I

I find myself lying down on my bathroom floor again, staring at the underside of my sink, talking to my inner self.

It’s only two years. Two years and then we’re done.

(Why I refer to my inner self as a “we” requires a lengthy psychological profile not relevant to this particular story, but it’s often because I view my internal voice as a separate being, as if there really is a tiny homunculus in my head who both perceives the world and controls my mind, but not without consulting with me, the external me who actually has to live in the world.)

You see, my bathroom floor and I have a special relationship. A bond, really. And not just this particular bathroom—the one in my basement apartment, rented in one of the wealthiest suburbs in D.C. in all of the country, actually. Any bathroom floor will do, it’s cold floor and off-white coloring in some feat of transmutation induces quiet clarity, allowing me to converse with my inner self.

I’ve tried talking to my inner self while lying in the comfort of my bed. Because I rarely fall asleep before 3 A.M. these days. Contrary to what children assume, beds are not the safest places in the world. When I close my eyes, even under my blanket’s sanctuary, visions of past errors and regrets drip into the empty void, whispering critiques and criticism like, “Why are you in grad school and not law school?” or “Why can’t you find a job?” or “Why can’t you make friends?” Haunted by yesterday’s failures and tomorrow’s fears, with a layer of warmth preventing my escape, I only endure the night.

So, I find that my bathroom floor is much more comfortable. The ghosts of my regrets are locked outside, and I’m left with my internal voice. And for a while, I’m just speaking to him, small talk really, because I have no one else with whom I can talk, until he says, Do you want to leave?

His voice startles me, but his question strikes at my current state of dread—that tomorrow will be the same as today, that I’ll never find my footing in this new city, that I can’t become who I want to become. So I engage.

II

This is not a city in which the passive can survive.

It’s only October and in the few months since I’ve moved to D.C., I’ve waited every day for the inevitable apocalypse (I’m not sure how accurate our translation of ancient Mayan calendars can be, but it’s almost the end of 2012 and we’re coming down to the wire; and, honestly, a Christmas apocalypse just seems rude).

Almost as if oblivious to the world’s fate, or maybe even in spite of it, the District goes about its day. (No one really calls it “the District,” which I find out soon enough.)

One might think this is a city comprised of politics and power, but really, it’s just a city of people who like to talk. Even the humdrum of sidewalk chatter blurts a steady stream of secrets. On benches, in coffee shops, at restaurants, the city eavesdrops on its own background noise.

Gentrified neighborhoods are both out of place, like newly hired senior staff who benefit from the family name and are both unqualified and your boss, and at the same time the very essence of “New-Washington.” It’s an old city that operates on archaic social graces, an exclusive club of thinly veiled, faux aristocracy. While its aged buildings and institutions embody stability (or, rather, immobility), the people and papers within them fluctuate constantly, an ebb and flow of new beginnings and departures.

The city’s residents physically move with haste (a problem not solved by speeding cameras), but their work makes slow progress. In red brick row houses or in slick, modern flats above gyms, in cars caught in traffic or in the metro (D.C.’s great income equalizer), like clockwork the people talk but nothing happens.

The fifty states carve out different sections of the city as diagonal avenues. Currently, I am walking down Wisconsin to get to my university, aptly named American.

III

“The law. It’s about process.” My Rule of Law and Due Process professor stands at the front of class in an upper shelf Ann Taylor black suit jacket and matching skirt. She looks like the stepmom from Parent Trap, if she had left California, gotten her law degree, spent a few decades in a big firm, and then became a professor. Her name isn’t important to the story, so in my mind, she’s just “Professor.”

Hitting her stride in the lecture, Professor continues, “And that process requires a story to guide legal actors through the grande maison of the law.” (I think I may want to be her when I grow up.)

Once she concludes her section on the legal process, she gives us a five-minute break. The rest of the class exits the room, but I stay behind to finish my notes. Cocooned within a faint sense that I don’t belong with the others (or is it that I don’t want to belong with them?), I feel like I’m out of my depth. So I fade into silence.

I take out a book of essays and pretend to dispel my solitude. The musings of Mark Edmundson escape an open page with a call to college students: “Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?” Two separate and uncomfortable inquiries whose answers exist independently, together they demand of a casual reader more than he is willing to pursue.

Edmundson and I are old friends (in the literary sense), having first encountered each other years ago when, to a room of college sophomores, my English professor quoted one of Edmundson’s creeds: “We need to learn not simply to read books, but to allow ourselves to be read by them.”

