‘Well in our country’, said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

1. How to have a panic attack

The most important thing is not to panic.

Some people will tell you that panic is essential. Do not believe them. Sure, you could have a panic attack in the fast lane on the 405 freeway and have to pull over onto the hard shoulder, while traffic goes whizzing past and the misty LA light starts to fade. You might stagger into a hospital, gasping and wild-eyed. There might be tears, flailing, falling. These things might happen: but it’s just as likely to be slower, more subtle. Maybe you won’t even notice. Maybe years will go by before you identify the feeling as something significant.

Lie in bed, on your side, facing the wall. Maybe you’ve taken some yoga classes, maybe someone once tried to teach you to meditate, and you think you can trick yourself into feeling calm. Feel dizzy anyway, maybe because all those times you were “meditating”, you were really just napping in the presence of incense. Feel your heart racing. Wonder if this is what dying feels like. Keep wondering this. Tell yourself that you would know if you were dying, in the same way you know if you’re about to vomit or when you’re hungry or tired. But you don’t know. Worry that you don’t know: is it good or bad that you don’t know? Is not knowing the same thing as knowing?

Wake up in the morning pleased and surprised. Go to bed the next evening not knowing if you’ll survive the night. Repeat until something more interesting happens in your life: you get drunk for the first time, you get a C on a calculus exam and have a meeting with a stern teacher who expected more of you, you get into college anyway, you spend two hours after the prom making out with a boy you didn’t even know you liked, you go to Europe for a month, you move across the country.

2. How to talk to doctors

Go running every day. When winter sets in and it’s too cold to run along the river, start spending your evenings at the gym, which is in a humid basement with a sweat-stained carpet and flickering lights. Run fast, but never very far: your usual distance is four miles on the treadmill, and the funny thing about this is that even four miles later you’re still standing in exactly the same spot. Play your music loudly and try not to look at the television screens flashing news at you. Lift weights sometimes, just the lightest ones, in an attempt to tone your arms, which is something you’ve read about in magazines. Lie on a purple mat and do a few sit-ups and wonder when you’ll start to look like someone who goes to the gym.

Then, at some point, late one evening, begin to feel a pain.

“What sort of pain?” the nurse in the campus clinic will ask you, when you arrive for your appointment and tell her you think you’re going to die.

Tell her you don’t know what sort of pain. Pain, in your chest. That can’t be good, can it? She’ll take your blood pressure, say it’s good. She’ll say you’re a healthy young woman. She’ll want to know if you do any other exercises at the gym. Any weight-lifting? she’ll say.

Tell her: a bit. Not very much though, can’t you tell? You’ll think this is funny, because you’re still pretty scrawny, or at least your arms are. But she won’t laugh; she’ll just say, without missing a beat: well, you’ve probably just pulled something.

Tell her you don’t think you’ve pulled something.

She’ll ask if you have any other symptoms. You’ll say, restlessness, inability to sleep, palpitations – only you won’t know the word for palpitations, so you’ll just say, my heart feels funny. You’ll tell her about that time you went to the ER for something that turned out to be nothing and the attending doctor said he thought you had some sort of heart murmur, and that you should ask your family doctor about it, but you didn’t have a family doctor because you were not from around here and your insurance didn’t cover things like that, so you were asking her about it, now, months later.

She’ll absorb all of this. She’s in her fifties. Maybe she has daughters of her own, college-aged girls. Maybe she thinks you’re crazy. Start to wonder if you’re going to be late for your 3 o’clock class after all. Is this the sort of thing you can get a doctor’s note for? Imagine visiting your professor during office hours, saying, I’m sorry I wasn’t there to discuss Discipline and Punish, I was keeping an appointment to announce my impending death.

Finally the nurse will say, alright, fine, I can refer you to a cardiac specialist. He’ll probably do an EKG, she’ll say. But I still think you’ve probably just pulled something, she’ll add. You have no idea what an EKG is but you’re happy to be taken seriously.

Go home. Look up “EKG”. Start to worry.

Tell your boyfriend that they’re going to hook you up to a machine. A machine! But he’ll be asleep, so you’ll mostly be talking to yourself. A machine!

