and so it begins
Continued…
I’m sitting at Gatwick in a wheelchair. I have enough money to last two weeks. Two weeks. Then I need a job. I need a job now. I also need to figure out how to use the public transportation system, how to get a dial up connection and how to not get raped in an alley. These are all things my sister says are important.
I got sick on the plane. This psychiatrist they sent me to see once, said that if I can talk myself into it, it’s probably not a seizure. The neurologist who was in the same room said, if it hurts, it is.
You may as well be in outer space. You may as well be in another world. Big deal you’ve been here before. Who do you know? Who do you have? Nobody. And what do you have? A life compacted. In a blue American Tourist and an over sized Adidas bag. And forget about school. School is something else all together. You have to find out if you really have a roof over your head first. And if your room mates are serial killers. And if you can actually afford to be here to begin with.
I was thinking all this when I blacked out. It hurt. I may have thrashed about some, I dunno. But the guy sitting beside me wasn’t sitting beside me when I came to. A crew member was. She got me a wheelchair because they didn’t trust my legs to carry me. I didn’t tell them my legs probably wouldn’t have carried me anyway.
One of the people I’m suppose to be living with – I’ll believe it when I see it – gave me her number. I talked to her last week. She told me to call when I got in. She’d pick me up. I hope she hasn’t changed her mind.
My connection’s here. I think I’m gonna throw up.
14 August 1998
1998
Today marks my 9 year blogiversary. It started with geocities, a garden in Paris and a first-name-only basis.
I practiced html, posted photos of myself and used it as a letter writing medium. I had just moved abroad and every penny mattered – I couldn’t splurge on airmail. It was cathartic and therapeutic and it helped me work through my homesickness.
Every now and then I find a page or two online somewhere. Cached on some random site. But for the most part it’s gone. Relegated to one of the hard drives I keep under my bed. Last night, I dug those babies out.
It wasn’t literature. And it wasn’t creative. But it was me, before I got it in my head to become a writer. When I still obsessed over John Douglas et al. and hung out with chics called Earl and Flynn. It was a diary that I kept. Religiously. And I’m getting ready to show it to you.
I’ve got other things to focus on this month. But I don’t want to put the blog on hiatus. So I’m sending you back to 1998. When I traded in Iaeger for London. Weeks in Princeton for weekends in Paris.
Here it is. The Original. Unedited. When I went by Buffy. And nothing else.
stepford stuff
I was looking through my old high school memory book. Where it asked about the life you’ll live and the things you’ll have in 10 years’ time. The first question was “Married?”. The first answer: “Not on your life. Or mine.”
My future was never made of man. I was on the softer side of 30 before I even entertained the idea of marriage and even then it was just a possibility. Something to do in my forties. Maybe. When I had tried everything and tried it again.
I had a notion that men held you back. Either from their own dead weight or from an enforced stepford-style of wifery. I couldn’t help it. It was what I knew.
Women who cooked and cleaned because their men said they should. Aunts who worked three jobs to support husbands who wouldn’t support themselves. And a woman I love dearly, who went without a phone or a friend because the man she called Dear liked to be in control that way.
I wanted more. More than more. I wanted it all. And was convinced the only way to have it, was to go without. ‘Why waste time on a man’, I use to say, ‘when you can waste it on everything else?’
But the thing is – and I guess we all have to come to this, one way or another – not all men are like our fathers. My mother found out the hard way. I found out the easy way. And was pleasantly surprised.
buffy holt’s diary
Number of days on mini-break: four
Number of cocktails on mini-break: six
Number of times thought Empire State Building looked like Dutch Pancake House: three
Number of times saw Conan: none
Buffy Holt
28 February 2007
