Last night I went to the grocery
store a block away, and a man who lives on the floor above me and refuses to
remember me exited my apartment building at the same time. For a moment, we
were heading in the same direction. I had on a Madewell sweater I got two years
ago, and I had been thinking that it was old now, but I still
thought of it as new. He was wearing a black jacket with the hood pulled up,
walking cautiously behind me so as not to pass me and have to make
conversation. I thought to myself that I hate him, this cautious distance he
created and how every time he sees me, he seems to make an effort not to
recognize my face, and now I feel complicit in this not-remembering, like I
need to make myself forgettable to aid his not knowing me.
I bought a bag of M&Ms at the
store and walked the three minutes home. The street outside the grocery store
is always filled with people and their joys and miseries and drugs. I got back
into my apartment building, and it smelled like roasted garlic and cumin. I
love that about apartments most of the time, how you are constantly reminded by
the lives of others and their meals. I did not see my upstairs neighbor, and I
was glad.
I wrote a letter on the floor of my
living room. I wrote it on ripped out pages from my Moleskine notebook. I had
written half of it on white computer paper my roommate had given me, but it was
too hard to read. My handwriting is slanted and interlocking, each s attached
to the letter following, half cursive and half print. I like it; I think it
suits me. I would make fun of my sister’s handwriting growing up. I thought it
looked juvenile and cramped. My mother would scold me for that, tell me that mine was worse so I didn’t have much of a leg to stand on.
I debated including all of that in
the letter, but I didn’t. I just said, sorry about my handwriting. I said, I
still like it though. I think it looks like me.
I finished writing it on the couch
and added a P.S. to the letter saying that. I like to know where people are
when they write letters. I said, I think I hand wrote this because I exist so
perfectly here in this moment, and this part of me will be here forever.
When I was in college and studying
the words of dead people, a common theme is that writing is the only way to
achieve immortality. Milton is especially concerned with this, and the pursuit
of knowledge. I wrote an essay once where I argued that Milton, over the course
of his writings, seemed to veer away from earlier proclamations that knowledge
was the source of some kind of happiness or understanding. I said that Paradise
Lost advocated for the idea that the happiest we will ever be is with a
child’s understanding of the world. Adam and Eve lost their innate knowledge
that God is real and sense of belonging in and to this world when Eve ate the
apple, and that was the greatest tragedy of all. It seemed to me that Milton
didn’t care so much about immortality or the pursuit of knowledge towards the
end of his life. He wanted to know he was loved and that the things he believed
in were unmistakably real.
I was at a bar a few weeks ago in
the East Village. It was kind of horrible; filled with men and a pool table and
loud for no apparent reason. I was at the bar trying to order when a man with
black hair and a beard walked up to me.
“I noticed you,” he said. “You
caught my eye.”
I smiled. I didn’t want the
bartender to skip me.
“My name is Abraham,” he said, and I
thought he looked like Abraham Lincoln a bit. Maybe it was the beard. He was
attractive, but not in a way where I felt compelled to flirt.
“My name is Katie,” I said.
I learned that he had just graduated
college—too young for me—and that he was visiting. He seemed impressed that I
lived in New York.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“Very much,” I said.
“Have you been to the Met?” he
asked. “I just went today.”
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s so big that
I feel like I could go back infinitely and still not see everything.”
“What was that?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, louder.
“What did you study in college?” he
asked.
“I was an English and Russian
history major,” I said.
“My favorite poet is John Milton,”
he said. “Do you know him?’
“Yes,” I said. “I took a class on
him in college.”
“Can you repeat that?”
“Yes, I do know John Milton,” I
said.
“Have you read Paradise Lost?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I’ve been to the
Met.”
We parted ways and I went back to
the group of people I was there with.
“I got hit on at the bar,” I said.
“He asked me if I had been to the Met and if I’ve read Paradise Lost.”
I made fun of him a bit, and I felt
bad about it in the moment and afterwards. I wondered what it said about me
that John Milton was the pick-up line. I wanted to ask him, are you as sad as I
am that Eve ate the apple? Do you think it could have all gone on even if she
hadn’t? Isn’t it tragic that Lucifer was so beautiful? Is there anything more
heart breaking than the end of youth? Isn’t it sad how self-assurance fades
with time and suddenly we’re apologizing for our handwriting and not being
forgettable enough?
He would have said: “Do you mind repeating
all of that?”
I am noticeable, I am forgettable.
Perhaps I am both, some kind of optical illusion, like one of those paintings
that is simultaneously a hideous crone and beautiful young woman. Perhaps I
exist most fully on the page. But if that’s true, then Milton was right, and if
he was right about immortality being writing, then maybe he was right that true
happiness is childish ignorance. I don’t think I could bear that.
After I finished my letter, I sat
for a while and thought about them, all of these men who remember and forget me
at ease. I thought about how my sweater is both old and new to me. An old crone
and beautiful young woman; both false, both true.
And then I took a shower and forgot
about all of it for a while.