Always half a minute behind in transcribing his lectures, I flipped to the page in Edmundson’s Why Read? in search of the relevant passage. The written sentence was just as jarring. By whom am I willing to be read? Which authors would, upon my reading of them, choose to read me in return? What would Amy Tan, Kazuo Ishiguro, or J.R.R. Tolkien find when exploring my story through theirs? Could I craft a narrative well enough that any other story would bother to pick me off the stands, meander through a couple of pages and take a copy home, intrigued enough to continue delving? Would they be satisfied by my plot, my character, my voice? Could I live up to their standards? Or would I be forgettable?

                                                                            IV

It’s 5 A.M. and I can’t sleep again. After each overcrowded shuttle ride followed by a brief metro commute and mile long walk, this city feels more like home, but less like mine. The people haunting its streets are alien creatures. They navigate the world at a pace so brisk that it’s almost rude, honking their horns incessantly, jaywalking at the first opportune moment, threatening to hit me with their cars or their bodies. Only the long walk home casts a familiar hue on the buildings, the trees, the sky. I can at least recognize the shadows.

I don’t even remember what good sleep feels like anymore. A dim computer screen illuminates my basement apartment, conducting its weekly antiviral scans. This obsessive routine keeps me from staring at a blank Word document, trapped in boredom. I almost arrived in D.C. homeless, but for the grace of strangers. Their house is a welcoming shade of turquoise straight out of a Bill Peet book. The underground atmosphere is conducive to a fresh start, a new take on an old masterpiece.

In my insomnia, I make my way to the bathroom floor and lie down. Not to sleep, no, I’m here to think. For a few hours, every night, I attempt to draft an essay, a written form of self-validation inked with my own voice defending every decision that led me to this city. (Yes, it’s vanity in its most infant stage, but I needed something to do.) I talk to my inner self in a muted tone, arguing points, fleshing out thoughts. I harass Paige, my close friend (and part-time editor) from back home, with an incessant stream of Facebook messages, cataloguing my plunge into insanity:

11:02 P.M.—Holy shit this is hard. I am definitely hitting a writer’s block.

11:45 P.M.—This is turning into my memoir...

12:13 A.M.—Now things have gotten way too deep and are actually painful...

12:38 A.M.—This is an exhausting process...

12:45 A.M.—OMG it’s terrible. It’s shallow and whiny. I suck. I’m not a writer.

I mean, what am I trying to say and why am I trying to say it? I’m tired and I can barely comprehend my own musings. In frustration, I give up on staring at my computer screen, preferring the cool quiet of my bathroom floor. But as if in retribution for abandoning my work, a headache burrows deep into my eye sockets. The crick in my neck begs to be stretched, so I roll my head and survey my domain. How can such a small basement have such a massive bathroom? Littered throughout are piles of things (papers, books, clothes, et cetera) everywhere, stacked methodically, organized by size and type of item. Strewn haphazardly across the empty half of my sofa bed, mammoth adjudication textbooks and their accompanying notes remind me of the jarring failure that was my choice to attend grad school.

In complete contrast, my bathroom is tidy to the point of almost being empty. And while not comfortable, its floor is calming, at least.

V

Another lecture, another break. And I am again the only one who stays behind. After several minutes, Professor returns with a cup of tea. None of my classmates are back yet, so it’s just the two of us. I’m nose deep in my book, thus I don’t notice Professor walking up to my desk.

“What are you reading?” Her question sounds innocent, but I get the sense that she’s deposing me and everything I say can, and will, be used against me.

“The Best American Essays: 2012. I prefer essays. Not really a fan of short stories,” I explain.

Short stories leave me unsatisfied, with too little room to explore the depths of their characters or their uncharted, and yet familiar, scenes. Short stories, like poetry, run literary sprints, leading the reader through a swift dash, hoping exhaustion will invoke revelation. I prefer the distance crossed by essays. The author makes a point, not bluntly but through a slow building of momentum, as each paragraph coalesces into a climactic bond with the reader.

Appropriately in a due process class, essays are like affidavits. They paint a narrative, with an argument or a purpose, even one as simple as background descriptions. Who are these people? What happened? Why does this matter? Stories form the foundation of the law acted out by citizens in a society.

“I like to read,” I offer, secretly hoping this tidbit of personal information will raise Professor’s opinion of me.

“Why?”

