So I went. My boyfriend and I hopped the BART to Oakland City Center and immediately after emerging from the station were overwhelmed with loud cheering following a union worker’s speech. The march was focused on raising awareness around the defunding of public education that’s currently going on in Oakland. The city plans to close down five schools due to budget cuts, despite already existent problems with overcrowded classrooms. This is an issue that’s close to my heart because I went to an incredibly overcrowded elementary school, one that was so overcrowded that in 2nd grade my teacher actually had to teach 2nd and 3rd graders in the same classroom. It was called a “2/3 split” and there were over 35 kids in my one class. It was chaos.

So at the rally teachers and students, unionized nurses and longshoremen, spoke to the crowd about the importance of mobilization, of education, of the Occupy movement itself. The crowd was incredibly diverse: tons of children with their parents, old people, young people, black, white, Asian and Latino people. I was happily surprised at the diversity considering what I’d been reading in the news. There were so many kids there! It made the whole thing seem safe, which was good because despite minor police presence my boyfriend was freaking out about getting pepper sprayed and/or arrested. (Though at this point who can really blame him?)

Following the rally, thousands of people marched peacefully past the banks in downtown Oakland, hanging overdue notices on their front doors to let them know how much they owe the American people. Everyone was videotaping and photographing everything. Before we embarked on the march, the organizers emphasized how important it was for regular Occupy protesters to document everything, so that we could have the real news, not just the news reported by the mainstream outlets. It was an effective cry; aside from the credentialed reporters, it seemed like approximately 1 out of every 10 protesters was eagerly documenting the unfolding events.

After marching by the banks, we snaked up to Lakeview Elementary School, across from the historic Grand Lake Theater. The theater marquee read: “No one can evict an idea whose time has come. Shame on you Mayor Quan.” It was inspiring to see such a public display of solidarity from local businesses. I admit to welling up a bit when I glimpsed the marquee.

Outside the school, teachers and parents and kids spoke about the horrors of shutting down schools when class sizes were already topping 35 and public tax dollars were being funneled into privately run charter schools. My boyfriend and I were asked to help hold a big banner that said, “Tax the rich,” which we did dutifully for a while until an army veteran offered to fill in for us. By this time it was close to 4:30pm and starting to get dark and drizzly. We marched back towards 19th and Telegraph, where the more avid among us were going to pull down fencing at a vacant lot in order to set up a new camp. When we streamed beneath an overpass, chants grew more enthusiastic as protesters reveled in the booming effect the overpass acoustics lent to our voices. We were thousands strong but beneath the overpass it felt like hundreds of thousands. The triumph of that illusion was not lost on any of us.

As we made our way back downtown, police had begun letting traffic through, so we streamed through lanes of cars. I assumed the drivers would be angry with us for posing such a delay, but the vast majority of them smiled and honked and pumped their fists in solidarity. They were with us, even the people we were inconveniencing! It was kind of amazing, especially considering how much we all hate traffic in the Bay Area.

When we got back to 19th and Telegraph, the rain began to come steadily. The first police presence I witnessed was a string of cops, clad in their regular uniforms, ringing the lot. When protesters began to dismantle the fencing, the OPD let them, which I thought was strange. Children’s art that had been lined up along the fence of the vacant lot was collected and stored safely at Rudy’s Can’t Fail Café, a restaurant nearby that has shown immense support for the Occupy movement.

At this point it was dark and raining and my boyfriend and I decided to head back to San Francisco. We came home and put on warm socks and cued up the police scanner so we could listen to see if the OPD were going to infiltrate the new camping spot. We heard later that the sound truck, which had been blasting music during the whole march, was apparently impounded under the ridiculous sideshow law. The OPD did not confront the protesters until 8am the next morning, at which point they left peacefully.

The whole day was an incredibly inspiring show of solidarity, of sheer humanity, in the face of the greed that has overtaken our government. I actually consider myself politically moderate–I am by no means a socialist or a communist or an anarchist. I just want our democracy to return to its roots: I want my votes to mean more than corporate dollars. So I can’t help identifying with the Occupy movement, since so much of what they are protesting—corporatism, the shrinking of the middle class, the immenseness of student loan debt—has impacted me and my family personally, and often times on a daily basis. The first protest I ever went to was in 2004 for Bush’s inauguration. My dad took me and my friend Alyssa into Washington D.C. so that we could boo when his cavalcade of cars drove down the Mall. It was cool, but it was nothing like this.

Last night, even though I was sore and achy from marching and carrying signs, I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night worrying and I didn’t have nightmares of police with nightsticks prodding my stomach and my back and my shoulders. I fell asleep easily, thinking of the poetry Occupy Wall Street projected onto the Verizon building on Thursday: WE ARE WINNING / IT IS THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING / DO NOT BE AFRAID / LOVE.

