riding in my car on a hot day with air on high, breathing in the wet staleness of it and thinking of Georgia. I’ve always said – if I can remember these things, these enchanted evenings, in such detail, shouldn’t I be able to remember forward as well? Shouldn’t I be able to stretch across the country and dip my toe in a swimming pool that no longer exists, next to a house that was demolished in favor of a strip mall, a house owned by a woman who died in her sleep years ago, whose death I found out about while I was sitting in a car with a boyfriend whom I no longer date, in a car he no longer owns, in a gravel parking lot that was paved over, next to a liquor store that went out of business? Where does it go. Oh, yes.
Such fractures, such fractures.