I got word from Tucson that people have been asking about me. They hope I am sticking it out. They say NYC can be hard. But they don’t ask me directly. No, they don’t.

Elana the psychic told me that she was meant to tell me I’ve got a lot of support going to for me. I need to hear this. All I hear sometimes are my mother’s words when she told me not to move here. Because I would die. Not figuratively. She told me I would die and she couldn’t deal with that. This was in April. She told me to stay in Tucson and become a teacher. That I wasn’t capable of more. She was drunk and unstable at the time, but she was only saying the things she’d been thinking for years.

The last time she told me not to move here I was twenty. She told me I’d be attacked. So when I was…let’s call it what it was…kidnapped at Penn Station, I didn’t tell anyone. And then I broke down back at Princeton. I stopped talking. I stopped going out or working on my thesis. I went home and cried. I dropped out of college altogether. I stopped leaving D’s apartment. I started drinking. Six months in, I was in the throes of a full mental breakdown. I had regular panic attacks and constant agoraphobia. I didn’t know what was happening to me. D’s sister figured it out though. I got help and I got better.

But it only got so bad because I kept it a secret for so long so as not to prove my mother right. When she found out, it wasn’t just an “I told you so.” It was a fulfilled prophecy for her. It justified her weaponized worry.

If I think about it, I know a lot of people have my back. But it’s intangible for the most part. There are all these people dispersed all over the world who love me. They believe in me. They believe I’m good at the writing and the thinking. They think I know what I am doing. But also that I am so impractical that I don’t tread the same ground as everyone else. They want to be amused by my ongoings. They want to say “Of course you did” at my latest odyssey.

I didn’t cultivate that identity. It just sort of came out of the ashes of the high holocaust of my early 30’s.

People really like mythology. They like origin stories that show how someone came to be this bigger than life thing that they are. I’m the bigger than life thing to the people who know me. Some fuchsia-hued force of life. That I was meant for something bigger.

Only I don’t know what I was meant for.

Which brings me to The Lady In The Water. It’s an underrated movie. And a lot of people refuse to give it a chance. But I think it’s good. Better than The Village at least. The moral of the film is that people don’t know who they are or what they are meant for.

I wish that someone would just settle it for me…why am I even here? Maybe not a complete spoiler. Maybe just a couple teaser reels?

My whole life people have been predicting greatness. Like in ways that felt so outrageous I thought they were hyperbole. But they weren’t. And they aren’t. If I must, I will live greatness for them because it would definitely not be for me. It seems isolating. And I’ve been more intimate with isolation than any lover.

But I am ok with a life that has no seeming direction or purpose for now. I do not live linearly. My threads are so crossed they form tapestries. When greatness comes, if ever, I will be occupied in the lasted fascination. Until then, I’ll be here. Taking it all in with curiosity and wonder. This world will never get old to me. And I shall never be old to it.

Doctors have come from distant cities
Just to see me
Stand over my bed
Disbelieving what they’re seeing

They say I must be one of the wonders
God’s own creation
And as far as they see they can offer
No explanation

Newspapers ask intimate questions
Want confessions
They reach into my head
To steal the glory of my story

They say I must be one of the wonders
God’s own creation
And as far as they see they can offer
No explanation

O, I believe
Fate smiled and destiny
Laughed as she came to my cradle
Know this child will be able
Laughed as my body she lifted
Know this child will be gifted
With love, with patience and with faith
She’ll make her way,
She’ll make her way!

People see me
I’m a challenge to your balance
I’m over your heads
How I confound you and astound you
To know I must be one of the wonders
God’s own creation
And as far as you see you can offer me
No explanation

O, I believe
Fate smiled and destiny
Laughed as she came to my cradle
Know this child will be able
Laughed as she came to my mother
Know this child will not suffer
Laughed as my body she lifted
Know this child will be gifted
With love, with patience and with faith
She’ll make her way!
She’ll make her way!
She’ll make her way!