Sifting through my possessions makes me wonder at how much absolute trash I own. Honestly. I don’t own a lot of stuff, but damn do I have a lot of junk. Old bills, scrap paper, receipts. It feels so good to purge, to bring myself down to bare necessity. At the same time I realize how hard it is for me to let go of things. The first CD I thought of putting on was the one I played while moving out freshman year. It took me a good half hour before I decided to throw away old wrapping paper. I don’t know what it is about paper—any kind. Wrapping, drafts of essays, post-it notes, magazine ads, junk mail...they’re hard to part with. I think it was during the summer before college when I finally got rid of all my elementary school Valentine’s Day cards. I suppose that’s why I’m obsessed with recycling paper—as long as they go somewhere, I don’t feel so bad. I've been through seven albums, two green apple Smirnoff twists, a pack of gum, one pair of scrubby jeans, and two near-cries today so far while cleaning my room. I could feel the exhaustion build up and seep away, and somehow transitions like these always make me so weepy. I’m going to miss this room. I know we’re moving on to bigger and better, but that doesn’t make this less valuable to me. I’m going to miss being able to have three-way conversations while sitting comfortably in our rooms. I’m going to miss my three windows, the narrowness of my room, my view of Tommy’s.
Now in an empty room with bare walls and glaringly vacant drawers: I have a stretch of alone time for the first time in so long. Not just physically, but the thoughts in my mind have only to do with what I feel, nothing of what I must do, and it feels so good to write like this.
Back when I first started this entry, I wanted to use a winter picture, and I wanted to start out explaining why I was using a winter photo for a spring post. Not to undermine my love of winter and its associated pleasures, but the feeling of displacement—of plain wrongness—that it evokes was fitting for my mood at the time. A bit of time has passed since then, and more than a lot has happened. On the surface, I finished exams, moved my things into storage, and have officially started summer. If that were it, this post would be a lot easier but it never is just that. I’m having trouble sorting things at the moment; things have accumulated to the point that I have no idea where to start and end. But I figure that this will be so long no one will get through it anyway, so it doesn’t matter so much.
After talking about my few days of euphoria and eventual easing into quiet contentment, I managed to experience one of the worst periods of anxiety I’ve ever had. I couldn’t bring myself to post about it while I was actually going through it; I could barely even write privately about it. Andrew and I were talking about denial, and that got us thinking about the five stages of grief, and I said that if I just went through each stage sequentially, I think I’d feel a lot more stable but my problem was that I kept vacillating between phases. At this point neither of us remembered any stages other than denial and acceptance, but I knew that I wasn’t stuck at either one of those. He looked them up, and I didn’t feel like they applied to me: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. These stages of grief seem to be provoked by an actual incident—a real tragedy. Which wasn’t the case. I told him that my situation constituted the five stages of inexplicable anxiety: panic, confusion, indifference/denial, reasoning, and confrontation. I definitely jumped between all of those, sometimes over the course of mere minutes, but always quite consciously avoiding confrontation until the feelings went away.
There were some moments where I honestly panicked, and then I’d feel so overwhelmed I actually contemplated indulging in a good cry, which I rarely do. And there’s my problem. I contemplated these things. I couldn’t ever let myself just do it; I never ended up crying. A few moments later I’d feel fine again, not completely at ease but not completely overcome either.
The real problem is, I don’t have anything tragic to speak of. I don’t feel like I have the right to be unhappy, and that’s what really made me upset. My life is so full of beautiful things and wonderful people, not even in comparison to those less fortunate (the argument your parents like to use when you’re dramatizing the trivial) but just purely and absolutely. I know I don’t need a life-altering reason to be sad, but can’t there be some kind of reason? Can’t there be something I can feel like I could change, or at least recognize and identify? Why was I so self-absorbed that I wallowed in this inexplicable anxiety?
Sarah says, life is reason enough. That’s the way I think about inexplicable happiness—nothing needs to happen, life is reason enough. But somehow I can’t get myself to really feel that way about sadness, even if I believe in it, even if I think everyone else should have that right, even if I know in mind and in heart that sadness is so valuable—why can’t I own it for myself? I really don’t know. There are so few things I am willing to say that I hate, that aren’t given negatives. But I really, truly, absolutely hate feeling unsatisfied with life, when all else reasonable and clear and right points to otherwise.
