I’m sitting in the bathroom, my hair saturated in a static knot of bottled cetearyl alcohol/propylene glycol/hydrogen peroxide that will magically reopen into a perfect shade of dark ash brown, transformed into its own naturally beautiful reflective tones and shines. Like a gleaming mushroom. I’m wearing a brown tank top with some bike shorts I put on last night in the half attempt to go running. I never made it out the door. Now it’s 5:07 PM on a Saturday in September and all I’m doing is laying here on the soft linoleum of the bathroom tiles wearing black and brown, when I hate black and brown, trying to ignore the fact that a million things were supposed to happen today, a million things that were supposed to spring up out of my to-do list and transform into clean laundry and finished chapters and sparkling, completed projects.
Every morning of my life for the past two years I’ve prayed to God to help me
accomplish everything that needs to be accomplished. Every night I’ve fallen asleep prayerless, disappointed. I asked my roommate for advice on how to pile as much as possible into a single day. She responded that she thinks the words “productive” and “efficient” should be applied to machines, not people.
The problem is, I often think of myself as a machine.
I wonder about isolating myself. I imagine living in a white factory box, far away from the clatter and tangling roar that is Distraction. It is glowing inside. Work springs out from small holes littering the walls like a cascade of Christmas lights, slithering smoothly and rhythmically in beat to my working hands and brain and heart. Papers fly out into the sky, projects gather in neat, glistening heaps, and my box floats closer and closer towards future happiness, towards paradise, towards perfection.
In my life of twenty-two years, I have only had one day of perfect productivity. I was fifteen years old. It was Thanksgiving break. I shut myself in my bedroom, the closest I had to reigning over a Utopia, to controlling time, every element, even the percentage of oxygen in the air. My room was shining, yellow walls, warm, and I put on Rach 3. I had discovered classical music for the first time a few months before, and I had all faith in the idea that it could solve miracles. I pulled out my to-do list, type faced in the thick, linear hand-writing I had been obsessing at for months, and finished everything in consecutive order, putting a satisfying 45 degree check next to each item when I was through. At the end of the day, I felt like I had conquered the world. I was on top of everything, I controlled everything – no, I was everything. I suppose part of me wants to be everything?
“There's an excess in the universe, a much-ness, a too-much-ness,” says Li-Young Lee. I read that line this summer while lying on a cot on the floor, bathed in pools of sweat. My laptop breathed the words out in a steady stream of heat, warming my bed into a red-glowing ember that captured the swells of humidity radiating from the air of summer, of a pulsating Korean summer. The heat was comfortingly oppressive. I reached towards it.
There is an excess in the universe, there is an excess in the universe, there is an excess in the universe. I feel like I’ve carved those words into my arms, into my stomach, into the ticking beats of my heart, long before I knew to think them, long before I knew what they could even mean. There is an excess, and I am part of that excess, and I want all of that excess. I want to do everything and be everything and be a part of everything, and when it doesn’t happen I want to smash my poorly reconstructed body into a heap again, watch the porcelain pieces fly and flutter futilely to the ground, dare them to resurface. I know if I do, they will. It is a guarantee, one of the few guarantees I know, that if I break I will always recover.
I learned how to swim when I was six years old. My mother signed me up for lessons during our summer visit to Seoul, and I would smile up at her through blue-tinted goggles and blow chlorinated bubbles that tasted mysteriously sweet on my peering tongue. When we took our annual family trip to the grand hotel in Gyeounju, I put on my yellow and white polka dot swimsuit, the one that had a cut out in the front that revealed, when I bent over, my belly button. I was embarrassed of this. I wrapped myself in a towel, spun through the red-carpeted halls, flung myself free into the glorious outdoor pool that was flooded in green, red, and purple lights. My mother slipped in more quietly.
Swim to me, she commanded.
I kicked forward off the wall, undulating, nascent to the wondrous world of blue and wet. I reached longingly, hopefully toward the peach pillars of her faraway legs. She stepped slowly backward. I kicked harder, imagining myself a mermaid, feeling my hair wrap like gentle seaweed tendrils around my naked shoulders. She stepped back again. Ever further. Out of reach.
