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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Instants/Eternity/Intrusions/Beauty

Sitting on  your childhood bed is a strange thing. It's been a day since I got home from my penultimate semester at University, and even though I once used to sleep in this very bedroom every night for years and years, it feels completely alien to me--a guest room, empty and cold, the linens are too fresh, the bathroom is too clean, there are creases in the quilt and dust (barely, my mother is meticulous) blowing around in the streams of daylight that beam through the blinds. No one has really lived here for a while, now. 

I read something the other day--a week ago to be exact--and I haven't been able to get it out of my head:

"I'm ALIVE. Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don't watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you're doing and it's the first time, really."
 --Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

I'm alive. 

And I have the perpetual sense--as I look out at my childhood bedroom, at framed photos on dusty shelves that tell you that I'm still just eleven or twelve, at dusty mahogany dressers full of long-empty drawers, a dent in the wall from where I kicked it once--of being frozen in time, of being far away, far, far away in some other time and place, in some other version of myself, in a strange purgatory of loneliness and stasis; I have always thought that being alive is very dangerous if you think too hard about what it really is....

And it's dangerous because what it really is is an instant in an eternity. It's a tiny, negligible, forgettable speck, and everything I am doing and saying and feeling and being is even smaller than that speck of a life, and for the first time I'm thinking about it, and noticing it. The way my fingers can type this out and how I can lift my arm and how I am breathing and there is blood pumping through my body and air in my lungs and thoughts in my brain and memories of the past 22 (my god, 22?!) years in my mind and my heart. I'm looking at how the corners of the walls and ceilings meet and thinking about how I am sitting on a bed in a room in a house in a neighborhood in a city in a state in a country in a world in a universe that has existed for 14 billion years and will keep existing long after I'm dust. 

Dust. Like the tiny flecks floating around in the beam of light coming from my blinds, like every little fleck of a moment that makes up my life, every interaction, every person, every feeling, every tiny piece, that, no matter how short or silly or perfect or beautiful made me who I am right now and brought me here. Each moment is an unexpected intrusion of beauty. That's what life is. Unexpected intrusions of beauty that make up an instant in an eternity, and that instant is an unexpected intrusion of beauty itself. 

And this perpetual sense that I live in a museum of moments, of people and things and ideas and events intruding unexpectedly and beautifully--of people exactly how I remember them--how I choose to remember them--not as they exactly are or were or anything, but specific moments when I loved them most--Katiana showing me her cat on the first day of college, in the first class each of us ever had there, Ellen eating pancakes for lunch at O-house, Malhar with no one to sit by in Calculus, Matt rolling around our chemistry class in the teacher's chair, Kevin yelling and swearing when we scared him, Daniel dangling his string cheese in my face, Andrea and her cats and her dogs and her mom, her clam chowder on fire in the microwave, stinky tofu at Chinese New Year, Zach waking up and smiling in my lap on the way to the Everglades before we knew each other at all, Burgess's Irish accents and Christmas-tasting gin, Anna screaming in delight when I got the Seek job, Nadine for hours in the car after The Grit, Alyson in the ocean at Tybee, Xanna in the garden, Nick and the hand sanitizer at Lincoln, my mother singing me "You Are My Sunshine," when I was three and I cried because it moved me and that was the first time crying could mean happy, too, my baby brother trying to grab his toy car as I cackle and hold it out of his reach, my baby brother running onto the stage to sit by me when my elementary school principle announced my name for making all A's, my baby brother on the phone with his voice three octaves lower, a foot taller than me, getting ready for college...all of these instants in my own eternity, exactly the way I love to remember them most. 

It's strange. I always hated endings. Until very recently, and I don't know what changed exactly. Maybe before the "endings" weren't quite as definite as the ones I'll be facing next May--the first time I leave Georgia, the first time I pay my own rent, the first time "good-byes" could truly mean forever and not "See you next semester" or "We'll catch up next break"-- for the first time I am very much leaving, and save a visit or two to Mama and Daddy on Christmas or Thanksgiving (maybe if I can afford it), I won't be coming back this time. Being a twenty-something in the city, with a salary, off of the family phone plan, with a car in my own name and insurance to match--I'll have finally, as they say, left the nest.

But anyway, I've always hated endings, goodbyes, falling out of touch with a person, falling out of love, falling out of friendship, distance, all of those things I hated. But, that's what life is, like I said. Unexpected intrusions of beauty can't last forever, they wouldn't be half as beautiful if they did. So why not hold those moments exactly the way they are, and remember those people, even the ones that hurt you or forget you, or the ones you've said good-bye to, or have lost, why not remember them the way they were when they were beautiful? 

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfalmadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All the moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfalmadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion that we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."  --Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

It's never over if it happened at all, if it made you happy, if it changed you, made you grow. The moments are there forever and no one has to die or leave or grow old.


As I've grown older (and, yes, 22 is old and if not in years, definitely in struggles), different parts of Desiderata, which has always been so important to me, have meant more depending on where I am in my life. Right now it's this: 

"Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth."

And right now, for me in my room, on this creaky old  bed with the creased sheets that I mussed up in a fit of anxiety, that graceful surrender means surrendering sadness. 
In order to move on from anything, you must first understand why you felt what you did and then understand why you no longer need to feel it. 

I don't need to be afraid of leaving this place, of leaving my family, of losing friends, of people forgetting me, of me forgetting people because gracefully surrendering these things means accepting I have the good moments forever. Even when goodbyes are sad, it's because things were wonderful once, things weren't over yet, and things can be wonderful again and start again with new people in new places, too. 

I'm scared of leaving Athens, I'm scared of leaving everyone I love, and I'm scared of losing the person Athens made me. I like that person. I'm scared of letting down the little girl that used to live in this room--she used to think everything was possible, she wanted to save the world, she wanted to own a unicorn, she wanted to read every day and be incredible. But I don't have to be scared, right? Because I have her still, somewhere, I have everything and everyone because all of those moments existed and will always exist. I'm still afraid though. Everything is changing. I'm afraid of what that may mean.



Who is that little girl in there? What are you thinking? Are you happy with what you've become? 





"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again." --Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

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