Arrive at the clinic wary but fully intending to go through with this thing, to find out once and for all what’s wrong, or not wrong, with you. Sit in the grim waiting room. Take stock: note the 70s brown carpet, the dirty yellow walls, the hazy late winter light trying to push its way through greenish-tinted windows. Note that nothing seems very clean, even though nothing is obviously dirty. Keep thinking: oh my God, I need to get home and have a shower. Wonder if heart disease is contagious. Reach for your hand sanitizer; rub the gel between your palms. Wonder if the people working here really work here at all, if the other people in the waiting room – quiet, like shadows – really exist outside of this space. Wonder if you’ll emerge as the same person, or if you’ll emerge at all. When the doctor calls you in, don’t tell him about the heart murmur or the palpitations (you still don’t know the word, and you can’t tell a doctor – a cardiac specialist, no less – that your heart feels funny), just that you’d had a bit of pain in the chest area. Play it down: say, my chest, maybe my shoulder. The nurse thinks it’s just a pulled muscle. The doctor will do some poking and prodding and ask a few questions and in the end he’ll say exactly what you want him to say: that he thinks the nurse is right, you probably pulled a muscle lifting weights at the gym. And because a doctor has said it – even a doctor with an incomplete picture of an incomplete problem, in a dubious clinic populated by ghosts and shadows – it’s okay. Buy a new pair of running shoes on the way home to celebrate.

A few years later, realize that you can Google all your symptoms. Learn the word “palpitations”. Feel immediately better: as soon as you find a word for something, some evidence of it existing, being a thing, it becomes easier to deal with. Visit your doctor. Try to tell him what you think is wrong without actually describing anything: say that you want to do something about the physical manifestations of your anxiety. He’ll think you mean diarrhea, so it will come as a big relief to both of you when you can laugh and say, no, no, heart palpitations, things like that. Things like what? he’ll say. Do you have any other symptoms? You’ll say, Not really. Well, dizziness at night. Sometimes nausea. Shivering, uncontrollable shivering.

Any shortness of breath? he’ll say.

No, you’ll lie.

Fill the prescription. Forget, for years, that you even have this problem. Let it become something that’s past: and forget about that Faulkner quote you once read, the one that says, “the past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” Forget what any of it feels like, so that it can seem new each time it resurfaces.

3. How to fool yourself into thinking you look like a grown up

Get a job, preferably one that you hate, though you could settle for one that you just find boring. Commute. Start to become one of those people who shouts at pedestrians when they walk in front of your bike and realize you’re not angry because someone could get hurt: you’re angry because you’re in a hurry, and you were going at a good clip, and they’ve fucked with your momentum.

Make photocopies and send emails. Become one of those people who distributes agendas before pointless meetings and uses the word “pipeline” regularly. On your lunch break, take a walk and wonder why everyone else looks so much happier than you feel. Catch a glimpse of yourself in the darkened window of a recently-shut shop. Think that you look pretty happy, actually, and that your expensive new haircut certainly looks expensive, or at least it looks expensive if you know how much it cost, which you do, because you paid for it.

Pay your rent. Pay your phone bill. Pay your other phone bill, even though you haven’t used a landline in about ten years. Pay your gas bill. Pay your electricity bill. Pay your credit card bill. Pay for your gym membership. Pay for your groceries to be delivered to your house in the evenings because you just don’t have the time during the day anymore. Go to the bank on a Saturday because you just don’t have the time during the week anymore. Discover that you’re not going to have enough money to pay your rent and your phone bill and your other phone bill and your gas bill and your electricity bill and your credit card bill next month, even though you have a job that you hate (or at least a job that you find boring). Start to dream about work: compose emails in your sleep, look for solutions under your wilted pillow. Wonder if you’re doing it right. See: 1. How to Have a Panic Attack.

4. How to actually be a grown up

Don’t.

5. How to not feel jealous of people who are fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished, and more interesting than you

You could try telling yourself that they’re not fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished or more interesting than you, but you probably won’t believe it, even if it comes from your own trustworthy mouth. Start to resent yourself for trying to deceive you: you don’t deserve to be deceived, even if everyone else is fitter, happier, funnier, prettier, smarter, more accomplished, and more interesting than you. How dare you do this to you! How dare you!

