Dear Simone de Beauvoir,
I am dazzled by pleasure, too. I felt what you felt
when you were in Los Angeles: alive and connected and utterly hedonistic. When
I was growing up in Kensington, I felt most alive when I watched a drug deal
between my little brother and the boy who took my virginity. You might think
that sounds masochistic; it may be. Feeling alive has always been connected
with pain, for me. I felt so much growing up: a million miles south, and then
back to the center, for me, for the unknown them, for all of us.
I identified so much with what you
said on page nine: “I walk between the steep cliffs at the
bottom of a canyon where no sun penetrates: it's permeated by a salt smell.
Human history is not inscribed on these carefully calibrated buildings: They
are closer to prehistoric caves than to the houses of Paris or Rome.” My youth
is saturated with smells of decay and destruction; the only remains are my
graffiti-ed poems on walls I never want to own.
The first time I cared about staying
alive was when I understood that I am on borrowed time. You talk about time on
page three hundred and eighty five: “[Americans] want to know only a present
that’s cut off from the flow of time, and the future they project is one that
can be mechanically deduced from it, not one whose slow ripening or abrupt
explosion implies unpredictable risks. They believe in the future of a bridge
or an economic plan, not the future of an art or a revolution.”
For a long time, I only cared about
the future of my bridge. How will I
get from my living situation to another way of life? It took crossing my bridge
and finishing college to acknowledge time outside of the next big step. I was
sitting in a park watching couples fall in and out of love and families break
bread and dogs wander back to their owners when I realized that this is it, in
the fullest, most tangible sense of what it means to inhabit our bodies and our
lives. There is no road trip: not for me, not anymore.
-Bess
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