In
relationships, I find I have trouble being faithful to the moment. I always have a secret affair with time. If things are going well, I jump the calendar
and imagine a beautiful happiness that stretches on and on forever. And then when I notice that I’m doing this, I
realize that I’m actually happy in the present and that terrifies me, so I start to imagine how things might not go
well later. I become plagued with
thoughts of time, change, loss and newness.
I tell myself that even if I’m happy in the moment, things will
inevitably change and I will lose the person I have grown to care about and
then, just when it seems that hope was lost too, I will meet someone new who
will replace the person that I once day dreamed forever with. My affair with time has ruined many of my
relationships, sometimes by causing me to hold on too tightly out of fear of
what I perceive to be inevitable change and loss, sometimes by causing me to
push away preemptively out of the same fear of change and loss. Most often I have ruined my relationships
with a combination of pushing away and holding on too tightly – the latter
makes the act of pushing away quite uncomfortable for both parties.
Last
week I sat in a bar with an old friend who was visiting from out of town and I
became overwhelmingly conscious of time.
Because we see each other infrequently, yet predictably, and because of
the deep nature of our friendship, he always brings me back to myself. And what I mean is that he brings back his
memory of the person I was when he last saw me, what I was thinking then, what
I was afraid of and what I cared about.
In this way I get an uncanny reminder of who I’ve been and how I’ve
changed – and how I haven’t. He said he
remembers when I used to wear a loose purple dress over jeans with moccasin
boots and a wooden peace sign necklace.
I remember that girl too. I was a
freshman in college in Chicago, dating my first real boyfriend and utterly
convinced that love is something you have to fight for – that its proof is in
the hard work, tears, and sheer begging you have to go through to convince the
other person that they love you back. I
also remember how much that girl wanted to be a writer in New York City. Talking to my friend, I felt the presence of
the six years that have since elapsed since I was that girl wearing a purple
dress and a peace sign necklace. It took
all six of those years for me to start to believe that love shouldn’t be a
fight. But it only took four of them for
me to move to New York.
Although
I am ever-conscious of time, it still managed to sneak up on me recently. I submit my thesis in one week and graduate with
my MFA in four weeks. And then
what? The rest of my life? And what is life but a series of failed
relationships and a couple good friends who see you through? Even though I’ve changed and succeeded in
accomplishing what I now realized were short-term goals that I set for myself
years earlier, I still don’t feel like I have anything substantial. Where does one get something
substantial? And what is something
substantial, exactly? It’s not a degree
--that much I’m sure of. Is it a
job? A career? (Is sitting in my
bed writing about myself a career?) Is
it a relationship? Jesus Christ, how is
it that I can commit to writing a one hundred and fifty page thesis and be
excited to write another hundred pages so I can turn it into a real book, but I
can’t succeed in having a long-term relationship? Is it because I’m so
self-involved that I enjoy spending one hundred and fifty pages talking about
myself? Is it because I don’t even
consider not making bad decisions
since I know they will be fun to write about later? Is it because I have a habit of drinking to
excess because I’m self-involved and know it will be something to write about
later and it doesn’t matter if I make people hate me because they’re not welcome
to sit in my bed with me while I write about myself anyways? And what if I don’t want to grow up? God, what am I going to do after I
graduate? Am I just going to go to work,
date men, get my heart broken, drink excessively, and write about it until I
die?
Writing
my thesis about my family and their relationships – and mine -- has made me
conscious of time in another way. In the
beginning, I am little girl asking my mother, “Why do people get married?” To
which she responded, “People get married so they can live together forever.”
Later, on one page I tell the story of my first four relationships. Then on twenty-five pages I tell the story of
another relationship. It’s one hundred
and fifty pages of time, change, loss, and newness. And it ends with me being alone but because I
believe in the inevitable newness that follows all loss, I don’t think it’s
that sad of an ending. And there is something else on
those pages. There is my mother, my
grandmother, my brothers, and someone that I cared so much about that they took
up twenty-five pages. There’s my
brother’s hand pressed against the window of the car as he and my mother drive
away, leaving me to fly off to my new life in New York. And there’s a man I loved, under streetlights
and stars, saying, “Here’s how it really goes.”
And there’s another man sitting beside me at an Upper East Side piano
bar while I clasp my hands to my heart because the piano player is performing a
song my grandmother used to sing and suddenly I wonder if this new man could
grow to love me for the way I love. There
is all the things that I didn’t really lose after all because I can still put
them right back on the page, still tell the story of how it was and how it
meant something. Goddamn, it meant
something. And that’s when I realized
that time is LOVE. People change,
relationships fall apart, and it hurts.
It really really hurts. But there
will always be Love. On and on
forever. You can count on it. And I will write about it.
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