I slept deeply for the first time in weeks.

What if I stayed home and tossed my phone off the balcony and re-sewed the curtains and wrote letters to all the people I miss? What if I just climbed into the car in my pajamas and drove north until the tenseness in my heart burst, broke open like a crystalline jellyfish and sprawled and unfurled inside my chest? What if I didn’t tell anyone and I just left, took the car and went, stopped at a gas station on the Oregon border to get a coffee and fill the tank? What if I used the rearview mirror and a pair of rusty scissors to chop my hair into a blunt bob, streaks of yellow-red hair collecting on the dashboard, falling between the seats? What if I just drove until I couldn’t anymore, and then found a town with Northwestern pine trees to settle down in, to find a new name and a new sense of self in? What if I just left and never told anyone? What if I just never looked back?

Some days it’s what I want, more than anything. I wake up and I burrow into my boyfriend’s arms and I say, “Let’s not go today. Let’s play hooky. Let’s go to a diner and then go for a drive down the PCH. Let’s just forget.” I say it but I don’t mean it, not really. If I meant it I would do it, I would go. Leaving is something I’m used to. Leaving is something I know by heart.

Adulthood is when your sense of responsibility finally outweighs your penchant for self-destruction. We both know leaving is impossible, a desire cultivated by feverish fantasies of escapism and misplaced angst. So we rise and shine, shower and make coffee, feed the cats and eat toast. As we pull out of the garage every morning that dread swells in me, quieted only by my nagging need to pay the rent each month, to put groceries on the shelf.

But what if we were brave? What if we were brave enough to leave?

Maddie caught on. “Moon!” she shouted and pointed at the beaming sphere. “I got it!” she said, and started ripping across the field to catch the moon.

I’m willing to admit to nosy strangers and curious friends that my family situation is odd. I have one sister four years younger than me, one sister 22 years younger than me, and another sister on the way. Sometimes I worry that people will think Maddie is actually my kid and my parents pretend she’s theirs because they’re super Catholic or something. This is probably because everyone is always so incredulous to discover our age difference. “That’s your sister?” they ask, like in 2011 they’re still incapable of comprehending divorce or remarriage or blended families.

But really I just feel lucky: lucky to be 23 and to have a sister young enough, sweet and innocent and celestial enough, to try to catch the moon.

“Yes,” I whispered back. “What is that?”

“It sounds like someone screaming, ‘Maman!’” she responded. “I’m really fucking freaked out.”

Of course she was, we both were, because the apartment next to ours was empty. No one lived there, and we knew this for sure because the door was boarded up. Still almost every night we were awoken to the sound of a male voice howling for his mother. It was deeply pained, underscored by staccato thumps on the floor and the walls. Under layers of holed blankets in the wet, obsidian night, we were terrified.

We tried to look up the history of the building, to see if anything bad had happened there. We couldn’t find anything except that the address had been used as a fictional building for some popular French video language game. We also unearthed a picture of the Allies marching down our street, past our building, when they liberated Paris from the Nazis during World War II. But no haunted epochs, no specter stories were to be found.

I am telling you this because Paris is a city full of ghosts, whispers of a life I lived a million lives ago, of people and places and memories that wrench and flicker in me still. Being here when I am so different, when my life is so different, is strange and weirdly emotional. I almost welled up walking past the gardens, past my apartment building, past the Tabac and crepe stands I frequented three years ago. Because this time I’m not alone, I’m with someone who loves me, ferociously.

But the ghosts still linger, in the back of Brasseries raising tiny espresso cups to their lips, on the streets with their arms slung carelessly around one another, in the endless tunnels of the Metro. They are the ghosts of the those who have left recently: of my dog, whom my Dad called to tell me on my first night here had to be put down; of my French teacher of five years who succumbed to cancer a few months ago; of my best friend’s mom, who loved it here, whose sophistication and attitude towards life was Parisian through and through. They are the ghosts of the people I knew here, the men who breathed their wine-words into my ears, the rag tag pack of British blokes we drank with until the sun fanned like a prism behind the Bastille. And of the spirit boy whose anguished cry punctuated all those sleepless nights in that tiny apartment, as we lay motionless, missing our own ghosts from back home.

We are here for my boyfriend’s work conference, so I’m actually also alone a lot, not just in terms of being a foreigner in a foreign country, but also actually physically alone, in our hotel room, in the Italian cafes, while he works. We have plenty of time afterwards to gorge ourselves on mozzarella and wine, to blunder awkwardly through the Italian phrasebook while our kind, impossibly patient waiters gaze at us in genuine amusement. I learned something important when I lived in Paris, and that is that as long as you try to speak the language, as long as you make a real effort to identify with the culture and pronunciation, people will be fond of you, find you endearing, even. It helps to be a girl who blushes easily.

