patterns and progress

David Park, Flower Market, 1955

I’m reading Anna Karenina on the train. My posture is bad. Two meters away a man gently rolls a soccer ball back and forth under his left foot. I’ve had one pisco sour and one glass of sauvignon blanc. It’s 10:27 PM in Manhattan. 

There have been a lot of nights like this. I’m always reading something, watching something. Wearing the same jeans, same jewelry, different blouse. I like Corner Bar and Gem Wine and Dante. Esme in Greenpoint, Hao Noodle in West Village. I’m a creature of habit until I’m not. 

It’s strange to think I’m flying to SF on Tuesday. It reminds me of the first time I moved from the east coast to the west coast, seven years ago. Yesterday I saw one of my best friends from college, and I realized this move feels like repeating a pattern. At Penn I felt just the same way I do now: subtly, but distinctly, out of place. So I left for San Francisco.

Is this a good pattern or a bad one? There are many patterns in my life, as I’m sure there are in yours. Whom I’m attracted to. What kind of environments I feel most comfortable in. My love of novel experiences. My need to buy 16 of the same oversized leather jacket. I sometimes think I’m retracing the same steps over and over again (time is a flat circle, as the moody detective show put it). Susan Cheever describing her third husband: I think he was the love of my life; I also think he was the perfect expression of my addiction and the ideal reflection of the traumas of my childhood as, I suspect, I was for him. We are doomed to reenact our wounds until we transcend then.