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| God that was strange to see you again
Introduced by a friend of a friend
Smiled and said 'yes I think we've met before'
In that instant it started to pour,
Captured a taxi despite all the rain
We drove in silence across Pont Champlain
And all of the time you thought I was sad
I was trying to remember your name...
This scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin
Tried to reach deep but you couldn't get in
Now you're outside me
You see all the beauty
Repent all your sin
It's nothing but time and a face that you lose
I chose to feel it and you couldn't choose
I'll write you a postcard
I'll send you the news
From a house down the road from real love...
Live through this, and you won't look back...
Live through this, and you won't look back...
Live through this, and you won't look back...
There's one thing I want to say, so I'll be brave
You were what I wanted
I gave what I gave
I'm not sorry I met you
I'm not sorry it's over
I'm not sorry there's nothing to save
I'm not sorry there's nothing to save... | | |
| I am... truly sad.
You cannot erase love in an instant. You cannot pack it away or hide it hoping it will die. You cannot kill it with rage, with burning hatred of the object, nor with the passionate love of another.
It lingers. It wonders.
And I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. It's like finding a ring you once gave another, hidden, forgotten. Sliding across the bottom of a wooden sock drawer.
I don't know what to do with this thing I still have for someone else.
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| I had nothing else to say. I had turned off the dome light, and when she got out the last words spoken had rung in our ears. The low fuel light flicks on, my teeth feel filmy, and my heart is dead. She gets out, shuts the door behind her and walks into the darkness, towards her house.
We confessed we would never love anyone like we loved each other. I believed it. I still do.
She fell in love with someone I no longer was. A man with a direction, self-determined and sure, so sure, that life was what he made of it. But when the changes came, when he realized this was no longer a game and he was not a six year old boy any longer, throwing sand at the girl he liked, he grew afraid. It wasn't that I didn't love her, or that I wanted to hurt her, but just like in the bar, when I looked away, I wanted to swallow my own pain, my own need to feel wanted, even in a crowd to let her have a moment to enjoy. But she couldn't enjoy it, because my heart ached even to look at her.
I am turned away, on a dark, speeding highway, in a loud karaoke bar, in a hotel room, sobbing, and I feel her touch again. I want to let my walls down, just this once. I need her to know how much that touch means.
My love always chokes me, takes my air, never giving me a chance to be... normal. To breathe, to be free. To be happy. And no one sees, no one sees how happy I am because of the fearful, timid boy inside, never willing to show, never willing to relax. Tense, controlled. Never letting his guard down for fear of what everyone already sees. Until it's too late.
I drove her away. I drove away myself. I am as self-sabotaging as she. And I left my heart there, the one thing I chose not to pack as I gathered my things and prepared for the long night's journey into dawn.
I'm ready to say these things again. It's too late to say them to her now, I think. But I was a man once. And I was sure. I knew what I wanted. I think I do still, even if I can never have them. Even if I can never be with her again.
I was that man once. I will be again.
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| I stepped from place to place, uncertain of what lay ahead, what I left behind, but with an assurance and a certainty that now, for once, I was going somewhere. I had moved home to focus on school. It was a radical change for me, but one that had started with something small: I wanted to be with my family again, I wanted to focus on learning. I wanted to learn more about what I loved. I had been independent, I had been free, but it had been my definition of free. My vision was small, effectively centered on the world I had created for myself.
I knew no one at my new school. That in itself allowed me to shuck off inhibition, the fear of what may already be perceived of me. It allowed me to finally explore my curiosity, freely, for the sake of understanding.
But over time, a familiar, narcissistic thread began weaving itself back into my thoughts. It came back all too easily, too naturally. For so long I had been self-involved, engrossed with my own concerns. I only looked beyond myself, to the world and its troubles, when it best served my purposes. The change to the scenery, the change in characters, effected nothing within me. The romantic notion of change itself began to wear off.
It was then I realized it had never been about switching schools, changing jobs, moving home, or even chasing the dream of an education. These were not things that would decide my path. I was a self-defining agent, and no matter where I might be at the time, I realized I could begin seeking purpose there. For whatever it cost me, I could seek a role that was bigger than me. Bigger than my wants; bigger than any of my dreams.