I only mentioned these things briefly to a few people. I felt like if I talked about it more, wrote about it more, I might have indulged in it and really felt it. It makes me feel so self-centered and vulnerable and absolutely silly. It bewilders me. I would walk through the yard on a breezy, sunny day, listening to something nice, and see how unbelievably green everything has become, and how quiet it is during this time of year. Things that have always moved me, so deeply. This time none of it penetrated this strangeness holed up inside me, and it made me so unbelievably sad to think that maybe none of it mattered as much as I’d previously felt, or else that there could be a part of me that could lose sight of its value. I hate that there is a part of me that no one and nothing—not even another part of my own self—can affect. It makes me feel so isolated, and a little useless, for lack of a better, less negative word. I realize, everyone must go through this so I shouldn’t feel this way…I shouldn’t believe that I can’t or shouldn’t feel this way. But obviously logic has nothing to do with any of this.
Then a series of ostensibly minor incidents occurred that dissipated this bit by bit, and by “this” I mean the somewhat pinpointable cause of being detached from people. I could feel it loosen its grip on me, and this gradual slipping away made me actually appreciate the time that I was so tightly held by that nameless shapeless all-I-know-is-I-hate-it feeling.
First Steph and I had the most amazing conversation about snakes and relationships and elephants and imperfections and settling and love and everything. Steph and I are so completely different in the way that we think about things. Superficially we seem like the same person—small Asian girls from California majoring in English with pre-med aspirations. Everyone confuses us; I’ve been mistaken for Stephanie many, many times. That’s why it’s so ironic that we are complete opposites, in perhaps a more subtle way than most people think when they imagine complete opposites. We differ in our taste in books and movies. We perceive and interpret things differently, from art (Christina’s World) and poetry (life is but a cherry fair) to romance and winter and real life situations. We’re both emotional but about entirely different things. But it’s why I love talking to her, because we know what we believe but we’re open to one another. I like those windows of time and incident when I’m lucky enough to glimpse how she sees things.
She told me about a story she was writing for Spanish, about a snake who falls in love with a man and wants to change so that she can be with him. She has to pass three tests given by the stars in order to do so (our favorite: she has to catch the moon in a bowl, so she fills it with water and encapsulates its reflection). I was impressed by this uncharacteristically romantic plotline, until Steph told me she was contemplating having the snake-turned-human poison the man’s family after she finds out he’s already taken (because she has retained her venomous snake powers). Though a little dismayed by this conclusion, I asked her later how it turned out. She told me that she decided not to kill off the family, but that the snake finds someone else and falls in love with him. I was utterly depressed by this ending. I didn’t think it could be true love if the snake so easily settled for someone else. Haha, I told Steph to title the story “Romance is a Sham.” She literally gasped with shock at this suggestion, a response that surprised even her. She then told me that the man with whom the snake falls in love is an elephant. This elephant was the elephant of the man who the snake originally fell in love with, and he was so in love with her that he spent the next three thousand years changing for her. I thought this was a little bittersweet—the idea that the snake didn’t get who she really wanted, and Steph said that was why it was poignant. We let this conversation go for a little bit, and somehow we got around to talking about real, human relationships and talking about how people so often settle. She mentioned her theory of best fit, that people choose their partners based on this, and how it has the connotation of settling for less than perfect, and how perfection doesn’t exist. I said that of course no one’s looking for perfect, but that I think it’s possible to have I-know-for-sure love, that’s perfect, not in spite of the shortcomings, but encompassing all of it. She kept saying, but how do you know. I kept saying, I don’t know but you do…you must, you must, I keep thinking. We eventually got back to her story, and she said that she knew the ending wasn’t perfect; it wasn’t supposed to be, and it seemed to reflect her philosophy in general. And I thought, but it is perfect. These people (animals) who wanted to change for those they loved, who saw in themselves imperfections they wanted to change—they ended up together, what’s more fitting than that? In trying to prove imperfection, and in successfully doing so, Steph stumbles along perfection. And she felt it too.
Then I received an email from Hussain about displacement. It wasn’t so much that he was going through something similar, but that he wanted to tell me about it. He can feel this intangible act of listening. It means something to someone.
