from now

I thought about what I would think ten or twenty years from now. I would probably think that my young life had been lovely. I would probably remember the giant wine glasses and the white roses, the blonde wood floors and the high crown molding and the Victorian windows without any curtains. I would remember the leaky shower and the coupons for Thai food and the writing, the reading, and the drinking. I would remember the dog and the washing machine. Why did it take so long for our clothes to wash? I would remember that. I would remember the organized clutter, all of the lost socks and old cook books and mismatched pairs of gloves, and the heavy spells of uncertainty. Surely I would remember the uncertainty. I would remember the solitude on nights when the snow would fall and the lights were low, when the blue night and the white everything were married in perfect unison together underneath the bright moon’s ever-approving eye. I would remember the quiet.

I would remember how I came to love the quiet. 

optimism

She was impenetrable, like she had a shell of warm, golden goodness around her at all times. She felt it enveloping her, felt like she saw negativity in the form of missiles come straight towards her while she was at the bank or walking somewhere, and she would duck or run away because while she was good she wasn't fearless and the evils would always find her, yet for some extraordinary reason each time they came close to striking her they were thrown back by this kind of unexplainable force or vortex that surrounded her like a shield; she watched it happen time and time again, just as awed by this baffling phenomenon as the next person, and so she inevitably wondered if in the same way that sad people had more sad cells than happy cells or in the same way that bad people had more bad cells than good cells, if there was such a thing as happy people having too many happy cells?

Was it possible to be tragically optimistic? 

the beginning

I didn’t really know where to begin.

I thought that maybe if I just went on a walk, I would come back to our house twenty minutes later and have a better grasp on some of the things that had been on my mind. Instead, while walking, I got distracted by the realization that lighting is everything. It’s all about the light that fills up my room when the sun is rising, making our blonde wood floors smile and the walls dance, transforming my sheer white curtains into wedding veils rippling away in the wind. There’s the pale and fading after-afternoon light that seeps through the two tiny windows in our bathroom so that taking a shower without the lights on becomes an ethereal experience that drowns me in a storm of honest, grey-blue sadness. In the evening there is a gentle light downstairs that drapes the faces of the people we love, complementing the glow of their bodies and spirits subtly, thoughtfully, all the while careful not to reveal too much. And outside, there’s the light inside of the other homes, outlining the profile of a young child’s pure face or articulating the unspoken softness that radiates from his mother’s wide, round hips. 

I glanced at my watch. Eleven minutes had passed. I didn’t have a better grasp on anything, but at least I knew where to begin.

I walked back to our house and took a shower without the lights on, ate dinner silently and alone underneath light that made me wish that anyone else was with me, and looked forward to the white hot glorification of my room in the early morning. 

the letter

My grandmother sometimes tells me this story about a man she once loved. Whenever she tells the story, it’s always unclear to me who this man is; Grandpa, or some other significant beam of light that once shot across her universe. 

She begins the story ironically. She says that she doesn’t remember how it all began – as if there was no quantifiable point in time in which she and he met, no coffee shop romance, no fleeting moment at the train station. 

Her story jumps around and it’s hard to follow, although there is one bit in particular that has always struck me as worth remembering. She and the man hadn’t spoken for years. My grandmother and her friend were just getting back from graduate school. It was early evening, and the sun had long been set, but she could make out a handsome man across the street walking towards her apartment. Her heart stopped. It was the postman, but it reminded her of someone else.

She says that they walked across the street towards her apartment and suddenly she knew, with an eerie amount of certainty but without the ability to explain it, that the postman had something special for her. He handed the mail to her friend. Decades passed in the time it took for her friend to hand the letter to my grandmother. “It’s for you,” she said. My grandmother says that she will always remember the look, because it confirmed what she already knew to be true even before she had seen who it was from.

So it was him! I say, excitedly. What happened? I ask. And how does it end? She smiles and completes the story with a question, as she so often does when she's trying to get me to see something right in front of me.  

Isn’t the important part that I knew? 

you

Your twenties are disgusting, she said, and not in the way that you think of the word disgusting. They are troubling. Your pain and fear is visceral, and you are alone in everything, all of the time. You think you’re not alone but you’re always alone in your twenties. You’re just a child amidst a jungle of high-functioning people and sideways relationships and silver watches that interrupt the lull in your quiet office with their tick, tick, tick. You’re making decisions that can change the direction of your entire life via one conversation with a stranger, one move to the big city, one signature on the dotted line. But you feel sixteen, and you’re much better at being sixteen, navigating the waters of going to a late movie or sweating around someone new and exciting. You aren’t good at signing on the dotted line because you haven’t even perfected your signature yet, because you haven’t had any time, and you can’t remember when laughing with strangers in line opened the door to laughing with strangers in bed, and you had no idea that moving to a new place would change the kind of skin you have or teach you how to be nice. You are constantly spinning and typing and walking and looking at people, and looking at yourself, wondering how you got to that bathroom in that house with that kind of lace on the windows. You’re going to walk downstairs and find someone real to look up to but it’s hard to find that because everybody has some ugly in them. People tell you that being in your twenties is one big sexy production, one fun, flashy extravaganza, and so you keep waiting for the curtains to open so that you can be the star and everyone can applaud you. You work hard and choose your supporting cast carefully so that when the big day arrives, you’re ready to emerge as the sensational hero you were always meant to be. But the truth is, the disgusting truth of it all, she said, is that there isn’t a single person in the audience when the curtains open. That’s what they don’t tell you. 

direction

I couldn't believe that he wanted to drive in the rain with the windows down. It was silly, and he was doing it to be more interesting, like people who only use a French press or like my friend at work who refuses to write with anything other than her monogrammed pen. Your leather seats are getting wet, I said. They're getting ruined. I emphasized ruined because I wanted him to know how he made me feel.

He ignored me and continued on with his lecture. If you believe everything that other people tell you, we're going to have a problem, he said.

I stared outside and felt the rain on my left eyebrow and on my upper lip and in between my eyelashes. 

I'm rolling up my window, I said. And I think the reason you want to keep them down is because you don't want to believe anything other people tell you. 

He considered this for a moment and then smiled and held my hand. 

Maybe you're the problem, he said. 

monday musings

"Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness."

http://www.mythirdculture.com/you-should-date-an-illiterate-girl-charles-warnke/