bon iver

No better time to reflect on winter than summer.

After a long absence I started running over Thanksgiving break, when I was in Denver at my oldest brother's place with my whole family. Historically, running has always started when my life has entered a certain phase, a difficult one or a transitional one. This time around I'm trying to add more permanence to its association and role in my life. Anyway this isn't about running but just to say that when I began in Denver, I was feeling a lot and running felt simple beside those things. The beginning of second year was...crazy. We were overwhelmed in every way, and Thanksgiving was the first breather. I spent a good deal of it studying drugs, which I hadn't even attempted to learn all semester. While the mechanisms were interesting, the new language blew my mind a little. I'd sit and wonder why we were learning to talk this way, and whether my mind would always sound like a stranger to myself, and not just strange like unfamiliar but strange like not right. Since this was my second school Thanksgiving break, and since I instinctively compare one time marker with its predecessor, last year's week came back to me often. Last Thanksgiving I was in Chicago, visiting a couple friends and exploring on my own. I wasn't studying, I missed the proximity of classmates I'd recently gotten to know but also absolutely relished solitude for the first time since a pretty rough time at the very edge of ends/beginnings that fall, everything was ahead. This Thanksgiving, it was wonderful to be with my whole family and my brother's new baby, the first in our family; people who'd been good friends the past year were now my other family and I didn't have to miss them, and I didn't feel any particular need to be alone either. I wouldn't say one Thanksgiving was better than the other. Putting them aside one another just made the year in between swell a little.

So much has happened. Even from now to this last Thanksgiving, I feel I know new facets of things and older ones more deeply. In any case, even though I wasn't thinking this at the time, I think all the things of the recent past were converging to make a me that wanted to run. I was tired. Spending the summer in Vietnam, road tripping cross country just a few days after, moving into our apartment right after that, starting school before moving even finished, then continuing full speed onto a year of massive mind-stuffing--I was tired. Things had been so fast I was still trying to decide how to approach the rest of the year, what did I want to do and what could I do. A year of tumultuous boy situations also reached its worst that fall, one that I never knew what to do with and another I didn't even realize was there. By Thanksgiving I had made myself proud though not particularly happy by eventually doing the right thing with the latter (yes, that is to say I probably didn't start out right), and transitioning to what would be the best time of our friendship with the former. I didn't know this at the time, though, and deciding how I would proceed was a struggle that break. It really took a lot in me, a lot of fighting my less admirable qualities, to continue the way I ultimately did, and so my energy was low for that reason too. Seeing all of my family was really wonderful; I'd been so looking forward to it but it still surprised me. Happiness is consuming too.

I always look forward to the music I run to. One night I decided that the next day I'd listen to Bon Iver, which really isn't typical running music if you like to listen to things chipper and upbeat. It's true that Bon Iver has a distinct tone, that could be described one-dimensionally as melancholy and quiet, but for me those things have always been so expansive. The sounds are so layered and raw at the same time. The effusiveness is subtle, tugs at things in you kept underneath. The next morning we woke up to a world draped in white. It was my first snowfall of the winter, and first run in a snowfall, and the soundtrack couldn't have been more perfect. Through the slow thirty-seven minutes of the album I went past my brother's neighborhood to discover water rushing fast down its creek, fluff atop and a mix of bare trees and clothed trees, for frame. I've loved Fremont and Cambridge runs, found lesser but palpable enjoyment in San Francisco and New Haven, but this was something I experienced in a place I had no real connection to and would likely never return to in that setting. For that and for everything else, in that sliver of space I felt everything.

The anticipation of good and stress, the tension of what happened, uncertainty of what I'd do and what would be done, the warmth of people I loved, gratitude for people who loved me so well--my family at school and my family-family, frustrations over words and connections, things I don't like admitting I feel (resentment, slighted, inadequate or superior, dislike and regret), open spaces, the heaviness of breathing, someone else's winter in mine, little life, treading and traversing over states, moving downtown, learning for the first time how to learn, a return after absence and the small changes, the walks to school, making home, laundromats and grocery stores, autumn, unfamiliar pressure, working hard to barely keep up, the newness of place and the continual resurgences of past that are so constant for me they may not even qualify as nostalgia--all there in a compact five feet two inches (and a half).

I bought a vinyl record of Bon Iver's album at their concert in Brooklyn, where wife and I were front row. I don't own a record player, and I purposely haven't gotten one yet. I would like to go to a store that probably doesn't exist anymore where they are still lined in rows and I can touch the spindles, on my own because I take a long time to make decisions, and choose one for myself...but not yet. But I like imagining that someday, when the time is right for me, I will have one, and I'll sit on my wood patterned floor and listen to those thirty-seven minutes. I might cry. Not for past melancholy, not even for present happiness, but for fullness in the crevices.