My friend asked me this past weekend, “What do you think is the biggest way that you’ve grown during your time here?”
I thought about it later that night, because I wasn’t sure. I looked through my sketchbook, glancing past what I wrote over three years ago on move-in day (I think I made a good choice. I’ll be humbled, I’ll be inspired, I’ll be forced from comfort into change. It’s good that I’m here!) before stumbling onto some of my previous summer’s scrawls. One paragraph stuck out:
I’m supposed to practice my writing, but I haven’t decided how I feel about sitting down to write when I haven’t stood up yet to live, or whatever Thoreau said. I haven’t lived! I’m in college—graduating next year, wow—so that’s boring.
I always knew writing was something cathartic for me, but I don’t think I understood it as the alpha and omega. It was my past experience, rebuilt from fragments, made gentler—or grander—with time. I picked bones and told stories with them. I found in them pieces of my life that meant something to me, that had accidentally altered me somewhere, like that summer when I composed a film soundtrack and spent so much time writing about strangers that I learned how to never feel alone. I was always building stories that arched between realities so that I could remain disconnected and involved at once, never entirely able to reconcile the difference between what wasn’t real and what was only waiting to be realized.
And I coveted those stories. I knew so many, even if they hurt or eluded me. I would wrestle with how inefficient love could be (back when I thought love was how you moved the suffering out of people). I made choices and crossed my fingers hoping that, whatever goes wrong, my homemade strength could handle it. I moved rapidly, never allowing myself to be constrained to one moment. I was grand and opposing, skewing all the rules. I was youth blinking itself into something else, something so barely at arms length that you spend years never realizing it’s not quite the same anymore. Back then, I thought that if I curled up as long as I could with something I had lost, it wouldn’t have only been some pit stop or detour, but something that would never stop mattering. So I’d write about it, endlessly.
It’s not that those stories aren’t worth telling, either. Those are my favorite stories: the ones that just fall into your lap, the ones you can fashion out of whatever surroundings you find yourself in. They’re just not the kind I want to dislocate and rearrange like the way I’ve always known. I’m no longer building something in places where I’ve been left empty-handed. Those stories, and characters, are the kinds that I want to let develop gently, a little removed and without distraction, so that they can no longer torment me.
I’m learning to be patient enough to cultivate the story I want instead of trying to make sense out of the one that’s happening to me. It’s why I’ve kicked to the curb lousy friendships and hopes that glimmered but would, more often than not, cave in. And it’s why I’m planning to move somewhere new: not for a job or anything, really, but for peace. It’s scary to make felt decisions and only hope that they’re right—and if they’re not, to only hope that I’m brave enough to change.
Instead of being someone to whom things happen, I’m more concerned with being someone who does things. Like someone who drinks iced tea while basking in the gardens, or who goes to dance class even though she’s hopeless; who makes her friends listen to just one part of a song on loud speakers and then talks about a film that made her cry; who sings Sam Cooke, feels drunk with love for someone who loves to listen, goes on late night drives to look at mountains silhouetted by the clouds; who brims with gratitude.
I guess I just want to talk candidly about things. I knew a little already about saying honest things, about pulling things from my gut and putting it all out there recklessly. There’s something about absolute abandon that’s just so easy. It’s quick and guiltless. But I’ve found that there is an art in colliding sincerity with truth, and it doesn’t mean wringing it out, or even feeling it. It means needing it.
But even that isn't the summit. I like to think that endings aren't so important. It's the grittier parts, the sensations, the sand and rocks swept back and forth by the sea, the glass windows freckled by moonlight, the stars, not when they're beautiful, but when they're cataclysmic, swarming, full of energy. It’s time to look squarely at the muddled messes and words of which I’ve made tiny homes. It's time to finally stop worrying about where the echoes of the echoes go.
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