Sometimes when I look at maps, I get overwhelmed with the size of the world.It’s like the thought of all of the places I am not starts to outweigh the importance of where I am.
And then I start thinking about the physical spaces between us and how they tend to eventually translate into emotional distance. If it’s true that regret is a circle, I am spinning.
Then there’s this line of thinking about how the big decisions are never really very big at all.They’re more the unintentional product of lots of small decisions.The things we think about as big choices in our lives – our jobs, our relationships – tend to be the product of momentum and reaction.And I know I keep coming back to this, but I can’t seem to get my head around the momentum I built up and the place it took me.How I was there and it brought me here.
So I’m always reminding myself that the past is the past; I recite old adages.It seems like every other day I’m repeating quotes framed in my memory about silver linings and how everything happens for a reason.But still I am here, 80 miles east of the place I should be.And while my friends are all finding their ways, I just sit and think about how I gave mine up.
Maybe, though, I should be thinking about how I’m going to get it back.
I think that maybe it’s fitting that while the curbs and gutters are filling up with old leaves, my life is too.When I should be turning new ones, maybe now I’m far enough removed from this to now look at it from a perspective outside of my own and realize exactly what happened.
Because the more I look at maps, the easier it is to see where I belong.
Keep walking around in the autumn of my mind.Taking in the smell of the coming cold and counting the leaves as they fall. And if it’s true that they’re most beautiful right before they die, our love was never a tree.
I’m looking at this picture of us, opposing ends of a puzzle.Strangely symbolic of how things worked for so long. When you were upside down, I was rightside up.When I was about to fall, you were the rope around my waist.
And it is strangely fitting that my life would follow the universe in its slow rotation upon itself.It is significant to me to be here, reduced from adjacent hearts to a short walk together in between them.Just as I discovered you once, with rain on your chin and a glow in your eyes, I am finding you again.
I am forgetting what you once told me, only to find myself remembering again.With my feet on a slightly curved path that I have come to know well.
It is strange.
It’s a current that I can’t fight.A tide that I can’t keep my chin above.
I keep drawing parallels from then to now, trace lines that only translate to a day.
I was lying in a hospital bed talking to God about His existence and His reasons for everything, when he reminded me that not everything is a test.
That some things are just things. Not good or bad, not serving some greater purpose. Sometimes things happen that are not based in rationality, are not mapped out ahead of time, but simply unfold .
Or maybe our lives are sheets of paper; wrinkled and creased and pressed flat again. Crumpled and left to unfold.
I think God saw the understanding settle onto my shoulders. Or maybe he can know in other ways. Either way, I woke up alone.
And the doctors came in, shook my hand and took the tubes out of my arms and throat. Told me I was lucky, that the stitches would take time.
So I walked gingerly out of the ICU, and I smiled and realized that I had thirty-seven stitches, three bruised ribs, a broken heart and a metric ton of twisted metal as proof that God leaves room for entropy.
We might not have any idea what we’re doing, but God damn, we’re doing something.
It is an interesting equilibrium that exists between love given and love in return. This precarious balance of giving and hoping to receive. Irrational, I suppose, is what it is. To give yourself wholly to someone because there is no other choice. Lately we’ve been talking with our hands, vulnerability our currency, afraid to be anywhere else. So we are here, breathless at the top of everything, propping each other up to remain.
I have learned that there are no plans, there are only expectations and tangible things. The taste of blood, the claim of love; the wind knocked out of me. Love always redefines itself.
So I will hope to learn the gaps in your teeth and the patterns that line your palms. Hope to fall deeper in love with the pauses between your words, tumble further into the uncertainty of all of this with the faith that leaning on each other keeps both of us from falling.
Three hundred and fifty years ago, a guy named Descartes wrote a treatise for a princess. And in seventeenth century French, he worked out the differences between emotions and perceptions, drawing lines between what happens to us and what we feel because of it. He talked about passions and spirits and the ways they pull us in and out of loops and tangles; talked about the spaces between what we are hit with and the way we feel it. Now, I don’t know if Elizabeth understood what he meant or if she agreed with what he was getting at – I’m not even sure she read it. But what I do know is that nearly four hundred years later, the same things are hitting our souls the same way, and the only thing I can control is how I feel about it.
So I am here, separated by time and distance from the last five years, but if it’s true that we are the sum of our experiences, then I am not so much sad as I am grateful.
Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write a hundred stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration as he realized at last, something was happening to him. An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived.
Things do not always turn out to be what I thought they would be. And things might not always happen when I am expecting them. But I am here in the present, five senses and memory, moving slowly along a timeline, cautiously optimistic about what might or might not happen.
You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.
