5 things I do for fun

1. I like to get on a random bus and let it take me wherever it wants to. There’ s a secret thrill in traveling all over the city at a steady 20mph, passing by the gaggles of pedestrians, honking cars, the bikers making a menace of themselves, dark green trees that brush the roofs gently, like a dog licking a child, all without moving a muscle. I want to see the whole world, I want to talk to strange souls, and share stories, but I’m lazy to my very bones. The public bus is like a sphere of chaos, loud clinging, and sharp turns that take you by the seat of your pants. There are two crackheads, locked in a vicious argument; the bus driver slows to let in a person running late; the robot announcer glitches uselessly; three girls who refuse to sit down are swaying, almost falling over, but chattering gossip at the same time, hanging onto the poles; an old lady rings the bell for every stop, but never gets off; the brakes squeal with an ear shattering noise as a dog runs across the street, dragging a small woman by his leash. If I close my eyes real tight, and I’m just about high enough, I can pretend I’m riding a rollercoaster. The bus sways, sometimes leaps forward, rushes down an empty street, breaks so hard your heart jumps out of your chest. But it’s much higher stakes than a rollercoaster. People are running late for work, bicyclists keep threatening to crash, cars pile up behind, honking like a demented cacophony of piercing noises. I ride the bus for so long that time stops still. When it’s dark, and the lights in the bus are on, it feels like I’m on a submarine, exploring the uncharted, deep, inky waters of the ocean. Everything moves rapidly in the shadows, and sometimes we mow them down. Cars and people weave by us, leaving a wake of frothy waves behind. The fair breeze blows, the white foam flies, the furrow follows free. I make up dumb little lies every time the bus driver asks me what I’m still doing there. Really, I just like to ride the bus, it’s an adventure.

2. I write because I can’t breathe without it. It’s like drawing oxygen. Whether I show anyone what I wrote, or whether it’s for the very private recesses of my mind where I dare not go, it’s all the same. It’s like pulling teeth. Somebody once said, it’s hell writing, and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written. I think that’s how most artists feel about it. It’s not a career, or a way to make money, it’s a release of parts of you that would poison you to death had you not freed it. I write everywhere. I write on my computer, in notebook after notebook, on napkins in the restaurant, on the back of my hand in Sharpie, on blank sheets of paper in the hospital, in my notes app, in chalk on the sidewalk, on the big full-length mirror in the living room, in the sticky note collage on the fridge, between pages of textbooks. If I don’t write, I feel I might lose myself completely, drown in the thoughts that never materialized. I know there are two kinds of people in the world, the do-ers and the thinkers, or, the adventurers and the scribes. I’m a scribe to my very core. I let the adventurers do their thing, take me along, and I write it all down to preserve all our glory. We cannot exist without the other. So no, I don’t write for fun. I write because I don’t know how not to.

3. The walls of my room, the bins under my bed, the art room in the hospital, the kitchen table, are all covered with a majesty of color and flair. I love oil pastels. There’s so much room for error. You can draw and color and cover and it all looks like a wonderful mirage of images, blended and scribbled over, crossing lines you can never cross with watercolors or charcoal. I’ve been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon in my hand. I love putting my imagination on paper. I have a marvelous imagination. It holds all the colors of the rainbow, and then some, of galaxies and eyeballs and the shapes of shadows, of bleeding ink under pavements, of sunburnt skies and bright orange popsicles that melt faster than you can lick them. I cannot describe for you what I see, the things that others can’t, but I can show you. I can color in the bony figures that follow me around, the trembling white fingers that claw on my bedroom windowsill, the rotting flowers in the trees in the avenue, the swimming pool with sharks below, cut up slices of strawberries, cantaloupe, and grapes melting on the kitchen counter, the big teeth of the wide mouths in the murky, lilac sky, the long faces of cars that pass on by. You can take oil pastels everywhere, in the car, at the park, in really boring classes and late at night on the balcony. When I was in the hospital this last time, Tvisha got me a tray of fifty oil pastels, and over the month I was there, I work them down to their nubs. My fingers are stained with burgundy and crimson and jade and navy and lemon and violet. They look like chalk, and I can’t help it, but I love chalk, and I bit one of the green ones. The nurse took them away after that.

4. There’s an app called Geocaching. I stumbled across it on one of those really weird sub-Reddits. The app shows you a map of geocaches, objects that you have to go and find, and you log where you found it. It’s very cool in New York City, where geocaches run plenty all over the city and its boroughs, and there are always people looking for them, so you can run into strangers that sometime turn into best friends. Finding a geocache might involve a lot of climbing weird treks, or combing through a public library, or swimming to the bottom of a pool, or exploring a church basement, digging in meadows, ducking underneath slides in the local playground. I’m obsessed immediately. Every time I find a geocache, I note it carefully in the app, maybe even come across a fellow explorer and we exchange usernames. Some of the geocaches glow with popularity, with people milling around it. We stick our hands into birdhouses, open Tupperware buried in magnolia groves, scribble our names into logbooks, add pieces to half-done jigsaw puzzles, put sticky notes on walls, and everything in between. It’s a great way to get out of the house and explore the city. It’s like the exact opposite of taking the bus for no reason. You have to get your hands dirty, get to know the neighborhood, and meet other weirdos who also like to spend their spare time digging around for whatever object the app commands us to find.

5. There’s no place as quiet and peaceful as the bottom of a swimming pool. I learned to swim very young. There was a pool at the social club, and Mom and Dad would take me, my sisters and cousins to go swim there regularly. The pool was a beautiful turquoise, with a bronze statue that pours and froths water at the edge of the pool. 10 feet deep on one end, soft sloping on the shallow end, where the mouth of the lion pumped the waters. His jaw was huge, a great place to sit if you wanted to take a break. We were only allowed to play and splash around if we’d finished our allotted laps, usually about thirty. We did somersaults, held breathing competitions, and swam to the very bottom of the pool to see who could stay there the longest. In the swimming pool, everything is soft, rippling over your skin. Swimming regularly is a habit I never grow out, even when I dyed my hair blue and had to wear those super tight caps over my hair to keep it from leeching dye. Some people go to the pool to laze around, some people like to lay down on the chairs, but I go in fully equipped, ready to do my laps, my hair cap, and goggles on. It’s my favorite form of cardio. The water is warm and gentle, and most importantly, there’s no sweating involved. Everything is silent, never moving, and the world disappears in the bars of sunlight that pour through the waters. Thirty laps is a good time for daydreaming, or later on, listening to music through waterproof earbuds, or pretending to be a scuba diver, or an Olympic swimmer, anything at all that your imagination can conjure up.