Some Habits

2005/2006 Juneau, Alaska: I take the bus home from school and walk up Bonnie Doon Street to Marguerite Street. The road is potholed and the hill is steep enough that, at fifteen years old, I can’t ride my bike up it. But I don’t mind because I have no interest in bicycles or physical activity. I don’t like to work hard. The house where I live is the more northern side of a camel-colored duplex with a red/brown trim. From the front it looks like the house is mostly garage, extending out from the house part like a beer gut. The rhubarb that was there when my mother, brother, and I moved in is doing well, becoming more voluminous every day. On the other side of the door inside the house is a three-year-old golden retriever who needs to pee but who won’t remember that when he sees me because he’s so happy. His name, Teelo, comes from a children’s book about a cat who learns to drive a sailboat. I let him out and throw his tennis ball for him with minimal enthusiasm. His face is wide and smiling and I love him although I truly believe his brain is empty. At fifteen I am harsh and unsympathetic. Inside, I make myself an English muffin—cinnamon raisin—toasted at the highest setting, topped with velvety margarine. I am excited about the food and relieved to be home. I take it back to eat in front of the oil heater. The heater is in the dining area and my back rests against a set of wooden magazine-holders fashioned to the wall. They are uncomfortable and the wood bars across in them dig into my back. It gets almost too hot when the heater kicks on and it turns the skin on my arms pink, but it feels good. The high school I attend is the only one in town and was recently remodeled. The newly-completed atrium is admittedly impressive but also extremely drafty and somehow impersonal; the whole building, even some of the warm, small classrooms, has me craving heat throughout the day. I read my brother’s comics: not the regular, classic comic books, but the collections of comics strips from the newspaper: Foxtrot, Zits, Sherman’s Lagoon. The story arcs are more enjoyable when you don’t have to wait a full week to find out that Jeremy’s mom is actually going to be really cool and understanding about him going to a no-parents party. I read for a while, then get up and make a second English muffin. Some days I have a third, but today it’s getting dark fast. It’s November. I sigh deep and find my coat and boots, the dog’s leash and a plastic bag. The dog leaps and wiggles, whines, whaps my legs with his messy tail.

2007/2008 Juneau, Alaska: My brother is a freshman in high school now. I give him rides to school and yell at him when he won’t wear his seatbelt. NOT IN MY GODDAMN CAR I say, imitating myself as mother, because I’m the voice of reason. We don’t come home at the same time, though. He has after-school activities or friends to hang out with. I am fumbling my way through the last math class I am required to take: Algebra II/Trigonometry. To say that I am fumbling, actually, is quite generous. The darkness of the season is exhausting and I’ve taken to napping as soon as I come home, just for an hour or so. Then I pull myself out of bed feeling much worse than before. My homework station is my desk, which used to be the kitchen table before we moved and had to find a small one to fit our new small home. My room is the biggest and can accommodate the table. I have carved my initials into it as well as several designs I find charming: yin-yangs, bunny heads, spirals. I am a designer. One thing I’ve found that I do like about math is that I am able to do my homework while listening to music without it being a distraction. My jams include various mix CDs from my friends, and the soundtrack to the movie Holes. I sit and draw parabolas, not understanding what the curves mean, where the numbers live. I rub my head. My mom calls DINNER.

2009/2010 Eugene, Oregon: I live in an apartment complex which sits among other apartment complexes housing college students. Our apartment is not nice, but I do not know yet that it is not the worst place I will live. I am seeing a boy I met in my ballroom dancing class. I am a community college student and I am loving every second of it. I am only enrolled in three classes; the others are wilderness first aid and beginning drawing. I live with my friend, Erin, a Japanese major at the University of Oregon who I know from Juneau. The boy from the dancing class is a deadbeat dad from Idaho who is sloppy and inconsiderate but has good hair and a good laugh and is liked by people I think are cool. He lives in an actual house with two roommates, and I take the bus from my complex to the downtown bus station to get to his house. It’s almost always dark when I’m on the bus; usually I pack clothes with me so I can leave to go to class directly from there, or else I have to get up early and take the bus home, then back to downtown, and then to school, which is a “commuter campus” and therefore out of town by a few miles. When I’m riding the bus, I take notes. Every entry looks the same: I notice the time, the route and bus number, and a few lines of my impressions of the bus driver. The boy I am seeing does not care for the bus, but I love it. He and I smoke weed and watch movies and fuck. He eats fast food a lot and always asks if I want anything and I always say no. I steal a few of his fries and go to bed high and hungry. I feel mystical.

