I always like how thing come full circle. I like balance and boundaries and movies with unambiguous endings. I wish someone would neatly draw or map the process out when it comes to us and others, or maybe just make it a story about ending up where you started, but probably no wiser than when you left. There’s potential there.
You could show how the formality erodes, maybe slowly, or maybe quickly. Maybe you dispense with it early on, just sense that it isn’t needed, it’s only getting in the way of getting closer. And then there is a whole messy period of feeling out what to say and in what measure – How much swearing? How many messages? Are you a welcome distraction or just the regular kind? Then an equilibrium is reached. This is our groove, our patois. It’s only for us. Outsiders can look but not touch. But something happens. Something always happens. It’s like getting the bends – too deep, too far up, too fast. Misjudged the curve and hit the guardrail. Now, there is a blank space. When every word has to be evaluated, rolled around and around on your tongue, it seems easier just to avoid speaking entirely. And formality returns to fill the void. But this time it’s an epilogue and not a prelude. Good Afternoon. Thanks in advance. Could you please… And it feels like all the high school French you ever knew leaving your head at once. Like hitting rewind and watching the apples magically fly up off the ground and back onto the tree.
Yes, I think that would make a good story.
You could handle it right now. Maybe not with all of the élan that you imagine under ideal circumstances. Maybe it wouldn’t be noble or romantic or self-sacrificing and maybe you’d lose sleep and bite your nails and drink too much and yell about the terrible timing, but you’d cope. You’d do it. You’d accommodate, adapt, make changes, furiously edit your life and brain down to the basics. You would.
You don’t even have to do it. It’s about knowing that if you had to, you could. It’s about believing that if you had to learn to swim in two weeks even though you’ve been afraid of water since 1994 or you met The One on the bus an hour after being horribly dumped or your tax return gets audited while you’re in the middle of a move and you can’t remember which one of the 103 boxes your documents are in, that you’d find a way to make it work. Believing that you’d get through isn’t daring life to hit you with its best shot. Instead, it’s not selling yourself short, not doubting your capacity to deal, not worrying about locating the radar and getting as far under it as possible and praying you can just scrape by without the universe singling you out for special treatment.
If push came to shove, you’d push back. Yes, even right now. You would.
I ended up seated across from a reporter. He asks if he can write a profile on me. I try to be vague and gracious in my refusal, but I know I just sound rude. The conversation ends there. He pockets his notebook and pointedly turns away. That’s the last I see of him.
***
We can’t find the firehall. We keep passing each other on the country road. Slow down, reverse, roll our windows down and shrug. The map is useless. We eventually settle on the only building with more than two cars parked in front of it. My heels sink into the gravel lot. It’s too bright and I can’t stop shivering.
***
The straw in my gin and tonic keeps getting stuck to my lip gloss. We are having the familiar conversation, Generic Breeze Shooting in A Minor. It’s call and response. I don’t know. I don’t know. Tracing a pattern on my coaster, nodding along. I settle my share while he’s in the men’s room. I tell him I’m going to buy measuring spoons. When we leave, it’s still too bright and I’m still shivering.
Eventually, after you are proven wrong many, many times, you stop speculating about the future. You stop trying to fix it in one place as if you’re zippering a wriggling toddler into a snowsuit. You make rough drafts of the best and worst case scenarios, maybe throw in an idle daydream or two and you just let it go. You do what you planned to do. Then you sweep up all the fallen chips, you course correct, you revise, you shake your head and laugh at what could have been (but mercifully was not). In health and safety lingo, they’re referred to as “near misses” and you should fill out a report documenting what might have happened if you hadn’t ducked in time. In regular life, we prefer luck or serendipity or fate.
If you get very good at not thinking about the future, it also helps you not think about the past. The less you use it, the more your ability to imagine any other state other than the one you’re currently living gets weaker and weaker until you might even swear that all roads, by some route or another, would have eventually led here anyway. The job you turned down, the major you didn’t choose, the relationship you decided not to move across the country for, in the end, they’re not much more than plot points in a short story. It seems silly that you ever thought of them in terms of making and breaking. Maybe you miss the person who believed every decision was marred by a million tiny spidery cracks representing far-reaching consequences almost too faint to see, but that person lost a lot of sleep and made a lot of useless lists.
Like the past, the future is just things, you tell yourself – good things, not so good things, things that absorb your whole head and heart for a long time, but eventually loosen their grip, things that seem as if they will change everything forever, but really only change what you’re willing to call “everything” and “forever.” Yes, it gets better, but it also gets worse and then better again.
And you will wonder why capital A advice ever mattered. At least advice beyond “Live it like you’re gonna lose it.” And again you will shake your head and laugh at trying to take such precise little words and carry them in your jacket pocket to be pulled out and rubbed between your fingers and held an inch away from your eye to squint at each of their wise little cells. And you will still be laughing long after you’ve taken off your jacket and rolled up your sleeves.
What kind of music do you like?
Where did you grow up?
How was your weekend?
There’s a difference between an answer and a response. I confuse them sometimes. People mostly want the shortest satisficing response. The uh huh. Yeah, sure. No, thanks. Of course. They don’t want fulsome. It’s small talk, not a deposition. You don’t need to show your work in a neat little column; there are only points for the correct solution. And the correct solution doesn’t even need to be accurate, it just needs to fit on the line. I pretend that by writing really tiny and straight out to the margins, I’m beating the system, but really, printing YES in big block letters and leaving lots of white space will always be better received.
But I like long answers. I like when you keep talking and talking and maybe reveal something you didn’t even intend, in what you have done said and what you have failed to do say. I like when you take the question seriously enough to address each of the mini questions embedded inside like those Russian nesting dolls. I don’t even mind if you ask me to repeat, so that you make sure you cover everything. I like when your handwriting gets all scrawly and dark at the bottom of the page. You’re tired, but you need to make this one last point. I will take as much of that as I can get.
Never quite satisficed.