Go to the pub. Sit in the corner. Have a drink and scowl at everyone. Feel marginally better, in an “I feel worse” sort of way. Go home. Go to sleep. Dream about something boring, like buying groceries. Wake up. Think about how everyone else probably has better dreams than you do. Slide into what’s commonly known as a funk, but know there’s nothing common about it: you’re the Queen of Funks, and this is the Funk to End all Funks, and if nothing else – if nothing else! – you can be a superlative failure.

6. How to get out of bed in the morning, even when you don’t want to

Find someone you love who loves you back and will make you a bacon sandwich but refuse to bring it upstairs, even when you say that there is no point in getting out of bed and you’d rather starve because frankly starving would be more interesting than not starving at this point. Wait a few minutes for the smell of bacon to climb the staircase and enter the bedroom. Decide that you’re still not happy with things, that you’re resolutely unhappy, in fact, but that you may as well go downstairs and have the bacon sandwich, as it’s there, because no one else is going to eat it, and it would be a shame to waste a bacon sandwich.

7. How to feel more productive

Stop reading things you don’t want to read. Even that. And yes, if it helps, even this. Also, add things you’ve already done to your to-do list. I know it’s cheating but it still feels good and it will always feel good, no matter what they say.

8. How to feel smug

Don’t own a television. Don’t own a car. Don’t tell people that it’s mostly because you can’t afford these things.

9. How to avoid awkward conversations

Don’t talk to anyone. Ever.

10. How to avoid feeling lonely

Talk to people. Often.

n.b. This originally appeared in GENE 01 last year. Some of it’s fiction. Some of it isn’t. Its alternative title, in my head, is, “It Would be a Shame to Waste a Bacon Sandwich”.

❧

First, let’s get a few things out of the way: I’m a white American female. I went to a private liberal arts college. I’m a (struggling) writer. I’m in my mid twenties. Very probably if the target market for Girls took singular physical form it would look exactly like me. I also understand that a portrayal of a world in which everyone is like me is ridiculous. I understand the exclusionary, maybe dangerous implications of such a portrayal, and I understand the need for criticisms of it: that Girls is too self-centered, too small-minded, fails to represent or even acknowledge huge swathes of society, emphasizes a certain kind of privilege. But this is, nevertheless, the show we’ve been given: the show in which four straight white college-educated chicks from comfortable economic backgrounds try to forge a life for themselves in a big city.

So. The point of Girls, as its name, I guess, is meant to indicate, is that the women depicted in the show are still uncomfortable about their “adult” status. They’re wriggling around in this tight new skin, trying to figure out how to be. They’re all grown up, except they’re not, because no one ever really is. That’s the joke, right? That we’ll still be thinking, “but I feel like such a fraud!” even when we’re successful, when we’re experts, even when we’re in our thirties, or our nineties, for that matter. We’re always still kids, always just faking it.

The anxieties that the women in Girls experience are, largely, anxieties of comparison – the virgin is uncomfortable because her peers are mostly not virgins; the writer is peeved that someone she took a writing workshop with in college has already been published. Some of them are my anxieties, too: when Marnie worries that she’s barren because she’s been sexually irresponsible a few times and has never gotten pregnant, I’m forced to acknowledge that, however irrational it sounds when it’s actually said out loud, I’ve had this exact thought; I know what it’s like to think that way about things entirely beyond your control. Again it’s about comparison; all the anxiety boils down to this fear of having to deal with a situation which is unique or un-mappable, a situation that our worst enemy or our best friend isn’t also in: why is what’s happening to her not happening to me? how do I deal with something different?

On the other hand, there’s this scene, with Marnie and an artist. They’ve left a gallery opening to go for a walk together; they’re standing at an entrance to the High Line. She’s got a boyfriend, but she’s flirting, or fawning – it’s difficult to tell exactly which. She tells the artist she’s not going to kiss him. He tells her he might scare her the first time he fucks her, because, “I’m a man, and I know how to do things. See ya later.”

Cut to Marnie, marching through the gallery to the bathroom, locking herself in, reaching under her dress to touch herself.

