The Inconstant Muse

1. Something Happened

It was a cold, lightless day, perhaps it was January; the weather had that distinctive, hopeless feel. I was in my mother's car, coming back from San Antonio, I think. On the corner of Magazine and Butcher streets, I remember seeing black branches and telephone wires outlined against the sky. There was nothing special or unique about this moment. There is no reason it should have lodged itself in my memory. Bur there it is.

The moment fades, or rather fails to continue to exist.  I am sitting in my apartment. Through the windows I can see remnants of the lowering gloom. Fear is running though me like electricity, like a red-hot grid of nichrome wire. There'd been no segue from there to here, no awareness of movement, only nothingness, a numb and fathomless void.

I take out my notebook and write the words "something happened", as if this could help me reconstruct the missing time. It couldn't, of course. It still can't. I can only recall suddenly being there, in that dismal place that smelled of rat-chewed paper. What can you construct out of nothingness, beside the alarming certainty that for a moment you had ceased to exist?

2. The Curious Tale Of The Invention Of Prozac

It was a couple of years later, in the middle of summer, I caught a bus to Waco. It was hot and sunny that day. I wore a crop top with a sunflower print - sunflowers being the thing that year - and jeans with navy blue flats. I had a tiny handbag and eyeliner that matched my shoes. It was an ill-fated romance I was having up there in Waco, though it might be more accurate to call it a waste of time. Whatever it was, the ride to get there was 6 hours of sheer and utter boredom, although if you think about it, the sort of excitement you'd get on a bus is probably not the sort of excitement you'd want to have anyhow.

I've never been able to sleep in a moving vehicle, and back then there were no clever phones to occupy your time. On the way to the station, I'd stopped at the new grocery store on the south side of town to grab a bag of Gardetto's and a magazine from the rack. There was no sense in being hungry as well as bored. Thus fortified, I got on the bus.

It wasn't until halfway through the trip I'd started flipping through the magazine. That particular bus took a long and torturous route once it left Travis county, so unless you enjoyed looking at dilapidated buildings and cedar brakes there wasn't much to see. Memory tells me it was beginning to get late in the day, although that might have just been dimness from the tinted windows. If I had to guess, I'd say it was about 4 o'clock.

That was the year Prozac Nation: Young And Depressed In America was the hot bestseller, which I hadn't read because I was already young and depressed in America and didn't feel the need to read about it. Elizabeth Wurtzel was everywhere though, and she was in this magazine, too. I remember her photo next to her byline, wearing a lavender-colored blouse. The article was about the invention of Prozac, how she'd gone to research the story of the drug that had saved her life. I read the article, which was somewhat of a disappointment, and nothing much interesting happened on the rest of the trip. I left the magazine on the bus when we got to Waco and that was that. Whatever else was in the magazine, barely a hint remains with me now.

...

Years pass. Waco, with its dour atmosphere and concrete skyline, recedes into my history. The dismal apartment recedes, too, thank god. I move away, and life goes on.

And yet. The memory of that bus ride and that article come back to me again and again. They show up in unguarded moments, prodding at me like a troublesome ghost. Here is where I wish I were a better writer, because how can I truly describe the eeriness of these moments? The way it brought to mind writing in my notebook that "something happened"? The way what should have been a simple memory seemed as if it were hiding something I should have known all along?

Around 2010, with growing uneasiness, I finally decided to look up the article. Perhaps it would give me a clue as to what was wrong. The magazine had a large and thorough archive that was easy to search. Nevertheless, I could find no such item. I looked up everything Elizabeth Wurtzel had ever published. Again, there was no such thing. I searched for other writing on the subject, but there was nothing that was familiar in any way. Frustrated, I looked up the actual history of the invention of Prozac, and discovered that almost everything I'd remembered reading in the article was wrong.

And then comes the funny part - because the Cosmic Joker has a way with these things - I realized that the author photo I so clearly remembered wasn't of Elizabeth Wurtzel at all, but Elizabeth McGovern, the actress. No sighted person could possibly mistake one woman for the other, but here I was, with both images in my mind, somehow without questioning it. How could this happen?

