Postcards from the Edge

1) "Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway. Besides, what was I supposed to do? He came up to my room and gave me that dumb stuffed animal that looks like a thumb, and there I was lying in bed twelve hours after an overdose. I wasn't feeling my most attractive. I'd thrown up scallops and Percodan on him the night before in the emergency room. I thought that it would be impolite to refuse to give him my number."



2) "I feel so agitated all the time, like a hamster in search of a wheel. I'm consumed with panic that everyone will find out about this and hate me, or laugh at me, or worst of all, feel sorry for me. Pity me for taking my Everything-That-a-Human-Can-Possibly-Be-Offered and turning it into scallops and Percodan on the emergency room floor.

I can see where people would think that my life is great, so why can't I feel it? It's almost like I've been bad and I'm being punished by rewards—this self-indulgent white chick whose inner voice says, 'Look how spoiled you are. Go on, have another great thing. What are you gonna do about it, huh? What are you gonna do about it?'

The thing about having it all is, it should include having the ability to have it all. Maybe there are some people who know how to have it all. They're probably off in a group somewhere, laughing at those of us who have it all but don't know how to.

The positive way to look at this is that from here things can only go up. But I've been up, and I always felt like a trespasser. A transient at the top. It's like I've got a visa for happiness, but for sadness I've got a lifetime pass. I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere."



3) "I talked to my agent and ended up in tears, which is not my favorite presentation of myself. Crying to my agent. I tried very hard not to, but I didn't have a chance. I've used up all the Not Cry I was issued at birth. Now, it appears, it's crying time.

I talked to my mom briefly. I was afraid that she'd be mad at me for messing up the life she'd given me, but she was very nice. She said a great thing. I told her I was miserable here, and she said, 'Well, you were happy as a child. I can prove it. I have films.'

What went wrong between what she gave me and how I took it?"



4) "'So I met him and we had dinner, and I really felt like he understood me, or at least like he might if he ever stopped talking. I mean, this guy was like the testosterone version of me, and I'm the testosterone version of me, so it was really weird. It was like being with more of myself. You'd think I'd have had enough of myself, but anyway, we had a nice time, and then he wanted me to see his house. I guess I should have known...

'And I didn't even have contraception. What was I going to do, wear my diaphragm to the restaurant? It's so embarrassing when they know you knew it was going to be sex. It's like, sometimes I try to be contemporary and modern, and on some level I just don't agree with anything I'm doing. So I told him I wasn't comfortable having sex with people I'd just met, and he seemed to get it. He said, 'Why don't you stay the night?'

'So I stayed over, and we necked for a while and it was nice. At one point we were kissing, and he said, 'This would be a great shot of you.' He told me that when he was in India he looked at the Himalayas and said, 'Great shot!' And he was there. It's like we don't know we're there anymore. We're so detached from our own experience, and so into how we can use that experience. As we're having it, we're putting it into another medium. Life is the largest medium we've got, and we want to put it in these smaller ones, to get it down to scale...'"



5) "When they'd first started seeing each other, she'd been unable to remember anything he said. She'd wondered if and when his words would stick, and what the sentence would be. Then, in the space of a week, she'd recalled three sentences of his. Random ones, but it was a beginning. First there was 'I talked to my friend Roy on Friday—I told you about Roy, didn't I?' Then, 'I run five miles a day.' And there was something else about chili dogs, but she couldn't remember the exact phrase. She was also making strides toward remembering what he looked like. She'd have a sudden image of his face while waiting for the light to change, or sitting in the bath.

Sometimes she disliked the sight of his feet, or the glint of his glasses when the light hit them at a particular angle, or the sensation of hearing him use a word that she didn't know the meaning of. But then she'd smell his soft Jesse smell, or he'd read something to her about some South African riot, or she'd watch him bent over his typewriter making a correction, and she'd think, 'He's mine. I own him.' Or, in a healthier vein, she'd feel a sense of belonging, a corny feeling that embarrassed and thrilled her."