2012/2013 Marshall, Minnesota: I have committed myself to a gym schedule from which I will not deviate, mental health be damned. As the region’s lovely late summer has transitioned into a snap-morninged fall which has given way to biting winds pushing insubstantial whorls of snow around on the pavement like cornstarch. Daily, at 5 a.m. I pull myself out of bed and I do fifty crunches, hold a plank for one minute, do fifty bicycle crunches, do ten pushups. I am obsessed with the simple implications of musculature forming on my arms. The way I seem to be shaving layers of my body off, especially my hips and belly. I change from pajamas to shorts and a t-shirt and add fleece pants and a sweatshirt. I walk to the kitchen and make a mug of black coffee with my single-cup drip setup. No cream, although some days I do want it. I fry one egg in butter and salt the shit out of it. I take my planner out of my pack and flip to the front. I write “Black coffee and one egg cooked in butter with salt—90.” The coffee stays in the freezer for a minute or two while I go to the bathroom to pull my hair back into a low bun and stretch a hat on over it. It is nearing the low teens in the morning even without the wind chill. Every thought I have I allow to dance and ping around in my brain and work through five or six times. I wonder if this is because of all the empty space here. The coffee has been drunk and with my winter coat and mittens added to my layerings, I am out the door and on my way. I ride in the absolute dark and the streets are empty, or maybe there is one car. Red and bright white flashers and a light on the front tell me and motorists where I am. Contrary to my perceptions, they’re saying it has been a mild winter. The streets are, at least, fine to ride on. I go directly through town on my way to campus, past the main street intersection and onto the road lined with chain restaurants and a few local businesses. There is a vacuum repair shop, a coffee house, a gas station called Super America which I will forever find fitting and hilarious, although it’s not yet a fully-realized irony. Once the brick buildings of campus come into sight, I make a hard left and lock my Trek on a rack in front of a set of doors. I take in the building’s warmth as I enter, removing my hat and coat. Inside the campus fitness center, a relatively small, nubby-carpeted room, I swipe my student ID and try to force a smile at the softball player behind the desk. She is one of five different people, but always blonde, always with a school sweatshirt. On the right side of the room are mirrored walls, a rack of weights, and cushioned mats. In the middle of the room are treadmills, elliptical machines, and a few bike machines. The far left side is weight machines; the front wall is windows that look out onto what might be the campus green (the campus dirt-brown); paths cut through short hills. The back wall is a wooden thing with spaces below for backpacks and shoes, and on top are magazines: Women’s Health, Fitness, GQ, Vogue. Sometimes there are more interesting ones but usually the standard is health-related. My routine will include more floor exercises along with weight machines and exactly thirty minutes on the elliptical.

Elfin Cove, Alaska 2012: My father has graciously (his own words) fixed up the former floathouse, which now sits on pilings, for me to use as my groovy bachelorette pad (his words). It has a wood-burning stove which can only swallow kindling-sized pieces of wood at a time, electricity, running water, and a bathroom area with a toilet that doesn’t work, but what difference does that make? Just drag the bucket in there—it’s got those walls up to your waist, that’s all yah need. I sleep on springy, narrow couch and I have learned to ignore the mildew smell. Most nights I go to bed slightly stoned, writing letters to friends or making up stupid stories for myself in my head. I set the alarm on my cell phone for 4 a.m. When it goes off in the morning I rise and add another pair of pants and another sweater to my outfit. I smell like I’ve been keeping fish corpses in my pockets and maybe rubbing them on my head and the insides of my thighs. Sometimes I wonder if I don’t do this when my mind isn’t watching. I grind beans and make a thermos of coffee. I do five pushups, fifty crunches, and hold a plank position for one minute. I grab my rain gear, three sizes too big, and my coffee, and shut my floathouse door. It is technically morning although it is almost completely dark. I walk the trail around town, pushing back the wetness hanging off of blueberry and salmonberry bushes that crowd the trail.