What? Is this an earnest commentary on what people our age are meant to feel – turned on by the firm promise of real adulthood, of real men (or women)? Is it a commentary on the ridiculousness of the way we’re condescended to? Or is it just a really, really bad call on Dunham’s part? So yes: Girls is hit or miss, sometimes downright awful; it relies on shorthand in the form of caricature; it’s self-consciously self-conscious to a painful extent; it’s got moments – like the Marnie/artist scene – which are utterly baffling.

Sometimes it’s hit and miss in the same moment. The very first episode – and therefore the series – opens with Dunham’s Hannah, at a restaurant, being told by her parents that they can’t continue to support her financially. There’s a disconcerting instant – why are her parents supporting her? they’ve just been congratulating her on how well her job is going – before we understand that the job in question is an internship – unpaid, of course. The scene is indelicately handled; Hannah’s infantile responses – “But I’m your only child, it’s not like I’m draining all your finances!”, or, “This is nuts. I could be a drug addict. Do you realize how lucky you are?” – do seem to warrant her mother’s final pronouncement: “No. More. Mo-ney,” she says, slowly, as if speaking to a baby. The scene seems to condense all kinds of potential (and potentially serious) problems and anxieties into a single, glib instance; it worries me how easily this could be construed as proof of the idea that there’s a prevalence of whiny, lazy privilege amongst people under the age of 30.

Which I think is largely how it’s been read, either critically (gosh those twentysomethings are entitled!) or sympathetically (yeah, I’m four years out of college and still doing unpaid internships!) – both of which are valid but rather surface interpretations. Because the meat, the heart, is this: here we see, laid bare, the two-faced self, the self that understands intuitively the role of marketing even in times of desperate insecurity, the self split by a desire to look good and a desire to acknowledge a sinking, desperate kind of doubt. One face tells one story, the other another: there’s the young woman, two years out of college, working at a publishing house in New York City, writing a book, being positively encouraged to continue, making it; and then there’s the young woman, two years out of college, without a job, without a book deal or a finished manuscript, relying on her parents in order to sustain herself, adrift. They’re the same person, and neither version is any truer than the other, really.

And this is where Girls does get it right. Last year, after the first episode had aired, and every writer, blogger, and clown with a pen had rushed to dissect it, I tweeted this:

“Wow, just fell down the “responses to HBO’s Girls” rabbit hole. Almost feel like I don’t need to see the show – like it’s been created to be ‘viewed’ remotely, via the medium of hype/criticism.”

I have, now, obviously, seen the show, but I don’t think I was wrong: I think the beauty of it, if you can call it beauty, is that it exists beyond its material form. It’s viewable even if you never watch it.

There’s a point in the third episode where Hannah, back from a reunion with an ex-boyfriend, sits on her bed, composing a tweet. We see the screen as she sees it, the empty box, the potential.

“You lose some, you lose some,” she writes. Delete.
“My life has been a lie, my ex-boyfriend dates a guy,” she writes. Delete.
“All adventurous women do,” she writes. Tweet.

So we literally see Hannah editing (or creating) her own image, forging a version of herself designed explicitly for consumption. What she decides to tweet is not revelatory or even meaningful on its own – but the expression that forms on her face as the words appear on the page suggest Hannah feels she’s hit just the right note. “I am busy trying to become who I am!” Hannah tells her parents at the start of the show, and here we see the evidence of this: we see her, hard at work, trying to become the person she is. And even if no one else is listening, she’s said the kind of thing that person would say.

This performance isn’t notable in itself – we do it all the time, even those of us who never touch a computer or a smartphone, who revile “social media”. But to see it acted out like that is, I think, notable. Perhaps Girls is not significant for being devoid of color, or for having been written by someone who was just 12 when Sex and the City first aired: perhaps it’s significant simply for being the first show of its kind, the first show to have been created in and for a world in which the careful construction of a tweet is as much a part of an encounter with an ex-boyfriend as the actual meeting itself.

