Daring

I am going. To Chicago. On the 12th of this month.

I am meeting my father's family. I am excited and terrified at once.

I don't expect a replay of what happened to me before, but I don't know. One never knows what things one will stir up in people, despite one's best intentions. Despite being simply oneself.

As I said to Nalini earlier today, situations like this are my kryptonite, emotional and otherwise.

I was up late last night reading Sartre's Huis Clos again, for the first time in many years. The play about being in hell, stuck there with no escape. Hell being other people. It made complete sense to me when I was seventeen, and it makes all the more sense to me now. I look at all my little underlinings, chuckle at my not understanding the significance of the falsehood of Louis-Philippe furniture, cry at how little I understood then about people hobbled by their inability to love. It is such a brilliant play. "Can you judge a life by a single act?" Apparently many people feel they are able to do so. Still.

In Berkeley the other day I bought Sartre's book, Les mots, in which he considers the power of words on his discovery of existence; of course: he was a philosopher as well as a playwright and novelist. To read, to write; that's how we make sense of things, or try to, anyway.

Or maybe by talking, if we find the right people. I am completely nervous about Tuesday.