I joined Psi Gamma to serve. I saw a need I could fill, and I wanted to prove myself. There was the opportunity to show that there was more to who I was. I could give of myself without inhibition, I could help define my part in the world with something greater than just me.
Through it, I had a mentor. An instructor just as new to the school as I was. He eagerly took part in the community project I was working on. I watched as he gave of himself in a way that inspired me. He saw the value of his time, and he held confidence that the effort he put in would not be in vain. He never hinted at the importance of his role, nor the example I saw him quietly trying to set for me.
These ideas were growing inside of me, the significance of the difference we were making. Every step was crucial to him. I saw the expectation, the value of doing something right, and for him, that extended beyond a sense of personal pride. He chose to make his work exceptional, because it mattered to him.
That was the moment, the turning of the page. I knew what I could achieve, what I could accomplish. I didn't need to prove myself, to make myself better by my surroundings or my company. What seemed all at once ordinary about me, I realized, could be used to achieve something greater than my own selfish intentions.
It was not grandiose, it was not self-important or melodramatic, these revelations. And the characteristics I wanted to reflect were disciplined, self-assured, but humble, reserved. It was the honesty that I saw in my instructor, in a man I could truly call a mentor, that changed my attitude. It was a true change, beyond anything self-serving or superficial. It became a second, more meaningful thread, weaving through the old one that focused only on me.
The work we had done came to a close, and I could reflect on my own image. The man I saw in the mirror, the characteristics I recognized, and the attitude I wanted to emulate, came into focus through the experience. I had been changed, and it was a change that made itself readily evident.
I reflected on what had happened in my writing. No longer could I write about discrete, transitory things, my daily happenings, my hopes, my fears, or the last remaining vestige of teenage angst brewing inside. Perhaps there had been meaning in them once, but my vision had expanded too much to go back to that. What I wrote now would need to be significant, or else I would not write at all.
I know, looking back, that I could have coasted through school. In the classes I had taken, I knew I could have continued without pushing myself, but I always knew there could be more. More to give, more to take away from, more to be offered by all involved. I saw it again and again in my writing: how I strived for purpose, how I tried to ascribe more meaning to the language I used. How I sought to make the ordinary things around me into something greater. I finally understood: I was trying to do the same for myself.
I needed to prove these words, to show that they were more than rhetoric. That I was somehow more than empty promises. That I could back them and the passion behind them with corresponding action. It was why I threw the dice. It was why I looked in the mirror, critical of what I knew was there. It was why I finally stopped writing about what I wanted from life and took a chance.
These are transitional moments. We each experience them, we may become cognizant of them with time, but only through reflection. I had seen two images cast, but now there was only one that I wished to keep.
This is the same essay I had written, essentially, but rewritten to the standards asked for, an autobiographical narrative on the conference theme.
This is what I will be presenting tomorrow. I wrote it last night.
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| I was tired. Physically, emotionally, mentally exhausted. I had not expected it to be easy, all the responsibilities I took on, a new job, a new school, all the chances I took when I redefined my life, but I had not expected it to overtake me, at least not this soon.
The road home bent, a curve and the orange glow of a vapor light. I looked up, whether with intent or by chance I don't remember, and saw my smile. It was a small, silly thing, the slight tapered edge curving, knowing, or at least understanding, the sharpness, the edge in the gaze that dared me to ask why.
Because I knew. I knew in that moment, looking up at myself looking down from the glass of my car window, that I was in love. I understood it, a moment of clarity and epiphany that raced past, staining my mind with that look. I was startled. I was excited. And I could not wait to tell her.
This is not where my story begins. This was not the final, defining moment or even the close of a chapter. It was the pause between breaths of a story I yet tell, a compass realigning, and, only in retrospect, unification, resolution.
My story does not begin with the key seeking the lock, stabbing blindly for its home in the cold hours before the pale winter's dawn, but it is there I found definition, correlation, and something I hoped was greater than coincidence.
I stumbled in blindly. The room was shadowed, not entirely cold, but void in the worst way imaginable. I fell into my chair, chastising myself for footfalls that were too loud, that would surely wake the neighbors downstairs, and there I sat, for days it seemed. A hollow absence pulled from the center of the room, an invisible singularity made evident by its effects. My apartment was entirely absent of sound.
