I'm a temporary flicker, I'm a leaf in the wind

At an Arts & Humanities divisional gathering several weeks ago, I lingered by the wine with my friends. We all teach at the same small college in our tiny town, and in fact have many of the same students; at a reading, one of mine might walk past me, catch my eye, and say, “Hi Professor,” and a friend in another department might turn to me and say, “You have him in your class, too? Did he show up today?”

We are of varying ages and origins and interests. Most of us are single, social, and united by our willingness to attend events such as this one. Many of us are here as “visitors”; temporary, hired to fill in for someone else on sabbatical, potentially renewable but no promises. The other writing fellow and I arrived here, though, knowing our presence was limited to 9 months. We’ve already seen the job posting for our current positions making the rounds on Twitter.

This gathering in question, at one of the dean’s houses—she doesn’t actually live in it, she just hosts events inside of it—was a mix of familiar faces and faces I’d never before seen in my life. My friends and I pooled together in a circle, drinking our wine and pecking at the snack table. One friend said, “I always think at events like this I should be, like, talking to and meeting new people.”

“I don’t really want to,” I said. “I’m just a temporary flicker here anyway.”

“Every year I fall in love with the writing fellows and every year they leave me,” she said. "

Now that the sun sets at 4:30 and we experienced the first dusting of snow of the season (it was 70 degrees last week!), I’ve been wandering town feeling like a moody wraith. A friend—someone who owns her home and has a permanent position at the university—came over last night. She graciously ate the popcorn that I sort of burned and brought her DVD player with her, so we could watch a DVD, which is something I hadn’t done since high school. We discussed how our town becomes barren during winter break once students, and many members of the faculty, leave for the holidays. My friend isn’t leaving; she works at the library, and it’s only closed for a week. “It’s always funny every year when people come back in January and are like, let’s have a welcome back party!,” she said. “Like, some of us actually live here, you know.”

“I’m but a leaf in the wind,” I said.

A friend, M, and I have been emailing. They’re also a writer. “Yes when will life not feel temporary and when will relationships not feel circumstantial,” they wrote in response to my observations on the fleeting quality of my current lived experience. My life as it is now feels very absorbing, and the relationships I foster every day feel warm and important, but in less than a year I’ll be replaced by some other hungry writer working on their first book, and so in my more ungenerous moments, I wonder why I am trying so hard to know and be known. They’ll call that future fellow “the new Pallavi” for the first week or so, as they did with me, and I’ll be somewhere else, starting all over again.

The knowledge that my presence is temporary somehow imbues everything with both critical importance and insignificance at the same time. I can already tell that the smell of the natural foods store next door—spicy and earthy—will be something I remember; all the times I wandered in there in search of dry lentils or a weird tofu panini. My stupid little strolls around town feel important, like research—like I’m trying to commit not only this place, but who I am in this place, to memory. Who I am in this place feels different than who I was in the last place, the last place, the last place. “Life feels very engrossing day to day but I’m always remembering that I will be out of here so soon and so there’s this premature loss infecting everything, love it,” I wrote to M. It’s difficult to parse which relationships are circumstantial, as M said, and if I think about it too hard, I become unbearably melancholy.

I was invited to dinner with a famous writer the other night. She had come here to give a reading as part of our reading series. One of her novels was the first novel I’d been assigned in graduate school. I’d read it the summer before beginning my studies, during that particular untethered and unrooted phase, when I felt I was on the precipice of some new understanding of myself, if only the fog would clear. I remember taking a photo of a passage she’d written and adding it to an album I have on my phone, a collection of passages that move me. And here she was sitting next to me, drinking pinot noir and eating mushroom risotto. She told a story about her first fancy fellowship, back in the 90s. How she’d arrived to Stanford after driving her beater car across the country, and when she noticed she didn’t have a labeled mailbox in the office, she felt—she really believed—that there had been some mix-up, and that she wasn’t awarded the fellowship after all.

