two years in pictures

(Written mid-January, 2008, front desk, Dave Wood Mazda)

Snapshot – let it go. Flutters, falls into the trash can. There are too many reminders floating around this room as it is, so it’s a damn good thing that most of my life is packed into boxes. One of these days, when I get settled somewhere, I’m going to have to take everything out of those boxes and figure out what to do with it. I guess I’ll have to let it go. I would love to leave everything in storage, but unfortunately I have to face it sooner or later. I think about the way her skin smells. I don’t want to remember these things but I have to, otherwise the last two years really were a waste of time, and I think that would make it even harder.

Snapshot – drinking coffee outside of Starbucks in the Target plaza, because she thought the coffee from the store inside was inferior. I took a picture of the Starbucks sign, jokingly trying to insert myself into another one of those things that she’s good at and I’m not. She held my hand and we took pictures of ourselves. Later I would tell her she looked like an angel when the pictures came out.

Looking out the big bay window at the car dealership, I am coming to the realization that, while the months from January to March are always hardest for me, this year might be the worst to date. The weather is up and down like a toilet seat; warm and rainy one day and freezing cold and snowing the next. It’s playing havoc with my health, I think. All the trees are brown and gray and they match the sky and the pavement. Snow falls like Styrofoam, some of it melting on the ground, the rest collecting in mushy half-water on the windshields of the display cars in the front lot. It looks like shit, and it does nothing to improve my mood.

Snapshot – lying in her bed despite the fact that my greater weight causes the mattress to slant almost imperceptibly. She calls herself the Princess and the Pea, and I laugh. She is so sensitive to everything, and I am so careful. We move the mattress, switch it around so the slant doesn’t bother her. We can make anything work, I tell her, if we can make this damn mattress comfortable. She says this is the best New Years ever.

Tonight I am leaving work directly to go see my best friend in the city. I don’t know what we’re going to do, since everyone else in the area has other plans. I’m bringing my guitar with me, not out of any real desire to play it, but more because I don’t want to be without it if our plans suddenly involve women and drinking and song. I realize that I have neglected my playing a lot lately; I’ll have to rectify that if I’m to play at that wedding next weekend. I’d like to make a good showing for the bride and groom, even though a wedding is probably the absolute last place on earth I’d like to be. I want to ask my friend for advice, but his track record makes him the wrong person to ask.

Snapshot – she’s screaming into the phone, long and loud, like she’s emptying out. She’s been sobbing for an hour, but she hasn’t hung up. I stay quiet while she screams, and in between I tell her everything is going to be okay, that I love her, that I’m not going anywhere, that I’ll always be there, on the other end of the phone, when she has to scream and no one else can bear to listen. She hangs up on me. Later, when she’s calm, she’ll apologize, and I’ll tell her again that there’s no reason to.

There’s something about this weather that makes everything feel vague. I’m vaguely tired, my stomach feels vaguely ill, my eyes are vaguely sore. I have only a vague idea of what I’m going to do next, now that my graduate applications have been mailed to two very different places. If I get accepted to York I guess I’ll move back to the city, but I don’t know how I’m going to afford it. It might make more fiscal sense for me to stay at my parents’ house while I go to school, but I don’t think I could deal with living in that little box, constantly surrounded by people who watch my every move. I’m starting to hope more, surprisingly, that I get accepted in Texas. The prospect of moving alone to live with strangers and attend school in what basically qualifies as a foreign country is starting to become more and more appealing. The weather is good there; every time I’ve visited the Fort Worth area the sun has been shining, even in the wintertime. It gets a little hot for my taste in the summer, but I’d gladly deal with the cost of air conditioning if it means my world isn’t white on gray on brown for nine months out of the year.

Snapshot – we’ve been fighting again and I tell her to take me to the airport, that I’ve had enough. We face each other from a few feet away, my coat already on and my bag in my hand, her eyes denoting a solid wall of anger and indifference. But I know better. It takes me only a second to drop my bag and pull her to me, and when I do she collapses into tears, and so do I. We whisper I love you over and over, mingled with I’m sorry and I’m scared. For once I am totally honest with myself and another human being. That kind of honesty is liberating, like a crushing weight you didn’t even know was there is suddenly removed. I feel stronger than I have ever felt. I hold her to me and we promise that we will hang onto that honesty, that finally, things are going our way. We reaffirm forever to one another. Two weeks later, she will end our relationship via an email.

I consider myself something of an expert on fear. I’m scared of all sorts of things, mostly people and my own emotions. I’m not very good at expressing myself in an everyday way. I am very good at talking, even better than I am on the page, but I never say anything. I can talk for hours and say nothing, because I am afraid of what might come out if I actually said something real. But since you never get very far if you aren’t willing to face up to your fears, I’m trying it out. As it happens, saying real things is both the hardest and the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Fear paralyzes some people and it catalyzes others. It will freeze me in place if I let it, and it jolts other people into a dead run. But understanding a situation doesn’t count for anything if you can’t come to terms with it.

So what do I have to show for it? Two years’ worth of snapshots, a lot of wasted time and effort, a “sadder but wiser” mentality? No. I just understand fear even better now than I did two weeks ago, and I know what I have to do. Snapshot – let it go.