I never learned how to say no. I never learned how to say no in high school when my back began to fold with the weight of my books, supplies, music, bags. I never learned to say no when I began waking at five for swim practice, left half way for chamber orchestra practice, triple scheduled Korean school and youth symphony and lifeguarding on Saturdays, desperately reading chapters from my AP European History or Music Theory or Chemistry book at stoplights in the car. I never learned to say no when I signed up for three different orchestras and violin lessons and piano lessons and service clubs and varsity swim team. It was for college.
It was necessary. I never learned how to say no as a freshman at BYU when I jumped into the premed track and signed up for 20 credits of science classes and chemistry research and symphony orchestra and volunteer tutoring and work.
If I said yes, I was in control. If I put my feet into everything, if I stomped them about here and there, I had a chance at perfection. If I poured so much into my hours that the minutes creaked with the pain of their load, I could declare myself the queen of the universe. The universe of excess, the universe of my reality, the universe where I did all this so that I could be in control, or praised, or hurt - I’m not sure which. Sometimes the hurting was the most comfortable thing. Sometimes the forced insomnia and the stressed warbling was so comfortingly aching that I clung to it, itching for the sting.
Of course, I broke. Of course, I broke so many times over that I fell into a pile of cracked china pieces every evening, patching them together with fraying pieces of scotch tape by morning, begging and praying to hold together again until night, at least, feeling the shards created by the collapses fall into me,
feeling my soul leak out through the holes.
My hair is glistening, shining, the minute half-shade darker I’ve ordered it to become. My laundry is folded into angular towers, my bed sheets have been smoothed, my books and papers have been laid out in parallel intersecting lines: a pile for my science life, a pile for my writing life, a pile for my art life, a pile for my spiritual life. I tap my fingers through my hair and smooth the curling strands into submission with a straightener that raises the coconut-scented moisture into clouds of steam around my face.
I ate a tomato for lunch. The viscous red strands journeyed toward the paper cut on my right ring finger, crawling into the crevice and resting nervously, waiting for me to react. I closed my eyes. I pictured the pieces drifting about in a pink-ish sea encased by porcelain white, pieces that had escaped from my throat after drinking the creamy tomato basil soup a few nights before, the red that had suddenly become foreign and strange and exciting as it swirled and diffused through a bath of lukewarm tap water. Physical or chemical reaction, I had wondered? I had received a 62% on a seventh grade exam because I hadn’t been able to mark the distinction. For months afterward I had quizzed myself, frantically embarrassed at my incompetence, forcing the universe into a dichotomy between the two.
Vomit: chemical. Tomato juice dripping down my arms and elbows and into my fingers: physical.
The warmth of the shower envelops me, soothing and nurturing, chiming its meditative caress in soft drumbeats all over my body. Soap drips from my chin like honey.
Love is all you need, shouts the stereo, singing from a mix made by a dear friend during a recent trip to Florida. We had listened to it in her car while driving down a lane lined with palm trees on our way to swim and splash and laugh for hours in the Atlantic Ocean. Sand still clung to the rubber casing on my ipod.
Love is all you need,
in the world to succeed.I'm driving, having just dropped off and bid farewell to one of my most beloved friends, a person that always helps me remember that the world is, can be, should be, overwhelmingly, gaspingly beautiful. The lights of the city fall like braille across the black of the night. I feel the indentations with my eyes, glide over them with the skin of my pupils. I try to forget the way my mother looked at me this afternoon when she said those words, those words she didn’t mean, those words she apologized for the next day in phrases of
I’m sorry and
I didn’t mean to, those words that hurt so badly I forgot to breathe. Those words I’ve been telling myself, secretly, in the moments I forget that the world can be anything near beautiful.