Girls gets a lot of things wrong: but it does get this right, almost exactly, painfully right. The biggest anxiety of all, it seems to suggest, is not the one about how to be, but how to appear to be. How to enact that appearance. How to look like the person you want to be, even if you’re not that person, even if you never can be, because, remember, underneath, like the duck gliding serenely across the pond but paddling furiously underwater, we’re all faking it anyway. Girls is bigger than itself; it is also its critical context, a product of its own hype. You could watch it, I guess, without having read a thing about it, but I think you’d be missing something. I think it was created deliberately for an audience who watch with the noise turned on, who contribute to that noise – I think that’s its natural environment. I think you can read about it without watching it, and still be watching it, but it would be harder to watch it without reading about it and still be watching it.

p.s. I haven’t seen any of the second series yet

❧

In November we spend a week in the countryside, looking after children and animals and a great big farmhouse. The bathtub is so large that I can’t comfortably read in it; I stretch out, my full length, and my toes just touch the end of the tub, while the top of my head brushes the other. There’s certainly no way to negotiate a way to hold the heavy issue of Vogue I’d planned to leaf through. I come downstairs and say, “the bathtub is too large!” I didn’t know this was a problem you could have, but there you are: a bathtub definitively built for two, not one – or for one much taller than me, at least.

We drive the kids to rugby practice (I stand on the sidelines, watching, trying to understand the rules; he brings me a cup of tepid brown water masquerading as coffee and stands beside me, trying to explain) and pick them up from school. The autumn colours are lingering; “This is the road with the pretty trees!” I keep saying; “This is the A361!” he replies, bemused. The garden is patrolled – or should I say owned – by an aggressive rooster who fears us a lot less than we fear him. Once I’m chased all the way to my car, and then into my car, and I sit helplessly as the rooster continues to peck at the side of the vehicle, and I wonder if I can explain to the rental company that I’m sorry about the dents but have you ever been chased by a rooster?

In the kitchen we’re kept warm by the Aga, charming if inefficient, and one night we sit outside at the pub, jackets pulled tight around us, the dogs on leashes yapping at every passing leaf. It seems odd that we are grown-up enough to be actually acting as grown-ups; that is, to be the people in charge, even when we don’t feel up to the challenge, even when we feel quite like children ourselves, wanting to be taken care of, to ignore the world, to succumb to the belief that if I can’t see them they can’t see me. Most of adulthood, if I’m understanding it correctly, is about this kind of surprised realisation of accidental, arbitrary authority. I am alarmed as much by the prospect of being in such a position as by our apparent capability: not that we are brilliant at being the only grown-ups in the house, or even totally competent, just that I had always expected that this was something you’d have to be meticulously taught, something that didn’t come naturally, something that only years of practice (and the kind of confidence you only get from having Done Something Substantial – started a brilliant career, had kids, bought a house, whatever) could equip you for. At one point, over-tired, I turn to him and say: “I don’t want to be responsible anymore!” But we are, irrevocably, and so we bear our responsibility responsibly.

It bothers me a little that we can’t seem to be this way just for ourselves, that we need to be needed in order to act our age; but then, I think, who can, really, who does act their age, except when it’s required?

***

Back at home, I read the proofs of my book and let piles of post and other work stack up on my desk. The rain is coming down hard outside. I look out at the almost-bare cherry tree, black against the bland grey sky. A few leaves still cling to the branches; they shiver violently in the wind and remind me of fish, suspended on hooks. A sinister image for a seemingly sinister day (a big black fly has taken up residence in my study; its constant buzzing causes me to feel overly anxious). But later the rain stops and the clouds break apart and there is just one fresh hour, before nightfall, when it is warm and radiant out after all.

***

One weekend in December we come home to discover that friends have brought us a small Christmas tree, from a farm in Wales. It smells cool and fresh and I find a pot for it and give it warm water. I have this very particular image of a memory (or memory of an image) which isn’t mine: my parents’ first Christmas tree, the first Christmas tree that they had together in the first house they lived in together, before I was born. It’s a photograph, from the mid-1980s, I guess, or thereabouts. Slightly faded, in that particular yellowy faded way that photos get, with thick white edges. My father is on a bicycle, in shorts and a long-sleeve top (this is California, after all), with the Christmas tree tucked under one arm, or maybe balanced in the palm of his hand. His other hand is on the handlebars. For some reason the poignancy of that moment, frozen arbitrarily by my mother’s camera, and the memory I have (which may not even be real) of being told the story of that tree, has instilled in me a sense that this is a very special occasion, this first tree. So I’m happy to have it, even if it’s extraneous. Ours is about the same size as theirs was, though I’m not sure I’m quite a confident enough cyclist to have been able to carry it home by bike. I buy a string of cheap fairy lights from the hardware store and tell everyone I know that after five Christmases together we finally have our first Christmas tree.

