phoenix {rising}
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Revolution
<<2004-06-04 - 10:22 a.m.>>

I don't think, whatever else I might have thought when I was thirteen and thought these kids were just the coolest thing ever, that I would end up in a 9th Avenue bar at two in the morning drinking Brooklyn Lager and part of their pulsating, amoebic crowd. Liba's friend Lily (from Maui, beautiful) suddenly looked up and her face was a tense scrim on which her words unfolded—she told us she's had a revolution (she meant revelation). She said this was different, that she'd never thought she could live in a city, but tonight had changed her mind—just watching you all, she said, interacting with each other, having such a good time—I think I could live here. We sat in our dark nook and put our glasses on a glass table and Lin would stop by and perform brief snippets of personality and people would get up and people would come back and we ate cherries and drank and I was quite content. But Lily's revolution was important to me: it meant that it's not that I am in some way inept, it's just that I have had it easy—I've had a good thing in New York all my life, a big smart independent-minded ambitious tender funny social circle and it's hard to give up good things.

Leaving New York never stops being gut-wrenching.

This summer I plan to get through as much Nabokov as possible. A worthy goal. I also plan to sit in smoky bars all night and grope my way into semi-fluency. The funny thing is the aloneness, how important it is to the experience. I talked to Moira this morning and she says she'll feel better when I'm there—and I'm glad she'll be there when I get there, but this is me on my own. On the phone she said something about how she tends to think, and how she thinks I probably tend to think, oh, I'm tough and independent, I can do this and only later realize about the missing. (Wrong!) But the point is, I am flying alone and living alone (i.e. not with good friends, for the first chunk) and I will be very far away from everything and very close to everything else and yesterday reading guidebooks I suddenly wanted very badly to go out and dance all night (there's no statutory closing time in Berlin) and wrote down the names of clubs that looked interesting. Then I left the bookstore and bought shoes in which to do it.

I am losing my voice. No, literally.

Maybe when I come back I will be tough and independent. (I'll still miss.)

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