The First Day of the Rest of Your Life
High expectations, the feeling that life isn’t being lived yet. You just want to live. You just want to live. You just want to live. Where are you?
The space between this year and last feels like nothing. At school, time was marked by traditions. Classes. Games. Parties. Weekends. Summers. Each year was distinguishable from the next and I learned about myself. Now it’s different: time bends inward. I am the same as I was this time last year. I had it good then and I didn’t know it. Or worse, I knew.
I’m on a bus back from Baltimore again. This is always when it happens: in the backseat of a cab or on a train or in a bus, watching states move by, I remember who I am. This time I’m reading Sweetbitter next to a pregnant woman who keeps touching her stomach, reading from a Kindle. I tip chips from the bag into my waiting mouth to avoid touching them with my hands. It smells like absolutely nothing, the air clean, different than how it smelled yesterday, which was like home.
I’m glad I’m reading something that inspires me. I want to keep the book to myself, and I haven’t felt that way in a long time. I’m glad the words sing. They remind me that I used to do this too, often–and maybe I still can. They remind me I still have creativity in my head. I can hold all these thoughts in tandem and make them mean something. I can write all ways. I can catch the good old days before they’re over. I can make words sing sometimes with a rhythm and I can make you hear the song, too.
If I’m feeling it that day I can make you feel it. I see how writers get drunk on this feeling. It’s power. But the truth is I don’t have enough knowledge or experience to have power. I just have thoughts, I have a song in my head that comes out on paper in sentences, and I want you to listen, because words for readers are both a burn and a salve. Sometimes it hurts to feel so much, but knowing someone else feels the same thing makes it all okay. It’s the quiet things that make years like this matter.
The truth is the bus is running two hours behind and I don’t care, because it’s almost like time is not passing. When I get on the train each morning I think, is this really how it is? Three hours a day sucked up by a commute, too tired once I get home to do much besides eat cereal and watch Netflix? Going out on the weekends and relishing it too hard, because it makes me feel, for a fleeting moment, like myself again, but slightly disoriented because I don’t know anyone at the bar, and they all know each other? I’ll go to work tomorrow and I’ll watch myself grow in one area of life and feel stunted in all the others. I’ll finish this book about a girl who gets lost in New York and is making the wrong decisions and is having sex with the wrong men and envy her because she has learned to tell where an oyster comes from by taste and she wilts at Park Bar at four in the morning and she belongs somewhere. Right now, I am waiting to belong to something again.
Each time I go back to school I feel like it eats my heart out. But it gets a little easier each time to walk away, to leave and go home, admit that school is not my home anymore, admit that it’s okay to be sad by that. Have my feelings. Be more comfortable with them. Let them rest in me, let them collect and sink into my body without trying to ignore them or force them out. I always thought I was in touch with my feelings, and I am with some. With the sweet excruciation of pain. With the heartbreak of nostalgia as a permanent state of being. With melancholy. With anxiety. But not with comfort, with acceptance, or with patience.
The thing about life now is I’m waiting for it to start. To call a place home. To feel myself again. To make new friends and keep the old. To belong to a bar and an apartment building and a bodega and a dog and a relationship and an office and the corners of the world where I find my friends. Just waiting for it to start.
When will it start?
It is hard to see places continue to exist without you. It is hard to watch other places race and crash and scream and not know what it’s like to be part of it. At night I walk by people in restaurants with all the time in the world and wish to be with them. As I look into other cars on the subway I see slices of life, juicy, overflowing, and feel like mine is dry.
As I write like this, I am unlocking a secret about myself: I have always wanted to know other people’s secrets. I have studied people from the outside hoping to understand. I have kissed boys thinking that would let me in. I have my own private inscriptions with my own people, and I love them. But my whole life I have been waiting to be a person with secrets someone else covets. When I think of myself in the future I see a girl in a hunter green dress, the type of clothing that fits whoever is wearing it because of how well it’s made, and this girl is always at a dim bar on the Lower East Side with a Negroni, and she always sees someone from her past and he always looks at her like he’s been waiting to swallow her for years but never got the opportunity. And she always makes him regret, somehow, not taking a chance that was never presented to him.
I don’t know where this vision comes from, but it’s as old and certain as rain.
I see myself as complicated. I see myself as feeling too much and thinking too deeply and loving too hard. As a good friend, and as someone who it takes a little strength to love. I see myself as never being satiated, and that scares me. I am hungry.
But the thing is, having these wants make me feel alive. Feeling the lump in my throat, the tears rounding out my eyes from the inside, makes me feel like I’m one step closer to knowing secrets. To discovering something. To belonging somewhere. If I want it maybe I can make it happen. If I want it maybe I’ll find my way to happiness eventually, because I’ve always been a girl who can turn my plans into reality, even if I don’t realize in the moment.
This past year since graduation has been hard. It feels like nothing has happened and no time has passed, but really, it has. I didn’t know these things about myself a year ago. I felt the fringes of the feelings, but I wasn’t ready to feel them. Now I am in them and I am working on being comfortable. I am working on it. All I want is to feel like I’m living. You just want to live.
The bus is almost back in the city. We get through the tunnel and burst out into midtown and pass a beautiful old railway building that has apartments for rent. I can see myself in it. I can see myself in many buildings in this city. As I get off the bus, the song I’ve been wanting to play finally bursts through my headphones after five hours, just in time for my walk to Penn. I match my stride with the beat. I want to turn this city upside down with my teeth one day.
Maybe not today, because I have to get home, eat dinner and go to work tomorrow. But that day will come. For now I’m sharpening my teeth.