In many ways, I feel like she did—walking around trying to suspend my disbelief that I’m here, while also experiencing a range of day to day emotions that confirm that I am here, that this is my life. It’s not possible to live your whole life in wide-eyed amazement, it’s not possible to feel lucky 24/7. The opportunity that once flooded you with gratitude and levity on an April morning is now, in November, just your life.

I can’t go to the pharmacy and buy meds and candy without being confused for a student in this town. “Get your studying done? It’s snack time, isn’t it?” the lady will say while ringing me up. After asking two of my colleagues what they teach, a tour guide at a local historical site will ask me what my major is. “Pallavi is very young,” one of my colleagues will say to the famous writer after she asks me a question about academic jobs, and I tell her I haven’t had any besides this one. The Xfinity guy who shows up at my apartment to fix my Internet will make me show him my ID so he can confirm I’m above 18, and when he sees my age, he will laugh incredulously.

Every minute I spend not writing—which is a lot of minutes—feels like a waste of opportunity, and the resulting guilt, of course, does not make me feel better. Before I write, I have to look at all my social media feeds and get that task out of the way, because that is definitely a Task, and then I must make sure all my dishes are done, and did I water my plants today?, and I probably should try and read some, and if I haven’t taken a walk yet then I need to because the sun is about to set in an hour, and I also want to watch the new episode of White Lotus and once I watch it it’ll be out of the way, and I need to wash my hair, and what about my lesson plan for tomorrow morning?, and I need to respond to student emails—

The worms in my brain are applying for permanent residency. I don’t understand why I do this to myself when I know that writing will make me feel good? Why do I avoid the good thing? Perhaps because it’s hard. Perhaps because I have a passive interest in self-sabotage. Perhaps because I teach writing and am around writers and think about writing near constantly, and the pressure I place on myself to finish the book is immense and unreasonable. I find myself always in a state of agitation. Life is lived in two modes: writing and not, and in both modes I disappoint myself in different ways. I might never have time like this again, and here I am, reading niche posts on the Wellbutrin subreddit, knowing this will bring 0 enrichment to my life. Why.

Several weeks back, a different famous writer came to read and speak on campus. He spoke quickly and animatedly and passionately about how difficult it is to write a book, and how it doesn’t get easier, and how starting a new book is just as impossible the fifth time as it is the first. I liked him very much. Having one doesn’t make the next one easier, he said. If you are out there trying to write a book, I am right there with you, he said. He read us a Virginia Woolf quote that made my pulse quicken: “I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.” She wrote this in a letter in 1928, nearly 100 years ago, and even reading it again now gives me a bit of a shiver. Breathless anguish! The far side of a gulf!

I have been writing. Not every day, though most days. Some days it feels like a chore, a means to an end, a task to cross off a list. Other days like snorkeling—gliding along a surface, seeing all the strange things that glitter below, diving to move closer, to examine, but always constrained by the need to breathe. I feel for the first time in a long time more able to shed my prior draft, and all feedback I received on it, as I work on the new one. I feel like I’ve finally caught a hold of something slippery and fickle, this voice I’m trying to channel, this sensibility, this subjectivity, this lens. It’s taken months to feel this way. I worry with every paragraph that I’m letting it go, that it’s no longer pure and right. What would she do, think, say, feel? She’s so different from me and in many ways a mystery. It takes effort to keep my own self from seeping in. I like writing guarded people because they’re hiding even from me. I keep picking and pulling. A line from a book I’m reading, A Gate at the Stairs: “I had always felt as hidden as the hull in a berry, as secret and fetal as the curled fortune in a cookie.” Getting to the point where I can crack this person open will be rewarding, I think, but it’s patient and meticulous and annoying work. It’s all very self-indulgent and self-important and mystical (who is this helping? no one) (how is this changing the world for the better? it’s not) but more and more I’m convinced that my mind has little to offer besides whatever this is. Every day I keep trying, every day I keep flinging myself forward towards a feeling I can’t describe but that I recognize.

(Somehow I have a bunch of new subscribers here. Hello! I only know about 10 of you irl. This content took a very long time to load, and I can’t promise that there will be much more or that it will be of any use, but thanks for reading, feel free to not)