The next day Audrey wrote me, and she said: “I think this every time I read your livejournal entries, but even more so when I read your letters or emails—I'm so glad you think so, too. It's nice to know that someone is thinking like I think and feeling like I feel. When I read your livejournals or your emails, I feel like you're writing about the things I think about, but don't talk about because they're just details so specific to me that no one else could possibly have anything to say about them.” It’s not just that she relates that relieves me; it’s that someone like her relates. It completely amazes me sometimes when I think about the people I’m lucky enough to know. The kind of people who would make you happy even if you weren’t blessed by their company or friendship—but just because they exist. It’s impossible to articulate how amazing it is to see what I love about and believe in people materialize in these actual, real people in my life. People like Aud who really thinks about things, doesn’t let them pass her by, but who doesn’t let this take away from the intensity of just feeling.
Then him, who constantly, unconsciously surprises me. With him I’m finding, over and over, that gradual discovery is possible. He asked me about the poem I posted a long time ago when I was first starting this journal. It was funny (not ha-ha funny but hmm-funny) because I’ve never talked about any of my writing that’s open to interpretation, and I didn’t anticipate how it would feel. He said he tried to figure out if the girl in the poem was waking up or falling asleep. And I thought, I wonder that too, and do I really know? I think I wrote a lot of that based on image and feeling without much thought about what it meant, and to hear it verbalized—I can’t even describe how it felt. Again the idea that something that came from so deep within me that I thought it’d be impossible to share—someone else thought about it, and made me think about and understand it differently. It occupied a small space in someone else’s mind. Maybe I’m not hopeless after all.
Victoria visited for a couple of days; she left yesterday. Despite the hostile wind and rain, showing her Cambridge and Boston was like rediscovering everything I love here all over again. There aren’t too many things to actually do, but there’s a lot to experience, and it was so nice to be with someone who understands that. Who likes seeing places that I introduce with, “There’s nothing really to see, but I just like walking around here.” We talked and talked, we ate in silence, we took pictures, we drank, we danced, we did girly things (shopped, gossiped and giggled). I remembered what it feels like to share so many different parts of yourself with someone else, to know that there is someone on the receiving end.
And the renewal of my love affair with New England jarred me; it was so relieving it almost hurt. Today was gorgeous. Steph and I took on my boxes this morning and moved within an hour. Our triumph set the tone for the day. For lunch we ate at au bon pain, in the outdoor seating area next to the chess masters. The way I can feel the breeze graze my skin here is so different than anywhere else. I love how, when the weather gets warm, everyone relishes their ice cream, and sinks into their flip flops, and slides into their tank tops. The communal shedding of layers and mass movement outdoors make me so aware of the warmth. I love how you can see people slow down, slow down their movements, slow down their thoughts. People smile at you, they offer to help you move their boxes, they don’t get mad if you stop to stare in a window. Most of all I love the street performers and the people who stand around and watch them. I love how different sounds follow you and linger around you for a bit before another kind consumes you as you walk through the square—first seventies folk emanating from Peet’s Coffee, then the strumming of someone’s guitar playing Simon & Garfunkal as you turn the corner, next the jazzy tunes of a trio in the T-stop area, then the sounds of families all along Mass Ave, and finally the quiet as you get to Bow St. to Adams.
Then we got bubble tea and went by the river to feed bread to the ducks. As we walked we talked about nothing; phrases were dropped here and there that touched me, the kind of things that blur in my memory the minute they’ve been said, so that I can’t recall specifics but can’t forget the deep sense of gratitude. We couldn’t find any ducks. Instead we came across a flock of geese who chased us. I can now say I’ve experienced seconds of pure fear. Then Otto’s dog, Pip, came running out and drove them into the water, where we could safely toss scraps without worry of being pecked to death. She gleefully bounded after the birds, seeming to understand she’d never catch them but enjoying the splash and the adventure all the same. She also ate some of the bread meant for the birds. I am so thankful for Steph, for the river, for crazy creatures.
Though always aware that the process of knowing yourself and other people is continual and endless, I’m finding I know so much less than I thought. I thought I’d come to a point of real understanding, flaws and all, of myself and my relation to others. It probably doesn’t come to a surprise to anyone that this is so not true, but that’s the thing about clichés. They always have to be repeated; it’s one thing to know their truth and another to feel their relevance to your own life. More surprisingly…I’m finding that this ignorance is immensely relieving, and pretty wonderful. There’s room. There’s more.
No comments:
Post a Comment