It is fun to be invisible in a place like this, but it’s tough when the people you’re around aren’t invisible at all. Here I am a +1, I’m “Steve’s girlfriend,” I’m the apparitional girl in the red lipstick subconsciously pouting my way through cocktail parties. Apparently I appear sad and haunted even when I’m not, even when I’m just bored. If one more person on this trip goads me to smile I will forgo customary American cheeriness and angrily stamp my Gauloises out on their forearm.

In truth I enjoy the anonymity but have a hard time putting on a solid game face. The people here are interesting, lovely even: there are tech titans and people from the U.K. who just genuinely love Google products; there are map geeks, people who sold everything they had to sail around the world and truck drivers from Melbourne. It’s a diverse crowd unified by the communal delight in maps and legends, in quantifying and photographing every square inch of earth, in telling stories using geo tags and coordinates. I like spending time with people who are passionate, even if it’s about something I’m completely lost on.

Today I will spend the entire day alone. After I’m finished writing, I’ll catch up on my Internet reading, I’ll take a bath in the claw-foot tub, I’ll put on perfume and walk around the piazzas. I’ll keep absolutely quiet so that people can’t tell I’m American: I want to be anonymous. I’ll go to the bookstore across the way and I’ll drink cappuccino at an outdoor café and when my boyfriend comes back from work I will bury the desire to throw my arms around him and say, “Thank God you’re here! I was so lonely.”

I got Cocoa for my 8th birthday. On that day, my mom showed up at school with this adorable, shaking puppy and I refused to believe he was mine. “Why are you holding Brad Smith’s dog?” I asked. “He’s not Brad Smith’s,” my mom replied, grinning. “He’s your dog.” Cocoa was so scared of everyone we had to carry him to the car. I remember he licked my face on the way to pick my sister up from daycare. My mom went in and got Alison and I sat in the car with Cocoa. My sister couldn’t believe our luck either. Didn’t my Dad say we couldn’t get a dog?

We learned later that my dad hadn’t been informed of the impulse purchase. My mother bought Cocoa in a fit of mania, without consulting him. She was blinded by her desire for love and admiration from my sister and me; she reveled in the gleeful looks that graced our faces when we first saw her holding Cocoa. I like to imagine that my dad took one look at Cocoa, so scruffy and buoyant, and completely changed his mind. In actuality it took much longer to adjust. But my dad did grow to like Cocoa, to bond with him even. He’d never admit it, though.

Cocoa lived with us in Allentown, where we’d frequently take him to the baseball fields to run around and roll in the dirt. We took him to the nearby creek on hot summer days, where he’d lay down in the shallows and gratefully lap up the surrounding water. My dad entertained me and my sister endlessly with a slew of ridiculous shticks he and Cocoa performed together: one, where he would tap Cocoa’s butt and yell, “Gotcha heiney!” and Cocoa would go tearing around the house, apparently in on the joke. I’m 23 now and I still find this amusing.

Cocoa grew older alongside us, moving with us to a new house in Springfield, providing much-needed emotional comfort during my parents’ divorce. When I went off to college, I cried when I said goodbye to him. I’d had a tumultuous high school experience, and in some ways he seemed like my main constant in that chaotic world. After I left for NYU, he slept in my bed most nights. Sometimes he still whined at my bedroom door, in an attempt to convince himself I was still there, just hiding under the bed or something. He loved me unconditionally, which is an important and revelatory kind of love for a teenage girl to feel. In New York, I missed him so acutely that I’d arrange video chat sessions with my Dad just to catch a glimpse of him.

Cocoa, by now 14 or 15, went deaf soon after that, so we couldn’t video chat anymore. I got a cat, who never replaced Cocoa but forced me bluntly into the pro-cat domain. I introduced them once, Gatsby and Cocoa. As far as cats and dogs go, they got along swimmingly.

My Dad, whose jokes about eagerly anticipating Cocoa’s demise have grown upsetting in their reality, called last weekend to say that the vet believes we should put him down soon. He’s in a lot of pain, can barely eat. He’s 17 years old.

It’s not so much about Cocoa going to doggy heaven soon, though it is. In broader strokes, it’s about the end of an era, the supposed demise of the trappings of my childhood. I don’t live at home anymore; in fact I live so far from home I can’t afford to go back for Thanksgiving. When I think about Cocoa dying, my chest feels panicky, delicate, a sharp, crystallized mass. I remember as a kid sitting on the back deck petting him and thinking about what it would be like when he wasn’t around anymore. It was a terrifying thought, but I comforted myself with the notion that it wouldn’t happen for years to come. I’d be in my twenties, at least. I’d be downright old by then.

