Katja

I wake up late and tired with my cat, Pluto, curled near my head, her paw on my face. I’m nervous for today, an unscheduled nothing day, one of the last before Spring Break ends and I go back to class to finish my final semester of grad school. I’m worried about this project, about what to make of my day and while I recognize that worry as being silly and unnecessary I can’t shake this tremulous feeling, as if I don’t know what to do next or have forgotten something, as if I have an opportunity I will waste.

When I was in first grade there was a school wide project called One Day, One Child, One Picture where each kid got a camera for a day. At the end of the year there was an exhibit and a book with every child’s photo. I remember having this same sort of feeling when it was my day, a kind of freedom tinged with fear, that I could do whatever I wanted, that I could do whatever I wanted. I took a photograph through the hollow tube of an empty roll of paper towel and the resulting image is a sea of black and a small, off-center image of the campus—wood chips, low buildings, bare trees, a wooden playground that was soon to be replaced by something plastic with fewer splinters.

I make tea and a soft-boiled egg and feed Pluto and rub the fuzzy leaves of the Philodendron hanging perilously on the slightly unattached molding of the South-facing back door. My friend Kate is back in Philly after showing her work (and winning an award!) at the Baltimore Craft Show and we make plans to walk to Acme.

I keep catching myself slowly moving through the day in the third person, as though I am recording my actions as I take them.

I have been thinking a lot about fear, about fear that you don’t notice so much as act upon, that informs your choices and actions and that, if you thought about for a moment, you would deny and reason away. I have always been risk adverse when it comes to the possibility of bodily harm—I do not ride a bike without a helmet, do not dive into bodies of water until I am certain there are no unseen rocks. But these things that I am protecting myself from in my unconscious, fearful actions, none are things I rationally fear, they are things I welcome. I am not scared of being hurt or heartbroken. For a long time, I was afraid of being subsumed by love, of being lost to it, overwhelmed, of losing pieces of myself in order to care for another. But that fear is different, now, and though I still recognize it, feel the taste of it, I am confident of my capacity to escape the undertow.

At Acme I buy eggs, arugula, and Boursin. I want lox, but their selection is wanting so I skip it. On the way back to Kate’s I stop at Cosmi’s for Zayde’s pickles for me and a Boylan’s Birch Beer to share. I write on Kate’s couch while she bakes, her cat rubs up on me and presents himself for snuggles but it’s a trap, he likes to lull and then attack. Once he lay contentedly on my chest for nearly an hour purring and occasionally rubbing his face against mine and then without warning he leapt at my head, his paws spread wide, claws out before he clamped them hard on either side of my face.

It is deliciously Spring today—trees are blossoming and it’s bright and sunny with a good wind; the kind of day you can wear wool pants and a tank top, and it sort of makes sense. It’s beautiful and it makes me nervous, makes me think of global warming, of time moving too quickly, of being too tired to keep up. At doctor’s appointments, when they ask me if I’ve been down or depressed, I’ve taken to saying, my mood feels appropriate to the state of the world. But it doesn’t always. Sometimes when I feel happy, I feel guilty. I want to take action to solve a problem that I cannot always solve, sometimes cannot name, and I am not always ready to accept the discomfort of that.

I walk to meet my mom for dinner at Mish Mish holding my headphones in my hand but not putting them on. I decide I want to be present for my walk and am instead instantly not present, instead I am thinking how I will write this walk, what I will describe and I realize that this is not being present with the day and the sidewalk and the cherry and pear trees blooming, instead I am consumed with the idea of this walk, the idea of this day, of myself.  

I think of the last time I was at Mish Mish, in the sticky summer, sitting outside with a boy I met in babyhood but have never really known, watching, and talking, and trying to sort through the humidity of the day and my thoughts and his smile. Was I developing a crush on him? Or was he just smart and curious and handsome? Did he just ask good questions and ask annoying questions and seem genuinely thoughtful and engaged in the world? Could I fall in love with him? Or would he drive me mad? As if those are mutually exclusive and not two sides of one coin. By the time he left I wished he hadn’t and so I ran through everything he had done or said that I hadn’t liked all that much as if to wash away the feeling.

For the last requirement of my degree, I am taking a statistics class supposedly to learn how to understand the research papers I will read to better inform my clinical practice. One of the questions on our midterm was about chance probability, the coin question, which everyone hated because it comes with the hypothesis that the coin is unfair. The coin is the coin, our professor said, but for the test you must pretend. If you get seven heads out of eleven tosses, will we reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis? To what level of certainty?

I have been thinking a lot about fear, about acting out of a fear I do not consciously feel. I have been thinking a lot about how to notice these actions, these instincts and how they weave through my system and my choices. I am less certain that I can think my way through this, I am trying to watch and listen and let myself be present and let myself be pulled into the fantasy of the walk to the restaurant, of the image of myself striding across the sidewalk and slipping slightly as I roll my ankle in my clogs, right myself, and keep moving on.

Katja is a writer & social work student. She grew up in Mt. Airy & lives in South Philly. She was bat mitzvahed in 2006; the party did not have a theme.