Summer to Summer
Filmed August 2020
I haven’t written in so long. I had to not write, at least not publicly, for a while … I thought I would try to record my life instead through a scrapbook filled with photographs and short, shallow phrases. It felt childish, silly, odd and… necessary. I think for writers we have a desperate, all consuming and rather vain obsession with being taken seriously. And no writer, acting as a child, could elicit the kind of respect she yearns for. And maybe, that’s exactly why I did it—to wage a war against it, to say the hell with your demands, let me live.
Except even in the privacy of my scrapbook, I couldn’t play. I took it too seriously. I would obsessively re-arrange the photographs over the page and fret over short phrases I was almost certain nobody would read. Maybe my mistake was in making the scrapbook publicly available, which complicated the experiment of fully letting go and deprived me of the kind of privacy I needed and did not know then. I think that’s how it has always been for me: one arm pulling me towards a life of total, impermeable privacy, the other pulling me in a hurry towards a crowd that is often more imagined than real.
And maybe it’s that I have never truly experienced the childhood I was trying to evoke and mimic. I have no pleasant images of being a child, only long, boring passages of what I’d rather not remember. How could I re-experience something that was never experienced? How could I replicate a state of being that had never been mine?
In other words, I failed the experiment I set out to try. I could not feel satisfied and satiated with my short, chopped sentences of the days gone by. I felt deprived of what I had considered torturous before: long, difficult bouts of concentration, uncomfortable sessions of sitting with the hard and ugly truth, and the wavering impulse I had to fight each Sunday: to sit and write, or leave the writing undone, keep my thoughts elusive, far, and the road near and precious.
Summer … to travel, to stay
Summer had gone and come back and found me just where it had left me, lost, tortured, full of self-pity and regret, a drifter with no sense of direction, no real destination. Except something feels different. I am exactly where I was last summer, and, at the same, no where near there.
I had these dreams, these impassioned promises I made to myself on the back of an envelope as I waited in middle of nowhere Virginia on my birthday. I told myself, you’ve got a year, get it right, this time. I had so much regret for the time that had passed. The love I’d failed at, the hurry I traveled with, the friends I’d abandoned, the chances I’d missed. I was stubborn this time. I believed, truly, that each of us had a limited container labeled “regrets'“ somewhere in our minds. I believed also that I had, at 24, already completely filled mine. I told myself there was no room for more.
So I lived. I gave myself to everything I had abandoned in the name of love. I faced my poetry and confronted the hard fact that my writing had deteriorated. I reconnected with friends, and others from the past. Some were worth salvaging. Some were worth the apology. Others, I learned, could simply not fit into my life anymore, not the way they used to. And, there’s another thing about friends— they are, by far, the most effective litmus test for change. If you’re not so sure if you have or haven’t changed, see a friend from the past. Now you know.
More than that, I tried to recover financially. I did, and didn’t. I began to, then thought I’d made enough. I was rescued, more than once, by stimulus checks, a few donations made to my website, some commissioned pieces. I stayed true to my promise to move to New Orleans as soon as I made enough. I even found a cat that would move with me. I found a place too, in the Marigny, where I’d always wanted to live. Then, on the day I was going to sign, a friend of mine contacted me to tell me that the hostel I’d wanted to work at for so many years in Vieques had opened again and needed workers. Also staying true to another promise of mine, I gave up the place I’d found in New Orleans and bought a plane ticket instead, no return of course.
Instead of one month, I stayed two. Having regretted all the times I’d hurried through my travels, I insisted, this time, on the opposite. I met a man, I fell in love, quickly. I said, “one more day.” Then, two more. Then a week…a month. I left a day or two after New Years. But that feeling of following my gut, of leaving reason to the wayside, where it should have stayed for longer periods of my life…there’s no word to describe it. I think our bodies know. The mind, I think, behaves more like a stranger on a train who keeps talking and talking and may say something profound and memorable every 15 minutes but otherwise speaks a bunch of nonsense and keeps you from the window you meant to look out from or the book you were dying to read. But I am polite, and downright a pure-bred coward, because I know the difference between gut and mind, I know which one is often right, which one is often wrong, and still, I silence the voice that has never done me wrong and give myself fully to the one that has been the cause of too much pain.
But for once, I listened to my gut, and stayed in Puerto Rico until it told me to go, and when it did, I left. I had sworn I wouldn’t allow myself to return to the states without a plan. In the end, I did just that: return without a plan. But I was lucky. My grandma had an efficiency in Rosslyn that had just been emptied. I offered to pay rent, she told instead that if I could cover the monthly condo fee, I could have it. I moved in thinking it was for good, that I would still travel and wander, but this would be my base, the base I had been searching for and increasingly admitting my need for. I imagined living alone would be wonderful, romantic, liberating. It was, instead, one of my most painful experiences of my life, and one I never want to repeat again.
