How strange it is to be lying on this bed, newly put together by S, drifting into the depths of sleep. And I know that scientifically speaking they estimate that our cells are completely changed every seven to ten years. So perhaps that’s why I feel so distant from that young man driving along the highway with his beautiful girlfriend. Perhaps I am not the same person at all, but a mere reflection still caught in the mirror of yesterday.
Time is an arrow disguised as a loop. I am lying on our new bed in our newly yellow room. The night sky is dark. The stars are hung like diamonds in the sky, and yet the words still won’t come.
Just sing it,” she said to me.
I don’t’ sing well.
“Just try it. I want to hear.”
The steps were cold. And I was eighteen, and the words wouldn’t come. I am not a good singer. But why did I want to hide that from her? The words never came that night. And here I am now singing along and thinking that things could have been different if I’d have had the words. If I hadn’t been so young perhaps we’d have a lain down beneath the moonless sky. The song ends, and I am silent once again. She will never ask me to sing again. I am silent like the wind. I am silent like the hidden moon.
I sit up. I turn down the fan. I walk into the other room and brush my teeth. I am returned from the world of dreams, from the world of what if’s. I am now twenty nine years old and sleeping in a bed of my own making. I do not think that nostalgia is a bad thing. Sometimes it is a good thing to reach into our past and try to touch the person we once were, even if it seems so damn distant.
“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable – if I want to any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”(pg. 267) DFW
I can't focus enough to read this blog entry because IT'S DAVID TENNANT AAAAHHHHHHHH!!!! Dreamiest man alive. Fact.
ReplyDeleteK now I've read and I have this to say...I've known too many people who've grown older and then completely changed their lives to believe this. Yes, odds are that by a certain age you'll have to realize you'll never be drafted to the NBA, or become a racecar driver, or marry Justine Bateman, but there are also many other options open to you. You can make wise financial decisions, save up your money, and buy an NBA team. You can learn that racecar is a palindrome, and that you probably drive like a big enough douche without having to add flaming death to your resume. And you can marry someone just as beautiful and much more accessible and have a life you couldn't have foreseen ten years ago.
ReplyDeleteAnd now, now that you've refused to sing, you can slowly come to the point in life when you realize that being self-conscious has only ever meant later regretting things undone, and you will stop waiting for someone to ask you to sing, and you will just do it. Because, honestly, what's life about if not just letting go of our self-imposed restraints and living a little? We grow from self-assured to self-repressed and back to self-assured. They call it innocence, soft mindedness, a lack of knowing better. I don't know about all that. I feel like we spend our lives getting wound tighter and tighter until we finally break a little, and then we slowly come unfurled, and it's scary, but it doesn't take away our choices. You can take up ballroom dancing, gardening, driving a schoolbus (like a racecar driver, when no one's looking), photography, travel. And you can stop letting shame guide you towards NOT doing.
But you don't have to mind me. Really I'm just trying to justify my own future as one of those old ladies who shoplifts. Some promises I've made to myself, I will keep.
the nicest things about the last five years are:
ReplyDeletei have been to europe 5 times
i am able to hike daily
i can stop and look at deer, turkeys, hawks,
or just watch cloud formations
if people ask me a question i can answer it
truthfully
i can laugh at myself more often
i can appreciate the ironies of life
i can read a good book whenever i choose
i can stay up late or get up early
doors continue to open and close but there
are still many paths and options to choose from
maturity is responsibility but dont get lost
in "the doing"