It just sort of happens one day, like a slap in the face or walking out into an unknown thunderstorm. It just hits you. This is it, this is your life. You’re not young anymore. Your chances in life are dwindling. You’re never going to be famous; a rock star, president, or even rich. You’re here. This is it. Welcome. You are your achievements and your failures. You are your hard work and you are your slacking off. This is the way it goes.
You feel like you’ve been on autopilot for years. It’s not like you don’t remember it all, you remember it clearly, you just can’t figure out where the time went. I was here and I was 18. I was there and I was 22. I moved there when I was 26. How could it be? You spend entire days just thinking. Not about anything in particular but about your life. You remember how at 18 you had an assignment to write a letter to your 28 year old self. You spend hours upon hours searching for it. You pull it out and read it and are disappointed to find out that life was nothing like you thought. You’re not married; instead you’re 28, single, and have lived alone for the past 5 years. You don’t drive the car you wish you drove. Instead, you had to scrape up enough cash to buy a family sedan which will probably never be used for its intended purpose. You’ve never really traveled outside of business trips. The list goes on and on but for some reason it doesn’t bother you like you think it would except for one little phrase, “hopefully you’ll read this after you’ve met the love of your life.” It cuts like a knife and for the briefest of moments you wonder how your 18 year old self could say something that could hurt you so much but you realize, “This has happened to everyone. No one’s life turns out exactly the way they want it to”.
You go to your 10 year high school reunion and see the people you grew up with, the people who knew you when you were a child. You see doctors, lawyers; you see drug addicts and criminals. You see people who you were friends with that you haven’t seen in a decade and they introduce you to their wife, their children, and you’re thrown. You suddenly remember listening to the Talking Heads in high school, “Once in a Lifetime” specifically, and the phrase “how did I get here” keeps ringing in your ears. They tell you stories about college or traveling and you try to picture them in your head, but can’t. You can’t move past the past. Past the fact that this person was once kicked out of class for throwing spitwads and now he’s driven across the entire country sleeping only in a tent under the stars, something you’ve always dreamed of. Or how a guy who in 6th grade couldn’t use the bathroom unless someone was a “lookout” for him for fear of being dunked in the toilet is now a PhD in Mathematics and spends his time between Brown, Northwestern, and some other European University you’ve never heard of. You think of your own accomplishments and you realize it’d be best just to not say anything at all. You try to find someone who you might have accomplished more than just to boost your own spirits but you realize that would be an asshole move. After you leave you go to your parents’ house and rifle through your old things. You’re looking for something; who knows what it is but surely whatever it is, is some sort of clue that would’ve given you an idea about your future. You look and look but you find nothing but yearbooks and old love notes.
You come back home to your life and try to put it all behind you. It’s not that you don’t have nice things. You’ve got a home, a girlfriend, friends, a dog, a nice job. You have every reason to be happy. You have every reason to hold you head up high…but you can’t. You toss and turn at night and when you wake up in the morning you don’t feel rested. You look at your pillow and there are 8 more strands of hair on the pillow case. You pick them up and wonder why this is happening to you. You look in the mirror and you can see your scalp. 28 years and you’ve never seen your scalp…now you don’t want to and it’s staring back at you. You get in the shower and wash your hair and more comes out. This sort of thing shouldn’t bother you. You’re not defined by your hair. You can’t rationalize it and you sort of wake back up when all the hot water has run out and you’ve been standing in the shower for 20 minutes.
You spend 9 hours or more a day in your little box, trying to fix everyone else’s problems. There’s no off time. There’s no countdown that you can look forward to. You go to meetings and you’re planning things for 2011, 2012 and beyond. You laugh to yourself and say, “I could be dead by then” but as you mumble it in your brain you look around and realize that you could be. You look around at your desk and see pictures of places you’ve been and realize that since you went alone, there’s not really anyone who knows how it felt. It’s only a memory now. You remember walking along the Santa Monica Pier in the sunshine but, even though you’ve have pictures of it, no one will ever know. No one knows what it felt like; no one knows the smell and the taste of the sea in the air. No one knows anything. For all they know you never went. After all, you only have your memories. The stupidity of your internal conversation makes you pause for a second and try to get a hold of yourself. It helps…a little.
You haven’t really spent any significant amount of time on your own in what seems like ages. Every night when you come home you end up spending it with the person you’re supposed to be with. Sometimes the daily phone call at 6:30 pm while you’re still at the gym irritates you. “Why would she call every single day at this time when she knows where I am and what I’m doing?” You calm yourself down before you answer by saying, “she just cares and this isn’t worth fighting over”. On the off chance you get to spend a night alone you have to devote at least 15 minutes to talking on the phone. It’s the same conversation every day. No substance, just the same drivel. You don’t want to engage in any deep conversation because you know she wouldn’t understand. You’re too old not to know how relationships work but you’re still shocked at the amount of childish behavior happens between two grown adults. You look in her eyes some days and wonder what she sees in you but it scares you even more when you ask yourself, “What do I see in her?” Some days you see love, some days you see a stranger.