She asks her question casually, and I reply with silence and a blank stare. (It’s the same face I’ve given since the second grade, caught hiding in the library, with a hoard of books under a fort of tables and shelves. My elementary school librarian, with a befuddled look, asked, “What are you doing?”)

Professor doesn’t expect a simple answer. The way she frames her question betrays an inner seer, a glimpse of a sibyl caught behind her gaze. The tone of her inquiry reflects two questions: “Who are you?” and “Who do you want to be?”

VI

“Trelaine, what do you think?”

Professor’s question snaps me out of my notetaking. In the fleeting seconds between her question and the point where my silence becomes uncomfortable for the class, every cognitive whir and whistle in my brain spins, desperately trying to compile a tolerable answer. More than anything, I am afraid that my classmates will think I’m stupid.

And as if on cue, I spew out a perfect example for them: “Well, um, maybe it’s clear for, uh, the lawyer-types, but I’m not sure. I think it was the right thing to do.”

Without prior legal experience, Professor’s class demands more than my shallow bench can offer. I know nothing about “standing,” or “justifiability.” So I spend nearly every second in class writing out explanations, underlining definitions, starring key points, and adding side notes. My detailed outlines display a deep commitment to learning. There’s just one problem: I don’t understand any of it, as if the words in my notes are a foreign language and I’m more a scribe than student.

As I study the text, sometimes the law seems cold and detached. It shouldn’t. The law operates by people wielding it, acting on its behalf, being affected by it, or constantly revising it. The law, like learning, is an endless process. No one should expect, or demand, static proficiency.

“I see you nodding your head, Trelaine. Explain.”

Grad school is the only thing I have to do right now. Being new to the D.C. area, I’m unemployed (not for lack of trying). But I don’t want just any job. I want to do something that matters. Money is secondary (or so I try to tell myself while subsisting on triple-fiber English muffins and green tea, both on sale at Safeway). Fulfillment and recognition are the chicken soup that feeds my postgrad soul. Such is the dream of my generation. (Or so I’m told. I have yet to meet another twenty-something-year-old who uses “millennial” both self-referentially and seriously.)

As if expecting a coveted career to fall on my lap through the sheer, prestigious ambiance emanating from my bachelor’s degrees, I apply (in vain) for countless internships. But by the end of September, with rejection letters galore, I still have the problem of nothing to do with my free time.

Hence my essay.

VII

Empty hands and a restless mind beg for something to do. Their current outlets are either homework or the ever-joyful job search. What else? Watch the news?

My boredom attempts to frame unused time in an effort to control it. Stories build, organizing the chaos of life, corralling various strands of meaninglessness into a single, crafted plot. The news is a story. The law is a story. My life up to this point? Less clear. My story seems lost, blindly scouring the streets for some purpose, like a headless wanderer, both aimless and directionless but with a mission, nonetheless.

I am in grad school with the hope that a master’s degree will do what a bachelor’s didn’t (or just a waste of money, depending on your perspective). My Monday classes consist of a criminology seminar and a lecture on criminal case law. I appreciate the consistency of their material, although by no means is either unchallenging. Still, research and precedents are pretty straightforward.

But my Tuesdays are knife-wielding nightmares that haunt me long after I’ve left campus. And like any horror victim, when I enter Professor’s class, I’m mentally immobilized, unable to defend myself or flee—although in this case, not out of fear, but rather severe incompetence.

“Trelaine, how would you read this?”

Out of nowhere, Professor’s question chases after me in a darkened hallway, and I gasp for air instead of providing a substantive contribution to the class. With nothing but a quiet cough, I look down and mumble at my desk.

On the first day of class, Professor scanned my abilities with her X-ray eyes and concluded that I should co-present Wal-Mart v. Dukes, a recent Supreme Court case on class action lawsuits, as my end-of-semester project.

“That seems like a good fit.” I didn’t exactly know how she made that assessment, but I assumed it wasn’t a compliment. I was assigned a partner, presumably because Professor deemed me one of two students unable to present a case solo.

And because I have nothing else to do, except maybe applying for yet another long-shot internship, I spend Wednesday through Sunday prepping for my classes. Lying on my bed, I read for hours. Then I sit in a chair, sip some tea, eat an English muffin, and continue reading.

But day after day, it’s the same routine. My eyes gloss over constantly. I decide to tackle these challenges like any typical grad student: as if I’m actually an expert on the subject. Fake it ‘til you make it, right?