***

The shops are full and the streets clogged with people buying things, but at the same time it feels like everyone has evacuated the city. The houses on either side of us have gone dark and quiet. At the pool, I have a lane all to myself. I go to the library in search of a particular book, and even though there’s nobody else about, I receive whispered directions from the librarian; I turn the pages silently; I muffle a sneeze. While I’m reading it gets dark, and by the time I unlock my bicycle the stars are out. A fingernail-clipping moon hangs over All Souls. The Iffley Road, deserted, seems wider and longer than usual. I’m tired when I get home: I need to pump my tires.

***

The Saturday before Christmas, we drive up to Suffolk for a wedding. This is a crazy thing to do; I know it’s a crazy thing to do, he knows it’s a crazy thing to do, but we do it anyway, because this is what being young is all about: driving to other people’s weddings three days before Christmas. Someday the kids of the people whose weddings we’re constantly attending now will be having their own weddings and they will do the same sorts of things and we’ll laugh and say, “what a stupid thing to do!” and then, presumably, feel humbled by our own forgetfulness, our own antiquity. Anyhow I rent a car and we dump our finery in the boot (me: a silk merlot-coloured dress and a pair of diamond and sapphire earrings that used to belong to my grandmother; him: a black suit, reluctantly, after discovering that the jacket that accompanies his kilt has been decimated, since he last wore it five years ago, by hungry moths) and drive to Suffolk. Towards the end of our journey we pull over and change in the car, and then we drive for twenty minutes or so down narrow, flooded roads to this little old church perched on a hillside. There’s nothing else around; we’re not far from the coast, and there’s an edge-of-the-world feeling, or an end-of-the-world feeling, perhaps, even though the Mayan apocalypse was yesterday and we’re still here. I complain about the parking conditions (I drive the car up a steep muddy bank at the side of a field, like everyone else; he tells me I’m still sticking out; I tell him that’s tough, I can’t move, the wheels are stuck, we’re going to be fucked when we want to get out, if they didn’t want people to block the road they shouldn’t have chosen to get married here, blah blah blah). My high heels, and they’re very high indeed, sink into the mud as we walk to the church. We’re shown to pews and given candles to hold, and as it grows dusky outside the church window is stained bluer and bluer. After the couple is married we try to light Chinese lanterns, but there’s a strong wind and only a few of them take to the dim sky. The reception is in a school gymnasium, decorated with fairy lights and bunting. We eat roast pig and spend two hours ceilidh-ing; I take my heels off and develop a blood blister the size of Alaska on the ball of my right foot. I haven’t had a blood blister of any note since I was a freshman in high school, when I was on the track team.

We take about an hour to say goodbye to people, moving slowly around the room. Then we start driving again. At first it’s quite pleasant; we feel very adult, sober, leaving the party before midnight, driving away, chatting away. We turn the radio on, the rain has stopped for awhile, we take the gentle curves of the B roads smoothly, like in a car advert, passing through little villages, past trees, hedges, fields. On Radio 4 there’s a programme on about William Carlos Williams. Various people read out bits of his poems; I remember my mother reading me “This is just to say” when I was little.

“Forgive me/they were delicious”

“He was a doctor,” I remember out loud. (So was Chekhov, I’ve just learned, which makes me feel a little better about my own sort of double life, if also somewhat abashed). There’s this pleasing period where we’re just driving along on these British roads, listening to people talk about William Carlos Williams, whose poems I recognise from my own American childhood, who I knew was a doctor as well as a poet, and we remind me of what I imagined adulthood should look like during that American childhood: we become, briefly, the thing that no one ever really is. Then eventually we’re out on bigger roads, and the rain is falling harder, the visibility is poor, and the mood is tenser, because I can feel how little control I actually have over any of it – the car, the weather, the million little stresses – and because we’re both tired, and suddenly wondering if we’ve been a bit ambitious. The roads are virtually empty, though, and finally we get where we’re going for the night.