Still, I worked hard, harder than I ever have. I had come back from Puerto Rico with ambition, drive, and energy. I could see where I wanted to go. I started filming like I said I would. I tried all the art experiments I had imagined I would try someday. Pieces started coming together and suddenly I had a solid project called “The Last Letter.” I started recording my dad’s music. I started painting, large scale paintings like I’d always imagined. I took full advantage of the new space I had. I did hours long photo sessions and completed more calligraphy pieces. I worked on my typewriter at night, working over and over poems that stubbornly resisted any final form. I took long walks to DC. I even went on a few dates. I brought friends back into my life. Then a bird, this little precious moody blue thing that’s got me wrapped around her finger. Then, I found a job at an art center in Arlington and started teaching photography and filmmaking. I applied to every bookstore in the area, then started a collection of books once I finally realized (after other failed attempts in New Orleans and Edinburgh) that I’d never get a job at a bookstore and that the best I could do was to build my own. I worked hard at becoming financially independent, after years of splitting everything with a partner and relying, far more than I was comfortable with admitting, on my grandmother’s help.
And where am I now, in relation to those dreams? A poetry collection. A film showing. Love. Travel. Art. Financial independence and stability. Freedom. Adventure. Not as close as I thought I would be. Not as far as I was either. And where does the fault lie—in the timeline I’ve assigned, or this embarrassing fear that keeps close enough to see what I want very clearly, and just as close to those awful habits and this foreign city I have, so far, been incapable of fully abandoning?
All the ifs
There’s something unsettling about this question, not because I am afraid to consider what could have been (in fact I think about it all the time) but because each answer doesn’t sound convincing enough to me. If I say, I would have done everything differently, I know that I would have risked missing the opportunity to discover filmmaking and art and travel. Had I not found myself in a very unhappy marriage, I may have never felt the desperate need to leave constantly and therefore may never have fully discovered the pleasure of finding myself, over and over, and often by accident, in foreign places that have given me my most precious and happiest memories. Had I been happier in my marriage, I would have returned to the US after dropping out from my masters degree in Scotland. And if I did that, I would have never discovered filmmaking in a course I took to avoid returning prematurely to the states. And had I not been so devastated and wounded when our marriage ended and I finally left, I may have never found the courage or the drive to do what my art teachers never found me worthy of. Had I not had such a miserable childhood, I may never have felt the need to escape in novels and poetry and later, in my own writing. Had none of these events happened, I may have turned out painless, popular, happy…but also, incredibly ordinary. This is not to say I think the pain was well worth it. On any day, ask me which one I’d forsake and which one I’d keep, and I’d tell you I’d give up art if I was certain in its place I’d be offered the chance to discard all my painful memories. I can imagine more faithful artists than I being disgusted with what I’ve said. Maybe. And while I can’t see any other purpose to life than the creation of something that will last beyond the body (which, in the context of my life, happens to be art), I also would be a liar if I said the pain was worth the discovery of my purpose.
Then, if I try to answer, I’d do it all the same, it would sound like a lie, because I wouldn’t. Had there been one figure from my childhood who gave me love, I would not have been so ravenous for it when it finally found me at 19 and took me, arm and foot, far far away from myself and into the body of a man I could not live without. In discovering what I’d never had as a child, I became a child again (or rather, for the first time). I needed him. Not in the romantic, Hollywood way, but in an ugly, raging, desperate way. But I could not go back to my childhood and insert that love in all the places it was missing. I could not erase the rage it left me with either. So it all came marching towards the man I loved, the rage and the childish appetite for love. I lived in two hells: I could not love him the way I imagined loving him in my mind; I could not leave him either.
It’s still too painful to write about, even now. I’m always one image or memory away from breaking down. I loved him. I wish I did not, but I did. And if I could have done it differently, I would have tried to find other ways of answering that demand for love rather than pouring it all into one body and making one person the source. Maybe our love would have lasted had I done that, or maybe I wouldn’t have been so broken when it ended. I would have taken the time to heal, too, so that all that rage would have been directed at the ones who were the cause of it. I would have gathered the courage to move to Turkey and work as a freelance writer just as I had dreamed of doing one day. I would have matured and grown and loved him slowly, independently, confidently, and less like the clinging child I became with him. I wouldn’t have rushed so much either. I would have traveled, just as I did, but far slower and less selfishly.
And maybe it’s not too late—this question, “What if you could do it all over,” or, the equally unsettling one, “What would you have done differently?” Both are extremely uncomfortable and absolutely necessary. And maybe, for now, there’s still time, and while those questions may shower us with a long list of regrets, it may, with the same intensity, push us in a direction we may not have otherwise found the courage or the need to take. It is ugly, and incredibly hard to confront this question with unfiltered honesty, but I believe it’s a question that stems from an uncompromising fidelity to a life worth living, and one that is worth asking sooner rather than later.