Your weekends are spent together but you don’t really get a say in what you want to do. You want to rest, she wants to go. So you end up not getting anything accomplished. “If I could just mow the yard I could have some time to think and clear my thoughts” but you can’t because you’ve got to go to dinner at her parents. Spending time with her parents always makes you awkward because you don’t fit in and sad because you miss your own. You miss your own parents who are on the precipice of 70 and on the decline. You try not to go and it starts a fight. You try to explain how you feel and that it’s nothing against her parents but you just wish you could see your parents but it doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t come out right. You give up and apologize and even though you feel like your points are valid, you back off them.
You’ve been together for a long time now and at your age people keep talking about the two of you getting married. “MARRIED?” you think. The concept blows your mind. You don’t even know if you all are that compatible. You look around at your friends and see how they are all married. You realize your age and that if you got married today, by the time you had a kid and that kid turned 18 you’d be in your 50’s. You still feel like a kid yourself some days but you’ve not had one of those days in a long time. You look at your friends and think, “they’re so in love” but you wonder if it’s true. The more you think about it the more that you realize that they’re not. The more you think about it you realize that each one of them sort of settled. This shocks you. You’ve never thought of yourself as someone who was going to settle in love, but the older you get you realize that it’s basically a fact of life. Everyone settles at some point or another. This depresses you.
You think back to the note you wrote yourself at 18 and about the love of your life. You remember back to meeting the love of your life and how different it felt then with her than it does now with someone else. You remember the fire that you felt the first time you kissed her lips. The absolute, full body shiver that you felt the first time she ran her fingers through your hair. You know you shouldn’t think about these things anymore and you try to keep them out of your mind, but can’t. You remember more about the time that the two of you spent together than any other time in your life. You’ve tried for 5 years to get her back. You remember the way she said your name with a slow country drawl and how she always smiled saying it. You shouldn’t be thinking of these things. That was then, this is now. You try anything you can to stop thinking of her, but can’t.
You’re making love to your girlfriend but can’t get your mind off the love of your life. You start thinking about the first time the two of you made love and how it felt to hold her in your arms. To have your chest pressed against hers. How you could feel her heart beating against your own. You realize you’ve been thinking about her the whole time and feel guilty. You can’t say anything but the feeling buries itself in your heart.
Nothing seems to stop the memories except for seeing something online. Something that tells you she is gone, that’s she’s promised someone else. You reach out to her and she says that it was time to “give up”. You suddenly realize that the past really is the past. You realize there is no going back. You wonder how you could make it the rest of your life without her. Knowing that she’s out there somewhere and that someone else is with her. Someone that doesn’t love her like you love her. For days you sit in the dark and you don’t answer the phone. You listen to old songs that the two of you used to dance in your living room to. You can’t seem to cry and you don’t know why. You can feel your heart but it doesn’t beat like it used to. Something seems to be missing. Your dog can even tell and instead of wanting to play she just sits by your side and nuzzles up to you. You feel the first emotions you’ve felt in what seems like ages and you hug the dog, wondering if she understands more than you ever gave her credit for.
You try to explain it all to a friend and they listen. They try to tell you the reasons you are wrong and the reasons why the other person was horrible for you. They try to explain why your life is worth more than you believe it is. You’re ready with answers. You know this feeling is real. You confront them with answers and they listen. For what seems like hours they listen as you go on and on about one thing after another. Finally they relent and tell you the words you knew but didn’t want to hear, “You want the truth? Fine. The truth is not one of us is happy. Not one person if you walked up to them with truth serum and the question “are you really happy” could answer “yes”. We have all settled on one thing or another. It may be a lover, it may be a job, it may be a million different things and whatever that one thing is prevents us from a lot of other things. And some people may say, “Well that’s what drives you to achieve” but that’s bullshit and only meant for motivational posters. The harsh truth is that this just “is”. At some point you just wake up and say, “this is the way that it goes” and live with it. You find someone who you think you can hopefully spend 50 years with and go with it. You find a job you can live with for a certain number of years and you do it. You just can’t sit around and think about it. You can’t live in your mind or it would drive you crazy. If you didn’t develop some calluses on your heart you wouldn’t be able to make it. You would’ve taken a header off of the tallest building you could find a long time ago. What you do instead is trick yourself. You focus on things other than the truth in order to keep your mind occupied. It’s just one big trick and you watch the years go by.”
So I don’t know who is going to read this and I don’t know if the person I want to read this will ever read it but either way I want you to know something. I know how it is. I haven’t decided whether or not I’m going to give in to tricking myself for the rest of my life, but either way I want you to know that I will always believe that you were that person I was writing about at 18. We all have that one person, trick or not. Always remember:
“Do you know what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted?”
“No, what happened?”
“He lived happily ever after.”
Maybe someone out there will have that but most of us will end up settling and instead just knowing where that happiness is. Just please don’t forget…I know how it is.
(via apoormansmemory)
