Here, There, Nowhere
“But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until–later or sooner–perhaps–no, not perhaps–quite certainly: it will come” A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood
Sometimes it’s a Monday night and sometimes it isn’t. More importantly there was a scaffolding of an involved plan that ultimately got derailed because four young women sat on the floor of a bedroom, opened a bottle of wine, and started talking. The conversation did not resemble anything linear, side conversations began and ended, only to begin again and offer an important announcement that all present parties most definitely needed to hear. The main topics at hand were that of being a woman, being a woman who dates men, the events that happened over the weekend, the failed prison system in the United States, bureaucracy getting in the way of helping people, how there is no money in helping people but there is money in tech, what makes a good friend versus a less good friend, love and all its other subsidiaries, how the apartment in which all the four women were sitting on the floor of has a particular energy–somewhat feminine, and somewhat unique, and where all the four women are going to move someday. At some point around eleven pm the four women retired to the backyard sitting around an unlit fire pit. They talked about relationships and how there is learned behavior that determines how you posture yourself within the relationship. Then the night ended with many embraces goodbye and the well wishes of ‘Let’s hang out again soon’, ‘I will see you in New York’, and ‘Come to Portland.’
***
I am approaching the fourth month of responding to the question ‘how old are you’ with ‘twenty five.’ June 29th marked two years of paying rent in San Francisco and in the middle of August, I got a new roommate. The refrigerator is full of produce that was procured in Marin County, the cabinets now store various ceramic cups, and a small dog named Lou sleeps in the other room with Victoria. There is art to be hung and a rug to be bought, but there is a much larger TV and a new floor lamp in the living room. The rearranging and redecorating of the same home has stirred up some kind of unnamed feeling that I find to be related to the notion of temporality. Knowing everything has an arc made up of a beginning, a middle, and an end. The denouement occurs after the things have been done and dusted and left in the past tense. A denouement as it is lived in a life I imagine is the act of remembering. Somehow, this twenty fifth year has felt particularly footloose. I have scratched every itch that led me to saying yes and staying up later and waking up earlier. My day to day has adjusted in the way the current nowness of the present shuffles things around for the sake of variety. I have visions of how I would like things to take shape, but have loosened my grip on the particular contortions of these visions. Holding on too tight to anything crushes it altogether. There is something to the wide open pasture and maybe that is why the horizon has a certain stopping point–we are never supposed to know the end, instead we know that it (the end) will come at some point later on.
I often have trouble re-reading books and I suppose that symptom also expresses itself in my inability to substantially revise anything I have written. However, the other day I opened a book I have not opened since I last closed it some years ago. I opened A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood and immediately swooned over the words as if I had not read it before. It was the language, its alienation of character to body, of person to the article it. I read the beginning as it was the basis of an assignment that looked at what it means to strike up a beginning. The beginning of any story is broken and that sentiment I find to be closely tied to whatever it is that life is–I perhaps feel that way because writing a fictional story seems far too involved for me. Life is broken and fragmented–years and decades. There are moments and people that take up residency for a bit. Addresses and phone numbers. Pants and jackets and seasons and appointments. Nonsense, the good and bad kind, and frankly a whole bunch of nothing. Life is slow and fast, memorable and forgettable. There is an end, but I suppose there are endings throughout. Breakups and crackups and makeups. Life is broken on purpose much like a publicly funded mosaic, shards of this and that ultimately make up something much bigger than the part itself.
