Week 4 with Dakota
La Haine
On the passage of time
I am writing this entry from Gravely Park, inside my van. And as I sit here, I watch the airplanes descend just above me before landing on the runway some yards away.
I turn 25 in a few days. There's this awful feeling I have about time, like it's always two steps ahead of me and catching me off guard. But I've also never felt like this before, as if I were standing at a crossroad where all ends, and everything begins.
By this age, I have said and done everything I wanted to, and, I have said and done nothing. I do not how to say it any other way. It is a paradox I can't seem to understand, how I have and I haven't, how I did and I didn't.
It is not that I want to do more, or say more. On the contrary, I want less, because what troubles me isn't the action, but how I've performed it. I have traveled, but traveled in hurry, in flight, in grief and regret. I have loved and been loved, but with far too much fear and anger . I have written, for years, but not said what it is I truly want to say. I have pages, plenty of them, to mark the passage of time. I have far less to show for the internal passage, the years, not years, that my soul has weathered through. My mind feels very much tended to; the other part of me, the part that matters, not so much.
I am not I. I am he,
Who walks at my side without my seeing him,
Who at times I am about to see,
Who at times, I forget.
He, who is silent, serene when I am speaking;
He who pardons gently when I am hating;
He, who walks where I am not,
He, who shall stand erect when I am dead.
-Juan Ramon Jimenez
“What inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.”
-Eugene Delacroix
Severance from the past
For all my beliefs about myself, for wanting so badly to declare myself fearless and unbound, I was, in truth, all along unable to let go of what was familiar, though the familiar was hell. It's as if someone had taught me that beyond this hell lay an abyss that would surely be fatal. We were al suffering, but safe, alive but very unwell. No one told me it was worth it, the risks, the dangers, all of it was worth it. But I needed permission to leave. I made it so. And only now, in coming home, have I realized that I'll never receive permission, not from the ones who matter anyhow. I will have to be the one to give it, and in being the one to do so, I'll have to desperately try to trust the voice that speaks, and to find a way to discard the anxiety that will want to follow my leaving.
I have given the past it's fair due. I have not run from it. I have served it, slaved for it, lost sanity, time, and love for it. And my severance of it now is no fairytale story of escape either. It's an embarrassing (and late) reckoning of what I've let the past do to me, and how I, willingly (though I'll often insist otherwise) carried it in all of my desperate migrations. I took objects with me everywhere to make sure the past was never far from me. I carried it in my mind, when I needed something to blame. I held it in my heart, and left little room for someone else who was trying to find enough space for himself inside it. I was stingy with the space in me among those I loved, but generous when it came to those who have hurt me. I have to say that, truthfully. But I did not know better then. And with this new awakening comes the guilt, for what I know now that I should have known then, when it mattered.
And I can’t help but ask, has it come to me too late, or is it, without my knowing so, the perfect timing?
I don't want to make it sound as if I've forgiven or let go either. That couldn't be further from the truth. But I have, for my sake, finally admitted that each hour has room for only one, the past or the present. And when I am choosing the past, I am letting it steal from the limited days of my life more than it has already taken.
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
-Jesus
Promises to self
I refuse to sleepwalk through life, even if it lessens the pain. I've never been one to do so. I could have numbed my way through it, and I’m sure I have tried to. But I never succeeded in going very far anyhow, and somewhere along the way, I must have stopped trying.
And now, days before turning 25, I am ready to look at my life from every angle, the ugly, the wrong, the right, the beautiful. The ugly hits me hard. The wrong tears me with guilt and regret. But there's no short-cut to the good. If I don't do this now, I'm afraid I'll have much more ugly and wrong to examine later.
Still, I have to be careful and balance this new and honest study of the self with a daring draft for a future that has nothing to do with what has passed.
I've allowed the furious hand of the past to pen my days for me for far too long. I believe there's still time to change that. And besides, what would be the point of this brutal honesty if it weren't mixed with an intention for change. And that is where I have erred before. I have dedicated so much time and effort in examining my life without any idea of what it is I wanted to do with the tugging discovery. Far too often, I've stumbled on a painful realization only to rush along to someplace else. That is why, years later, I am not much further away from the angry girl who left years ago.
I’ve been obsessed with the very thing keeping me far enough from the self I was afraid to meet with. And I knew who she was, and where to find her when I was ready. Only I was never ready. But all throughout these years, I held a vision, however far and undefined, of a woman, wild and free and sinless. She was me, the me that was waiting impatiently for some tragedy to strike me so that I could finally meet with her. It did, and now, with shame and apology, I walk to her.
“He didn’t know if she would come back to him or not. But she did. And the minute she settled, he forgot to love her in the same way.”
On love
I have met people who are easy to love. I am not one of them. I don't think I will ever be one of them.
I don't mean for this to sound harsh. Some of the most precious people in my life and those who have stayed around the longest have never been easy to love. They do not give easily, because when they give, it's unlock any other source of love you've received. They know it. I know it.
It would be far easier to believe that the kind of love I need doesn't exist. It would be easier that way. But I can't lie to myself. It does. I have had it, though not nearly for as long as I needed it. But now, I can't help but wonder how I could go on knowing that kind of love exists, but that it is not mine to have. It would have been kinder never to have tasted it. But to have found that love, to have thought, at last, I can rest now, and then to lose it, I can’t imagine a punishment harsher than that.
Still, I have hope, however faint and childish, that there is a person for each of us out there who will know how to read what it is we haven’t learned to say it. The question isn’t if that person exists, but instead, how can we bare be patient while we wait for their entry?
My parents, when all was well.
The Potomac River, or home
“To make up for time lost or to announce the time left.”
It’s only the end of the world