The next day, driving down the M11, the sun breaks through the clouds and I ask for my sunglasses, and there’s a moment on Desert Island Discs, just after Dawn French talks about her mother’s funeral, when Etta James is singing “At Last”, that feels particularly sweet. And when we get back to Oxford we have our little Christmas tree, and leftover beer from an impromptu party earlier in the week.

***

Since my pool is shut until the new year, I go for a swim at the community pool off the Cowley Road. I’m secretly hoping for Christmas music, like last year, but there’s just generic Radio 1-ish music coming through the speakers. At one point, about halfway through my swim, I recognise “Gangnam Style,” which I last heard in a grubby nightclub (is there any other kind?) in central Oxford on a Saturday night. The pool is basically empty: there’s a lifeguard sitting on the bleachers with his head in his hands, one man doing laps in the next lane over, pleasingly just a little bit slower than me, and an elderly man in the big slow lane, paddling doggedly up and down the length of the pool, looking disturbingly, desirably serene to me, with my pounding heart.

***

On Christmas eve, we take a bus into town and do all our shopping. It’s raining hard but it’s also unseasonably warm. In the covered market we run into some friends and pause to say hello next to a hanging deer carcass. Later we split up to buy gifts for each other and reconvene at the King’s Arms. I have half a pint of bitter; when I complain of hunger he buys us a pickled egg and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, puts the egg in the bag, shakes it up.

***

I like the long stretch between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, particularly when we’re not at home, are excused, for a time, from the daily indignities of responsibility (“What’s making the fridge stink? Is this broccoli too old to eat? Can I borrow 55p? I hope the postman didn’t notice that I’m not wearing anything under my dressing gown. I hope we remembered to put the right bin outside. I hope that red wine I just poured all over the front room won’t stain the floorboards.” and so on). One day, when everyone else has gone out for a little while, I go into the garage and use the cross-trainer for half an hour. It’s an old machine that someone rescued from a skip and it makes an awful creaking noise, like it’s too tired to go on, it wished we’d left it well enough alone so it could rot slowly in the persistent English rain, but eventually I get used to it, and my boredom transforms itself into exercise-induced elation. I listen to music and feel pleasantly, mildly high, even though in reality there’s little as mind-numbing as using a piece of gym equipment in the corner of someone’s else’s garage, with nothing to look at but stacks of old boxes and children’s bicycles, long retired, leaning up against the walls, and bottles of wine and vodka on wooden racks. I have a memory of being in college, using the campus gym, which was in a basement and stank of sweat but sure as hell beat running outside in the middle of a Boston winter. It was also a social thing, a bit of a game. I ran very fast on the treadmill and was always gratified to see someone I knew there, a friend from class, a boy I almost-liked, someone whose presence, whose acknowledgement of my presence, validated the efforts I was making. Otherwise I was just running in place for an hour, working up a sweat but going nowhere.

❧

I’ve been traveling. Or at least this is what I tell people. The truth is that when we arrive at LA neither of us feels different or amazed in the way you feel different and amazed to discover yourself someplace entirely new. The air is warmer and heavier than it was in the place we left; in England there was a summer wind, blowing big clouds across a narrow sky, whipping my freshly-washed hair around my face. But we have a history here – if not here specifically then here generally, in this part of the world – and the pleasantness of familiarity borders on mundanity. We take a shuttle to the Hilton and check in. Everyone is cheerful, and the mirrored elevator whisks us up a dozen floors. Our room looks out over a parking lot. Anonymous lights flicker and blink in the distance. We’re in a no-man’s-land. Hard to believe this place ever had any other purpose, though it must have, once. We fall asleep with the TV on – a film with Russell Crowe, I think, or someone like him, playing a cop in 1970s America. He’s yelling at a junkie in an ambulance when I nod off.