There was an obvious explanation. I must have fallen asleep on the bus, even though I'd swear I hadn't, and dreamt the article. No, this isn't a usual thing to happen to me, but who's to say it can't, after all. Nothing mysterious then, only an ordinary foible, mistaking a dream for reality.

Except...except...I realized (and records bear this out) that the store where I'd bought the magazine and snack hadn't even been built until a year later. This is the point where the dream theory falls apart. I rarely went to that side of town unless it was to go to the bus station. I only used the bus when seeing Waco man. I was no longer seeing Waco man by the time the store was built. And the only time I'd buy those kind of snacks or that certain magazine is for a road trip. Anyway (for what it's worth) I remember it as clear as day: me in my sunflower top and my navy blue shoes, excited about seeing my boyfriend, waiting in the express lane, plucking that magazine out the rack, the smell of the brand new store, the high windows, the light on the south side of town.

There is no boredom, road hypnosis or toxic traffic fumes to confuse this part of the memory. It is untrammeled. And here the eeriness comes over me again. I would swear - will swear - I got off the bus with the memory of reading that article. But now I have to ask...when exactly did the false memory sneak in and replace apparent reality? And what happened to the reality?

Where does memory go when it disappears?

I suspect only Mnemosyne knows.

The Tale of Heinrich and Peggy*

*names have been changed to protect both the innocent and the awkward.

Heinrich and me

Heinrich was a friend of mine, in part because he was friendly to everyone, but mainly because we were weird. I don't mean the benign sort of weirdness that seems to be an esthetic choice, but the deep-down, painful sort of weird that necessitated many school lunch hours spent hiding in the library.

I guess there's a special bond that springs up between those who could never fake normal long enough to blend in.

As an adult, I tried - somewhat successfully - to channel my blatant strangeness into a more genteel eccentricity. Heinrich, on the other hand, had given up any charade of normalcy and just let his freak flag fly. The first time I saw him, he was wearing a headscarf, love beads and a Brooks Brothers suit, running furiously from something I couldn't see. "it's the Nagual!" he said, desperately. "it's after me! What should I do?"

Now, if Heinrich had said something like "how are you?" I might have been at a loss as for what to say, but being weird, I was perfectly equipped to handle this one. "Well, first you have to find your center." I told him. "Do you know any yoga?"

"Yoga! Perfect!" he shouted, catapulting himself into a complex ashtanga pose in the grass next to my front porch. "Why didn't I think of that?"

So began my friendship with Heinrich.

Peggy

On the other side of the courtyard, my neighbor Peggy watched all this with a disapproving eye. "You certainly have some strange friends" she said, meaningly. I shrugged. What could I say? Peggy was a very conventional girl. Not that there's anything wrong with being conventional. Conventional people tend to have an easier time in life; they face fewer struggles achieving their goals than those who are congenitally unable to fit with the crowd. But I can't pretend to truly comprehend them. Our values were very different, Peggy's and mine. I couldn't understand why she collected cow creamers. She couldn't understand why I worried about karma. But people are people, and they are what they are.

Heinrich and Peggy

As time progressed though, something strange happened...Peggy fell in love with Heinrich. The first sign of this was when she came down to the sidewalk where we were making chalk drawings and proceeded to put the moves on him. It was so very odd, Peggy twirling his hair and saying "why don't you come up and see me sometime" like a sort of ersatz Mae West that Heinrich at first couldn't figure out why she would want him to. "Er. Well, okay. Sometime." he said, nonplussed.

Peggy did not give up, however, and eventually Heinrich got the message. They went out on a few dates. That's when the war between the conventional and the unconventional began.

One of the reasons, I think, that Heinrich and I had such a fond friendship was because I understood that in his basic nature, he was a free spirit. He was a bit like a butterfly and about as harmless. He would flit around to other places and people, but sooner or later he'd flit back. When he did, one accepted him for what he was. There was no reason to expect different from him, really. To do so would invite disappointment.

"Disappointment" is a mild word for what soon began emanating in loud shrieks from Peggy's apartment whenever Heinrich was around. "Put on some proper shoes, you can't wear sandals in winter!" "No normal person drinks wheat grass juice!" "It's Saturday night, you're supposed to be here with me, not out playing guitar for hobos at the park!!" and so on and so forth. Finally, one night, there came the topper: "You must do as I say, Heinrich, because DAMMIT, I AM OLDER THAN YOU!!"

