I'M YOURS ~ Marta

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-435020087790887201.post-32050026009064610072007-12-12T06:16:00.000-08:002007-12-12T11:25:12.058-08:00I'M YOURS ~ MartaOne night Natvar walked back with us from Mark’s apartment. It was the very early days. We had just started eating together in the evenings. I had only just moved into the Institute. Maybe it was so early on that Natvar was still spending nights there too before he moved in completely with Mark.   I had moved into the Institute. Natvar had said that he was looking for someone to rent the back room, and I volunteered. I thought it would lower my rent. I liked that idea. I had quit the full-time job about six months earlier, desperately trying to rid myself of something so conventional and predictable as a 9 to 5 job. It had been six months and the excitement of the dream of creating a completely different life had worn thin. I hadn’t managed to transform my life into the pictures I held in my head – maybe I would rebuild furniture I found thrown out on the street and sell it. Maybe I’d become a carpenter. Or a political person who went to rallies and meetings. Maybe this, maybe that – and now I could live in the Institute if I wanted. Boy, wouldn’t that be a great way to let Natvar know how much he could count on me.   The square lobby with the cut-out window looking into the small office that until now had felt off-limits to me, Natvar’s private area – a place I had no business in. But now I was part of this place. I slept on the floor of the lobby – thin green carpet, a muted grass-green color with narrow lines of a darker green creating almost a plaid. For a little while Natvar was there too, discretely in his room at night, a room I had never entered, much more private than the office, the place where Natvar slept. For a few mornings we did as planned, getting up early-early-early to meditate in the meditation hall together before walking over to the coffee shop to meet Mark for coffee and bagels with cream cheese.   We walked back from Mark’s that night, walking in the Manhattan streets, four or five of us, Natvar at our center, doing all the talking.   We stopped downstairs outside the Institute. Next door to us was a hardware store, owned by our landlord. Natvar was complaining. He said he had been asking the landlord to install a light there at the door, in the small alcove between the door to our building and the door of the hardware store. “It smells like a toilet,” Natvar was saying. “There’s no light so the bums come and piss here. I keep telling him we need a light, but he doesn’t care. I know,” he said. “I’ll show him –“ And Natvar was pissing now, spraying his urine across the front door of the store. He was laughing. We were all laughing. This was new for me. New to be with someone who crossed lines I had assumed you could not cross.   “In the morning,” Natvar was saying, “we should leave a turd. That would do it. That would make him put in the light.”   I did it. I did it the next morning, placed my offering just as Natvar had suggested, early, and reported my accomplishment later at breakfast. Natvar was delighted. I was his star pupil. Well, so was Mark, but I was certainly a star.   I was certain I had hitched myself onto a skyrocket that would take me out of the mundane into something brave and original. MartaSzabohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07554422492794060801noreply@blogger.com