We wake very early; no spectacular sunrise, just a dark grey that lightens as the invisible sun moves behind a curtain of June clouds. I ride the elevator to the pool. There are two men splashily attempting laps as I swipe my card and enter the gates, but they soon leave and I have the place to myself. The pool is shallow, and so small that within six strokes I can cross it lengthways. But the water is warm, and the air outside is cool and the overall sensation is soothing.

***

Orange County is a source of perpetual amazement. In Garden Grove, Anaheim, Santa Ana, I think: people made it this way. But how would you ever know that it was people and not robots, that it was meant for human inhabitants, that it was deliberate at all? Do you see any humans? Do you see anything that’s human-sized? No. You see the drive-thru ATM, the drive-thru coffee shop, the strip malls, the six-lane streets, the parking lots. Even the Crystal Cathedral, with its garish screen announcing services and its spires pricking a white sky, is too big, meant I suppose to contain multitudes but destined, I fear, to look comically (or tragically) like a cartoon version of itself. Where they exist, the sidewalks are hot and narrow, stained by chewing gum and spilled McFlurries, interrupted every few feet by curb cuts. We pass hamburger joints, hospitals, hotels. Nothing seems particularly busy, but there are always cars pulling in and out and people must be inside the cars, compelled to keep moving by some obscure motive or other – errands, lunch breaks, breakdowns. There are people behind counters and cash registers, taking money, making money. We repeatedly seek respite in the old part of Orange, where antique shops and cafés and wide shady spaces make us feel welcome, even a little nostalgic. I fall briefly and irrationally in love with a vintage 1940s swimsuit, made of thick navy blue wool with red straps, “a really rare piece,” the girl in the shop tells me, smiling encouragingly but understandingly; it belongs in a film, or a frame. So I pretend that if I had lots of money, or even any money, this is the sort of thing I would impulsively spend $250 on.

***

I watch episodes of Friday Night Lights and feel nostalgic for small town Texas, even though I’ve never set foot in Texas, even though I’ve never been to a high school football game. My high school mascot was the earwig, which inspired very little spirit in anyone, and all the boys played lacrosse, although certainly not well enough to be state champions. People weren’t really from there, anyway: it was mostly a boarding school, and everyone scattered at the end of each year to go home or to college. I flip through old yearbooks; I note that in my senior year, I was voted ‘most likely to succeed’, alongside a male counterpart. As I was never sure, and still am not sure, what it is I’m supposed to succeed at, I doubt I’ve lived up to the challenge yet. (My primary achievement so far, apart from moving far away and finding somebody who continues to love me even though I never put the bread back in the bread bin, seems to be writing a book centered largely around the idea of changing definitions of success). The boy voted most likely to succeed now, I believe, works in finance, which sounds much more like something approaching success, particularly if success involves being able to pay your rent on time.

I revisit the valley where I went to school. The uncertainty of my relationship with the place now is based on the understanding that I know almost no one here anymore: there’s little chance of a chance encounter, one of those movie scenes where you’re standing at the counter picking up your mother’s prescription and someone taps you on the shoulder and says ‘oh my god, I can’t believe it’s you!’. I keep thinking about how different everything is – none of the places that used to be here are here anymore – but at the same time nothing’s really different. It’s not the same salon, but it’s the same old story, or a version of it – this time it’s the hairdresser’s husband, not the hairdresser herself, who was born and raised here.

I drive home, listening to a mix CD I must have made in high school – Jimi Hendrix juxtaposed with Dashboard Confessional. I always did like to be contrary. The sights are familiar and so are the sounds. I turn the volume up, blaring Weezer like I’m 17 and pissed off at nothing in particular but nevertheless enjoying the freedom and the speed and the inherent understanding that all the big decisions are still somewhere on the horizon, not yet made.

As it happens I’m not pissed off at anything and am feeling pretty mellow, driving slower than I used to, pulling over to take bad photos with a borrowed cell phone, momentarily at peace with the big decisions that have already been made. But I still remember the time I hit the squirrel on this stretch of road and the time we discovered that the cows had escaped their pasture on that stretch of road. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately and I wonder why these are things I remember particularly.

❧

Then, just a few years ago, I realized that everyone feels secretly fraudulent. It’s the feeling of being an adult.

- Miranda July, “Free Everything”, The New Yorker, October 10th, 2011

❧