Yet the moment I enter Professor’s class, I not only lose the ability to form coherent thoughts, but I’m also stripped of my supreme conviction of self—that protective confidence, however justified or not, in my own intellectual abilities.

“Classroom posturing”—superfluous explanations that read like recitations of thesauruses, humble brags of one’s best non sequiturs masquerading as brilliant anecdotes, and irrelevant appeals to the authority of past thinkers and experts with an overabundant use of quotations—is a common grad student’s skill that I haven’t fully mastered. And Professor’s class is filled with such distinct posturers—like literal Department of Justice interns—that my “I was on the Dean’s list twice in college” title loses what little significance it can claim.

But as Professor’s class snatches my veil of self-worth away, it also forces me to confront an uncomfortable possibility: maybe I am nothing special. The law, after all, is blind to the subjects of its stories.

VIII

From my vantage on the bathroom floor, an all too familiar figure sits up and stares me down—the personification of my past failures. (I usually give it my older brother’s name, but for the sake of this story, I’ll call it “James.”)

James parses through my soul in search of hidden, inner fears. James tends to wear the faces of different people from my past, people whom I’ve tried desperately to surpass (but will not name here). I relive my mediocrity in an endless loop of one-sided competition.

Dad always said that my worst vice was sizing myself up against other people. Quoting “Desiderata,” Dad would lecture me: “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” (And then I’d roll my eyes.)

Now solidly in my early twenties, it seems that Dad was right. Albert Speer once observed (okay, you have to understand, I’m still in grad school flexing my posturing skills): “Somewhere I have read that boredom is the torment of hell that Dante forgot.” But boredom is tolerable. Boredom sometimes can spark creativity. Maybe instead, Dante purposefully excluded the missing Tenth Circle: a tiny room covered in mirrors that reflect other, better people. As hard as you try both to improve and prove yourself, and as many times as you succeed, their greatness eludes you. You can never escape wanting to be them. And you can never see yourself. (In that way, James is less a personification of my past failures, but rather a personification of my “failures” as measured against the perceived successes of everyone around me, especially my older brother.)

I wonder if that’s where I’m trapped, ten steps away from purgatory, unable to lose the image of other people who I think I should become. My self-worth lives in their faces.

Who am I? What am I doing here? And why am I not them?

Then, in an attempt to banish James from the bathroom, I hear my inner self conjure from the ether a faint recollection of one of Edmundson’s quotes. His voices echo in the silence, Knowledge of the other without a corresponding self-knowledge is a supremely dangerous acquisition.

Ensnared by the images of others, my sense of self-purpose subsists as a bitter reflection—tainted, diminished, and unoriginal. What is success if defined by the lives and choices of other people?

To loosen Jame’s hold on my psyche, to actually exorcise him from the part of my mind where regret and doubt live, I have to understand me, not in relation to anyone else but a true excavation of who I am and what I am doing here.

As if to add to the cacophony of disembodied (and internal) voices, I can hear Professor from the other day ask me, “Tell me the story, Trelaine. Why did the lawyers choose these plaintiffs? Why did they write their affidavit like this?”

IX

It is into this mess that I plunge, fleshing out my essay until six in the morning. The clicks of my keyboard reverberate throughout my basement apartment, as if heralding the dawn.

I don’t like to relive past moments because they force me to accept facets of my character that are uncomfortable and painful to acknowledge. Memories often long to relive their past lives, but they don’t like when their subject tries to change. However, in my current state—a sadness borne of loneliness and a sickness borne of doubt—I have to don a personal history lens to predict the future. I have to look backwards to understand how to move forward.

Although it has taken a few years, Edmundson finishes reading me, providing an assessment of the words I choose to describe myself. He invokes aged wisdom, citing an ancient Greek: “Socrates recognizes that getting his students to reveal themselves as they are, or appear to themselves to be, is the first step in giving them the chance to change.”

To break Hell’s mirrored chamber, I take Edmundson’s advice, opening myself up and letting the books read me. As I voyage to my past, to an abandoned twilit realm, I arrive by wind at a darkened Middle-earth shore, burst onto its shores aflame like Fëanor, a spirit shedding its vessel. The moon rises for the first time and treks a strange path across the void. Both sundered and dark elves behold the new light, a gift from long forgotten kin. (At least that’s how I hope Tolkien reads me.) And as I write, I hope to read my reader in the same way.

“Are you an essayist?” Professor lures a response from me.

“Yeah, I think so.” With the meekest of answers, I begin.