Sleepless Nights
Just this morning, I explained to someone my “geographic trajectory” (let’s abbreviate it to “GT” to be cozy about it, although to be clear, I’m not referring to a cozy G&T), and it kind of blew her mind. Not because my GT — the “I’ve lived here” version of push-pins on a map — is so amazing or unique, but because she just had no idea. Basically: “How’d you end up here?” And further, “I’ve never been remotely near where you’re from.”
The late literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick in her acclaimed 1979 novel Sleepless Nights wrote this: “The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic. I place myself among the imports, those jarring and jarred pieces that sit in the closet among the matching china sets. I have no relations that I know of born outside the South and hardly any living outside it even today. Nevertheless, I am afraid of the country night and its hottest slumbers, uneasy even in the daylight with ‘original settlers’ and old American stock. The highway, the asphalt paths, the thieves, the contaminated skies like a suffocating cloak of mangy fur, the millions in their boroughs—that is truly home.” I suppose one could consider Sleepless Nights, with its narrator named Elizabeth, some version of autofiction before we obsessed over autofiction; it reminded me of The Years by Annie Ernaux.
The places we live might charm and dance for us (and maybe, in turn, make *us* dance). They may obfuscate our true selves — or perhaps in some cases, obliterate them. They yank us into the future or beckon us back with hypnotic nostalgia. The places we live often congeal into one wonkily quilted backdrop. Remember those swirly bouncy balls or even just an old-school marble? That is what it’s like to try to make sense of one’s GT. From afar it might look like a singular color or texture, but up close it’s kaleidoscopic…and tends to roll away if you don’t grab it. (Of course one’s GT is comprised of actual people, although Billie Holiday likely won’t be part of yours as she was for Hardwick’s.)
Ask someone about their Geographic Trajectory — different than a quick laundry list of locales — one of these days. 🌏📍
originally published on instagram