Too warm for the heater to balance, and one of the small windows of time without an incessant buzz of appliances from the kitchen. The roads had iced over, the interstate feet from my door now lay deserted, and I sat alone, quietly, absent of any thought or outside stimulation.
It chose to begin sleeting in that moment, the cold crackle on glass beside me is a stranger begging to be let in.
It is a strange, sad thing to live alone. To know the precise location of everything within the confines of this singular, static space. I was the sole instigator of change, I was the one any only thing responsible for the way things were, and even without the dim light spilling through the drawn blinds, I could navigate this world with ease. I knew precisely where I was, where I was going: a neatly contained, self-motivating force.
The sky was cerulean, clean, without scratch or blemish, washing into yellow, true yellow, as the sun beat down on us. It was the gentle beating after the long, arduous days of summer had passed, crisp winds from distant mountains and shores cut through thought, and purpose, and every intention we set down. That air now redirected us, my heart a wayward weathervane with course corrected. I turn into the cold, I closed my eyes, smiled, and breathed.
I hold a piece of wood, cut from a piece of tree, down from a piece of mountain, somewhere else I wish to be. I imagined the wayward misdirected air, which hunted the tree down like a lost friend, had found a piece of itself again. I brace against the wood as another drills a screw into it, creating something new.
It screams and moans like a drunken trumpet player over the spinning motor of the electric drill, and then finally rests, the echo of its notes ring off the white buildings and green grass and cold air surrounding us. My life was more meaningful for the work, for my labor over long autumn shadows.
I did not reach this place consciously. There is a gradual, serendipitous nature to everything, lazy and seemingly inconsequential until looked back upon. The love I now knew began as the friend I spoke to long into the night, sipping on conversation like whiskey, mellow and tart, singing as it went down, and we peeled back layers of ourselves and the jazz we listened to. I did not think I would ever know what I knew when I looked at my reflection, when I saw what she had become to me. I did not think I would draw from what then seemed of no greater meaning that the moment we both found ourselves in.
I stood up from the chair, turning from the rapping on my window, stumbling, groping in the dark. I was filled with regret then. But not for the drinking, not for the parties or any of the things I said or did when I chose to lose control. I regretted the hollowness of my steps, my insides ringing like a bell with each one. I regretted not having, not being everything that I wanted to have, to be. I regretted my self-imposed exile here, the meaningless, selfish actions, and my expectations of purpose behind them all.
My fingers run along side a wall, a thousand miles of arm and shoulder distant from me, finding the switch. My eyes squint in near-perfect synchronicity with my hand as it turns the light on. The focus rolls back and forth, the photographer in my mind resolving the edges until I see him clearly, staring back at me from the bathroom door. I see the floaters pass in front of his eyes as they pass before mine. I know this man well; I understand everything that he is and isn't. I know where he has been and I know precisely where he is headed.
He stares back at me, with equal parts accusation and shame. His future is not a bad one, understand that. He will not die in a gutter or live as an embarrassment to all that know him. But neither will he take chances, and he will not look down smiling and laugh when a knife presses through his heart. He is ordinary; he has sought nothing greater, nothing less.
It was a gradual thing, really. I looked at myself through the toothpaste stains on the mirror, and witnessed everything I had been in life summed up in one image. I, naturally, took a picture. It was not to remind myself of where I had been, not to serve as a cautionary tale for my future self. It was an interesting image, I thought. I believed I captured a piece of my soul, trapped it through some dark ritual, and let others try to grasp what I had been startled to find.
Only through reflection do I ascribe sense to the events. I compare, I contrast, I grope for meaning like a switch.
I built a jail. Twenty months have passed, and I have built a jail. It is October and I am sunburned, looking out on a serene, glassy lake beside my school, reveling in my small part of a painted, two walled frame that will help raise money for children that are barely holding on. This is not the most bizarre moment of my life, not by a long-shot. I will drive home that night, I will see someone in the reflection of a car window, someone I do not recognize but put all my hope in. I will see his striking gaze, without fear or shame. I will know that he believes in himself, that he believes in others, that he trusts, that he loves. There is no void in the center of his room when he goes home.
I will know that none of this was by accident, that there is correlation and causality at play, and I will believe again in someone, trust them with my heart. To take that chance again. To know that it will be worth it.
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