I am old, but not in the same ways I imagined I’d be. I still feel naïve and lost most of the time. I do things that adults do, like pay taxes and go grocery shopping and get to bed at a reasonable hour, but mostly I still feel like the kid that I was on that day in 3rd grade when my mom showed up with Cocoa: bewildered, fragile, disbelieving.

I’m the same girl I was back then, but it’s been so long that sometimes I have trouble remembering. Cocoa, now 17 and halfway towards being gone forever, never forgot. I think to him I’m still the little girl who carried him, proudly and excitedly, through the maze of the school parking lot on my 8th birthday. He wasn’t Brad Smith’s dog, he was mine. For 17 years. And I’m going to miss him terribly.

When she accomplishes something notable, the celebration won’t be a source of anxiety. There will be no fretting over whose house to host it at or whether her Stepparents will get along. There will be no awkward silence as she sits by and watches the adults in her life struggle like children with polite phrases. It won’t be about them. It will be about her.

She won’t know what it’s like to live like a nomad, to court double lives with exasperated ease. She won’t eat dinner at one house and keep her things at another, or sleep on the couch for two years because there isn’t room for another bed. When her parents complain about how little time she spends with them, it will be because she’s out with her friends, not because she’s spending time with her preferred parent.

A lot of things that were my fault then won’t be her fault now. She’ll have one bedroom and one set of parents and one place that she will consider home. I think she will be happier and luckier and lovelier. I’m grateful for that.

I don’t think it began with the Mayans, but our collective fear of the End Times certainly cast some of its roots in that mythology. Some fear the world will end on December 21, 2012, as that will be the final day in a 5,125-year long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar. It might sound hoaxy or bizarre, but a quick search for “Mayan 2012” unearths over 8.58 million Google results. Books published including the words “2012” and “Mayan,” have skyrocketed in recent years, and the upward trajectory only continues as we inch closer to the end of 2011.

Naturally, the closer we get to 2012, the more our curiosity is piqued, but if the earth’s crust didn’t rebel so frequently and the ocean waves kept their calm, it’s doubtful we’d erupt into such a frenzy. America’s cozy relationship with Christianity’s fire and brimstone side also underscores our willingness to believe in the world’s end: Harold Camping was embarrassingly, publicly wrong, but science does support the idea that some of our basic human activities—the mass amount of waste we generate, our dependence on oil—put the planet in peril. When all of these tangentially related factors coalesce and streamline themselves into a lightning-fast Twitter feed, I start to think my anxiety is much more manufactured than I’d first thought.

Is it like this from now on, always this feeling of falling? It’s like I’m angled over the edge of a dark well, bracing for the slightest breeze to toss me into the blackness. Earthquakes and rape and wars, terrorism and hurricanes and racism: these are the topics that have dominated the news my entire life. How could they not have some impact on the way I see the world? Has the news always been this depressing?

In a way, for many people my age, it does all come back to 9/11. At 12 or 13 or 14, how do you respond to a tragedy that cataclysmic, that emotionally hulking and paralyzing and terrifying? Even our parents didn’t know what to say, just stood there in front of the TV ghost-like and sallow, chewing at the corners of their mouths. Our history books included the same messages of Manifest Destiny and American power as those of our parents’, but with the terror alert flashing orange and the feeling of your bare feet sticking to the floor of the airport security line, it’s hard to imagine that America was ever a world power at all. Young people today were born into a world where America was already declining. With the political system collapsing into little more than a small dick contest and the media choosing to shower more attention on the Kardashian nuptials than the Libyan conflict, believing in the end of the world starts to seem like the only sane thing to do.

I’m only 23 so my perspective is limited: have we always felt this unmoored, violently barreling towards a seemingly human-manufactured end? If books are any indication, the word “apocalypse” peaked right before Y2K, and has actually decreased since. But from August 1, 2010-August 1, 2011, Google News indexes 9,940 articles including the word “apocalypse,” a number more than double the 4,940 results surfaced from August 1, 2009-August 1, 2010.

And for the first time since the mid-90s, books including the word “terrorism” are actually on the decline. Certainly this is a small indication of our shifting national fears. The most solid unifier of a nation is a common enemy: it used to be terrorism, but 10 years have passed. Now, with 2012 approaching and natural disasters striking almost daily, it seems our common enemy has shifted. Fueled by social media and TV news sensationalism, it seems what we’re most afraid of is this world we’ve created. In short: what we’re afraid of now is ourselves. And who can blame us, especially considering the crazy August we had?