When I get back home, it’s 7:23, but it feels like the end of time. My feet feel their way up the stairs, press their flesh against the maple of the floor, kick through the luggage I hadn’t even had the chance to unpack. I’d arrived that afternoon to the clattering roar of airborne plates and books meeting in angry tribal dances on the marble of the kitchen floor, and when I’d walked in, when I stood there and reacted and took my father’s side, she’d looked at me and said those words.
I crawl deep into my covers, my new womb, cocooned by the cradling hum of my portable space heater, and close my eyes into the safety of the pressing heaviness.
We wait for the concert to begin.
I glance down at the fresh stain three inches above the hem of my skirt. The dark purple silk gathers into a starburst of wrinkles around the oily melanoma mark where a farfalle noodle had landed during dinner. My mother had said something sharp and my right arm had shot suddenly forward in response, straight for the bowl of artichoke pasta at the center of our table draped in Christmas-themed tablecloth, even though it was barely November. My fist released the squealing noodles I'd grasped into an unforgiving explosion on my red dinner plate. One had slid off the plate and landed with a soft thump on my left thigh.
Later, ashamed, I attempted to wash out the evidence with a bit of hand soap in the upstairs bathroom sink. The silk smelled like wet dust.
I shift my coat to hide the mark before my mother can see it. She is all that is put-together, sparkling in her Lancome makeup, Theory blouse, Ralph Lauren cashmere cardigan, Juicy Couture diamonds. Her right leg crosses crisply over her left. She glances at the program, talks about the boy my sister likes, points at him unabashedly as he walks onto the stage. The concertmaster. Clean cut, smiling, such a cute boy. I've never told my mother about any of the boys I've liked, I've dated. She has never had the chance to embarrass me in this way.
I try to tuck my long, unruly hair behind my ears, sweep the bangs I had trimmed that afternoon into a perfect parabolic swoop on my forehead. My high school calculus teacher is seated a few rows above us. In May, I ran into him for the first time since I'd graduated when I'd offered to take my sister to audition for the orchestra, when I’d offered to drive her back to that same classroom I had lived in through high school and hadn’t revisited since. I had tiptoed into the room, like a mausoleum, wanting to whisper at the posters and the carpet and the chairs that were still exactly the same. Holy relics. My photograph at the back of the room smiled up like a young, sheepish ghost. Concerto Night 2004. Lia Farnsworth. Soloist.
He had looked at me perplexedly, sensing the familiarity, uncomfortably unable to place me.
I firmly thrust forward my hand. My name is Lia Farnsworth, I said. I took calculus from you four years ago. He stepped back, remembering filling his stance. I’ve been going to the Y. I’ll be graduating in a year with a double degree in physiology and visual arts.
You never really liked me.This I didn’t say.
Jack walks onto the stage, and the concert begins. Jack, who had been my mentor through adolescence, coaxing me with my violin, crooning out popsicle-stick jokes during orchestra rehearsals. Jack, who still looks white-haired, rosy-cheeked – the same. The orchestra looks up at him with their glimmering, orthodontically-corrected smiles, their 15 year old wisdom, the infinite glowing potential of youth. The violinists press their instruments to their cheeks. I forget whether I am on stage or in the audience. I forget whether it’s 2002 or 2008. Nothing has changed.
I didn’t even know you played the violin, a friend said to me this spring. He’d come to visit me at my parent’s house from school, from college. In the two seconds I’d left the living room, my mother had mentioned this fact. I thought of my violin. It sat alone, dusty, encased in a black clothed coffin beneath my bed, pushed away by the mounds of homework and exams and projects and life I had to sort through.
Nothing has changed, but everything has changed. I am on the other side, the side that wishes on them the potential, the side that is now supposed to be doing everything in the world. Tomorrow I will get a letter from Teach For America, telling me I’ve been put on a waiting list, telling me I’ll be informed of either acceptance or rejection in two months’ time. Tomorrow I will sink into the floor, and wonder about my life, and wonder about the emptiness of this world of excess, of too much-ness. Tomorrow I will realize that I am not really in control.
And then I will pick up, breathe deeply, and continue.