Heinrich, feeling the iron fist of authority bearing down on him, fled from Peggy even faster than he had from the Nagual. It was no surprise, really. As I said before, Peggy was a conventional girl, and while she may have fancied Heinrich in his natural state, no sooner had she got him than she tried to make him into a conventional boyfriend. It was doomed enterprise from the start

The story does not end there, however. Of course it doesn't, tales of lovers scorned rarely do. Besides, you're probably wondering how the shoe at the top of the page comes into this. Well, I will tell you.

In which the story becomes kind of embarrassing

Peggy was not pleased at Heinrich's having fled and was determined to get him back. No such luck. He was not interested. As he explained to me, he worried that spending time with Peggy was hindering his spiritual development. Well, he didn't use those words exactly. What he said was that he was worried her negative vibes were polluting his aura. Pretty much the same difference. We both agreed that there were better matches out there and that it was best to move on. He went on his way, seeking solace among a more accepting group of friends. That's when Peggy started stalking.

She pretended she wasn't, mind you, and was just happening to turn up wherever Heinrich went, but because we lived just across the way from each other, I knew she spent hours tracking his location by phone and planning her next move. It was in this way that she scored an invitation to a party given by a friend of Heinrich's friends - and Heinrich was going to be there. I wasn't going to the party, myself, but that evening still managed to produce one of the stranger images that has ever jammed itself into my memory.

The evening of the party, about 6 PM, Peggy sailed out onto her balcony. I knew she'd been in her apartment getting ready, since music was drifting from her windows and the front door was propped open with her cow-shaped doorstop, but this was the first time I'd seen her. She'd traded in her usual pantsuit and SAS shoes for a flowing patchwork dress and a pair of lace-up witch boots. Well, this was unusual. It really wasn't Peggy's style. Something about it bothered me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Perhaps the outfit was meant to impress Heinrich, I thought. If so, it was a miscalculation, since Heinrich was more likely to be impressed if she'd woven a dress out of cornshucks than any store-bought clothes. No, something was really off here. I didn't realize what it was until she began to dance.

A Maroon 5 song had come on the radio and this must have inspired Peggy, because she began to whirl and sway with a dreamy look on her face. As she added more dramatic movements to her dance and began to pirouette across the balcony, I realized - oh, holy hell, she was imitating me!

I mean, not that I'd ever dance around in public to Maroon 5, good god, no, but I could recognize my own peculiarities of style and gesture recycled by someone else. Actually, recycled is the wrong word. It was more like a fashion designer finding a strange, random dress at a charity shop and recreating it for Bloomingdale's or something. Peggy, who had the gift of being normal, was attempting to co-opt my own weirdness in order to fit in. Well, it was certainly interesting. But it didn't work. Not even close. It was pure fakery through and through, and it irritated me.

For years now, I've pondered why I found Peggy's imitation that night so unsettling and distasteful. What was it to me, really, how Peggy chose to act? It's not as if I'm in love with my spacey demeanor or my rummage sale clothes, or any of the other things that make people look at me as if I'm an alien. It's not as if I feel any proprietorship over such things. Some of my qualities, I would have traded many times over just to not have the stigma of being different. But that's the answer, isn't it? What Peggy didn't understand is that for Heinrich and me and many of the other misfits who clung together like survivors on a raft, being weird wasn't a costume we could put on and take off when it was convenient. For people like us, being unconventional was never a choice.

Perhaps Peggy found out the hard way. Certainly she came home from the party in a foul mood sans boyfriend, and I never saw the patchwork dress or witch boots again. And Heinrich, he again went on his way, eventually flitting off to a far country where he finally felt at home. That was the end of Heinrich and Peggy, and I guess if there is any moral to this story, it's that one should accept people for who they are, and to thine own self be true. Peggy was a conventional girl with conventional ways, and it would have been better had she embraced that than pretended to be what she wasn't.

Then again, a few months later, Peggy married a burglar she caught breaking into her apartment, which is far weirder than anything I've ever dreamed of doing, so really...what do I know? :p