I was reared on bad news, my family gathering around after dinner every night to watch Tom Brokaw or Brian Williams enunciate another tragedy. I think in some ways it’s always been that way: bad news is just more interesting, and avid news readers have always been the equivalent of car crash rubberneckers. But when your childlike invincibility and fear of world events combine, it’s a scary mess. And for journalists and writers already prone to anxious fits, it’s difficult to step away and get perspective. The trick is to know when to extract yourself from the mire, to close the browser and pull on a jacket and just GO, straight to a place where there is nothing but what’s happening there, with you, in that moment. I think if we did this more, we’d eschew the alarmism for something more akin to rationality.

Or maybe I’m naive. Either way, I’m not ready to stock any underground sheds with bottled water and ammo just yet.

As we approached the state line, casinos and 24-hour bars appeared just on the other side of the border, ushering us into Nevada with flashing lights and whirling signs. Later I confided, “Being from the East Coast, it’s so strange to me that we can just take a jaunt to Nevada for the weekend.”

“NevAda,” our host corrected me by flattening the A. “Not Nev-AH-da. That’s how tourists say it.” Oops.

The next day we drove to the beach and the sand was so hot it burned the bottoms of our feet. We got lake dirt in our hair and in the web of our fingers and it felt wonderful to be in a place where the threat of fog ruining the warm temperatures didn’t loom immediate. At night we packed on the layers and went to see Twelfth Night on the beach. You could see the lake shimmering beyond the set and the moon came back for a visit, this time full and glorious, a big friendly face in the billowy sky.

The next day we would return to our lives with a new appreciation for how much we loved them. But by the lake, ankle-deep in sand, it was nice to live a different life, at least for a little while.

My grandfather died of a heart attack before I was born, when my dad was just 19 years old, and I don’t think my grandmother ever really got over it. It’s been over 25 years and the only time she takes off her wedding band is to do the dishes. Her fingers have gotten bonier over the years, the various illnesses she’s fought against and won make their permanent mark on her body in the form of her frail, protruding bones. I wonder if she’s ever had to have the ring resized, if she’s ever had to go to the jeweler and field questions about her husband. I’ve wonder if she’s lied just to save herself the shame of admitting that she’s been married to a dead person for 25 years. I wonder if that fact even embarrasses her. Even though I’m her granddaughter, even though we’re family, these are things we won’t ever talk about.

In those lush, languid summer mornings we’d eat our Crispix cereal from woven wooden bowls, our sweaty thighs sticking to the plastic chairs. Afterwards my grandmother would roll a hulking, puke-green dishwasher into the kitchen, its gears grunting and screeching like some guttural monster, and load the dishes into the racks. For years that dishwasher terrified me; I mostly preferred using the upstairs bathroom to the downstairs powder room just so I wouldn’t have to tip toe past it.

My sister and I lived with our parents in a small twin house, the backyard no more than a patch of dirt and grass with a stubby tree growing from it. My grandmother’s house and backyard, small and shoddy by current standards, seemed like utopia to us then. Out back, stretched beyond the cement patio, was a dry, sprawling grass space that bordered a golden cornfield. In the summers, my sister and I would fill up the baby pool and relax in the sun, or we’d haul out the sprinkler and thrash around, carelessly coating ourselves in hose water and mud and grass blades.

In the evenings we’d take baths and blot our bodies with baby powder. We’d play dress up with my grandmother’s jewelry and makeup before settling in with a bowl of sherbet to watch the scrambled shows on a rabbit-eared TV. We’d try to get her to let us watch All That or Keenan and Kel but we always ended up settling on some old-timey, innocuous show like Bewitched. We were kids, so we never really minded that much. We never really minded anything back then.

***

In high school my grandmother sold the house and moved to a retirement community in New Jersey. There are less cows and more factories, less dirt roads and more freeways. Sometimes I miss visiting the cattle in her neighbor’s yard or watching the sun crest the cornstalks. When we returned the last few times, when I was 12 or 13 or 14, the cornfield had been torn down in favor of a new housing development. Her yard, which had once seemed gloriously endless, didn’t seem that big anymore. It wasn’t so much that the yard had changed as it was that I had, too.

During those summer visits, when it was time to sleep, my sister would settle into the bed in my Uncle’s old room and I’d take the pink fluffy one in my Aunt’s. The cicadas hummed so fiercely that it was impossible to hear your own thoughts, so we slept easily, dreamlessly, our toes sticking out from the sheets. That was years ago, but we haven’t slept that well since.