Eat, Pray, Love

interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.
I’m lucky that at least I have my writing. This is something people can understand. Ah, she
left her marriage in order to preserve her art. That’s sort of true, though not completely so. A
lot of writers have families. Toni Morrison, just to name an example, didn’t let the raising of
her son stop her from winning a little trinket we call the Nobel Prize. But Toni Morrison made
her own path, and I must make mine. The Bhagavad Gita—that ancient Indian Yogic
text—says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of
somebody else’s life with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and
clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.
Anyway, I bring all this up only to admit that—in comparison to my sister’s existence, to
her home and to her good marriage and to her children—I’m looking pretty unstable these
days. I don’t even have an address, and that’s kind of a crime against normality at this ripe old
age of thirty-four. Even at this very moment, all my belongings are stored in Catherine’s home
and she’s given me a temporary bedroom on the top floor of her house (which we call “The
Maiden Aunt’s Quarters,” as it includes a garret window through which I can stare out at the
moors while dressed in my old wedding gown, grieving my lost youth). Catherine seems to be
fine with this arrangement, and it’s certainly convenient for me, but I’m wary of the danger that
if I drift about this world randomly for too long, I may someday become The Family Flake. Or it
may have already happened. Last summer, my five-year-old niece had a little friend over to
my sister’s house to play. I asked the child when her birthday was. She told me it was Janu-
ary 25.
“Uh-oh!” I said. “You’re an Aquarius! I’ve dated enough Aquarians to know that they are
trouble.”
Both the five-year-olds looked at me with bewilderment and a bit of fearful uncertainty. I
had a sudden horrifying image of the woman I might become if I’m not careful: Crazy Aunt Liz.
The divorcée in the muumuu with the dyed orange hair who doesn’t eat dairy but smokes
menthols, who’s always just coming back from her astrology cruise or breaking up with her
aroma-therapist boyfriend, who reads the Tarot cards of kindergarteners and says things like,
“Bring Aunty Liz another wine cooler, baby, and I’ll let you wear my mood ring... .”
Eventually I may have to become a more solid citizen again, I’m aware of this.
But not yet... please. Not just yet.
Eat, Pray, Love