Red Lipstick Real Estate

It started with a voice in my head, “Wake up.”

I thought it was someone behind me, or maybe in front of me, or maybe in the next room down the hallway. Until it said again, “Wake up.” The voice sounded male, real, right there. But no one was there. I was perfectly in the middle of the passage between the main dining room of the restaurant and its event space. Between the rooms to the right was an alcove where the bathrooms were. I loved that passage, the in-between spaces. It was the one space where people didn’t stick around, they passed through quickly. It was my quiet space. That and the bathroom stall.

I had a service tray of crystal water glasses that I carried to the event space after that brief pause. Something felt like it was bubbling in my stomach, not those fluttery butterflies I experience the moment a rollercoaster peaks and begins its decent. This felt stirred up, like a boiling pot. Something woke up, something deep. The rolling murmuring from the dining room returned to my awareness and I kept walking down the hall.

I had been working at the restaurant long enough that my brain no longer had to direct any of my body’s actions. Intuitively, I would float from the host station, past the black wooden tavern tables, around the wooden partition separating the bar from the dining room, to the bar counter where I’d find ice tinkling glasses on the gritty, black round service tray. Everything was wood, black, and white. It was even in the name of the restaurant, DeepWood, white words on a black background. Yes, people would stand outside of the restaurant to take a selfie.

The same jazz playlist looped for ten hours a day, six days a week, save during the holiday season when we would switch to a shorter, holiday themed set of songs. I still hear this music from time to time in my dreams or when I’m taking a shower, as though those five years of repetition haunt me. It’s been a little over six years and I think I’ll never shake the habit of pre-bussing my own table when I go to restaurants and arranging my dining table with the soup spoon always on the left, water glass on the right. But even with these persistent habits and hauntings, I did wake up. I knew I needed to leave.

I needed to leave the country.

I was twenty-eight, on my tenth year of college for a four-year degree. I only needed to take one class to graduate, but I was taking my time. School was all I knew. And Jesus. Learning and the Lord. Although I had renounced my “faith” in high school, the cult environment I grew up in also had its irrevocable imprint on me. Everyday I live in wonder that there is indeed a new day, that potentially yet another day may come. It made setting goals, such as graduating college, difficult to imagine. By the time I got to that one last class, my only vision of the future was more school. With graduate school as the only sight on the horizon of my future, I became immediately aware that I needed to make myself eligible to get there. Looking at my transcript, I didn’t feel confident.

“Do something interesting.” The head of the Film Studies department advised me when I expressed my desire to continue school, but lack of necessary credentials, “Do something interesting and they won’t care about the numbers. You’re already doing interesting things. You’re exactly the type of student schools love.”

It felt counterintuitive after over twenty years of the grades mattering intensely. But, I can do interesting. I can leave the country and make art. Or something. I wasn’t sure of what I would make out of it, but what I knew I could do was leave and that where I was, leaving was hard. I decided I was going to Europe. Possibly Seoul after that. Then settle down in Kansas or somewhere in the midwest where I could be sure I would get into some program. I didn’t end up in Kansas. I ended up in East Hampton. 

When I returned to the host station, I stared at the front door and allowed my body to take over while I reflected, What the fuck was that? Is there a voice in my head? Right then and there, I knew I had to do something. I don’t want to live life turned off. I don’t want to live life waiting. I want to live.

The goal was simple, or seemed simple, at first. Save money, quit job, leave apartment, travel the world. That made sense. There was a clear step by step progression that my mind could wrap around. I got a second job and worked seven days a week for three and a half months before I left. It took a month and a half to sell off and give away most of my possessions. I didn’t budget for storage or any moving costs, so I figured the best thing to do was to be efficient, live with less, and become mobile. Mobility was a keyword.

“I think the opportunity for success with your generation is mobility. If you can travel, you can travel to jobs and to opportunities. If you can move around, you’ll be alright.” This advice came from the director of a film archive. I spent a couple months cleaning and repairing reels of film to send out to art-house theatres. Some of the older reels had color tests at the start of them, stuff that audiences never saw. I wish I knew the name of the woman who would appear in several of them. Her perfectly curled 50s hair in full technicolor and bright red lipstick. I loved the feeling and the sound of winding up the reels while I gently wiped off the grit and dust with soft white cotton gloves, all alone, surrounded by shelves of steel cans.

I shed the weight and focused on real estate. Travelers, real travelers, understand what I’m talking about. The precious mere inches of storage space that is composed of your luggage and body. I allowed myself a Chrome backpack and a boutique, designer canvas shoulder bag.

two pairs of shoes
three dresses
panties, panty hose, and socks for two weeks
hairbrush
microcloth towel
a thin sheet
portable pillow
toothbrush, toothpaste
deodorant
a light jacket which also served as a scarf
a six inch handcarved cigarette holder, black with walnut and brass accents
pea green, vintage winter coat
notebook, pens
flipflops for hostel showers
under clothes passport holder
luggage lock for the tote bag
red lipstick
razor
kindle and mp3 player because my kindle was better at GPS than my phone
my iPhone 5
folder with all of my confirmations and identification information
beast of a laptop
tissues

While I’m sure there were a few more items, that’s the majority of it. I traveled light. I wanted to be able to move quickly between destinations and not be afraid to lose anything, except my phone. So I never carried my phone and always put it in my locked tote bag. Except one time when I got lost in Paris.

I left toward the beginning of April, late at night on a bus heading to Chicago where I’d catch my first flight. It was cold, but my body was buzzing with energy. I was doing it. I was doing something interesting. I was waking up.