The End of the Innocence

One of my classmates did a cool thing the other day: brought a small, flowering branch to our Research and Statistics class. It was from a local bush called Sweet Olive which, he told a couple of us during lunch, blooms during sudden changes in temperature. He said the smell, more intensely than any other sensory data, brings back a childhood of happy time spent outside. That reminded me of Proust’s madeleine—the capacity of scent (and for me, music) not just to evoke, but almost to conjure or reinstate the past. This is why I could never really get into Buddhism; because I find the past to be one of the best things in life. Why try to detach from it? Why not just wallow in it?

I remember returning from class one gloomy October day during my sophomore year of college to find my suitemate, Dawn, sitting alone in the dark, listening to music and weeping. I hope it doesn’t ruin this if I say, the music might have been Journey. I must have attempted to console her; she tried to explain to me that one day, I would understand and even welcome the pleasures of melancholy. I think I may have since taken her message a little too far. She also suggested that I would not always feel the need to hide my long brown hair under a hat—which I did for roughly 3 years of college, either a baseball cap or the soft, velvety winter hat given to me by my grandmother, the queen of hats. She was right about that, too. I probably could have learned more from her; but in her wisdom she soon transferred from Colgate to a much more liberal school in Massachusetts, where people probably understood such things automatically.

Anyway, in the car this morning on the way home from Sara’s daycare—where, when I lingered too long, my child ordered me to “leave, mom!” in a tone that made me flash ahead to her teen years—I heard a Don Henley song on the radio that catapulted me back. I somehow drove home but I was not really aware of my current surroundings. Instead, I was in the summer of 1994 when the man I was in love with (my first requited love, which is a powerful thing) had made me a mix-tape—to take the sting out of the fact that he was spending the summer after our Freshman year strolling around Princeton with his long-term girlfriend, and I was spending it working at Drug Fair and DJ’s Fast Pizza, as well as cleaning the 4 litter boxes in my parents’ basement. (I remember counting down—only 64 more litter boxes before I go back to school...) On lunch breaks from Drug Fair, I sat on the bleachers behind the middle school with my Walkman and listened to the tape, which had on it Henley’s “The End of the Innocence”; “Nights in White Satin” ('Cos I love you, yes I love you, oh how I love you); Simon and Garfunkel’s suicide-inducing “Scarborough Fair”; and the REM song with the refrain I’m SOORREEE… Oh, the drama. I sat out there crying, my headphones sealing me into a private world in which I was the star—not a minor player relegated to ringing up people’s cigarette purchases or sneezing over cat litter boxes. The songs he gave me, while they did not help me to stop imagining him in bed with her, did help restore me to myself, and that was quite a gift.

Hearing that song today, I felt some tears for him (who I am still in touch with, of course, on Facebook); tears I had thought, 16 or so years ago, would never stop. But they did. And that is the real “end of the innocence”: to become aware that it all passes; a well that seemed inexhaustible goes dry. I used to think love meant marriage and a future. Now I know that if love comes into my life, I can’t assume I know what it means. I should just be thankful for its fleeting presence and the enduring sensory traces it leaves behind, the being happy inside the being sad.

What are we here for?

This is what I'm wondering right now. You can't just exist; you have to have money and credit cards and a car, etc. and the bondage to all of these things. I spend my days sitting at a desk at one job or another, or running errands that need to be done (depositing money in the bank, mailing bills, going through junk mail, cleaning...). Is this what my childhood was preparing me for? Is it what riding my bike through the sweet blue evenings of childhood summer was leading to? And dressing up for dance recitals, posing for pictures in satiny skirts and bright pink lipstick, receiving shiny trophies at the recital every June (which didn't mean anything, because everyone got one just for making it through another year of dance...). By the time I get home from work I don't have energy for anyting, let alone hanging out with my poor toddler...I just want her to be quiet and removed somewhere while Mommy collapses on the couch with a book of poetry or a magazine or a burrito and a beer. And that isn't living either, it's RECOVERING. It seems only if you have money, a lot of money, can you actually have life--filling your days and moments with things you want to do and choose to do, living on your own rhythms. Imagine waking up, puttering over to a cafe and sitting there reading and writing for hours, then having a glass of wine over a leisurely gourmet lunch, then taking a long walk...but maybe on some level all these things, too are just things to fill time--the time of existing, which none of us can bear without filling it with something. But that is going way beyond where I wanted to go in this thought. I just wonder, what exactly is the point if all your moments are spent just paying for something you deserve in the first place--to exist, to take up space on the earth among all the other earth-inhabitants, and to feel what is meaningful about that existence, to look for meaning. I guess we're all competing for resources but the resources aren't actually scarce, it's the system that makes them that way. Like, it's not as if I have to spend my days making spears so that a wild boar doesn't kill me on the open plains. But spending my days making money is THE SAME THING.

People say to find a job you love. I think that's bullshit. Who loves their job? How quickly can love turn to hate when you have to do something over and over or else there will be dire consequences? I am burnt out and tired and I resent having to devote my best energy (all the daylight hours) to administrative tasks, to busy-work, to driving around and around through traffic to do other tasks. I feel a constant anxiety that whatever I choose to do with the rare free moment isn't good enough, because there is so little unoccupied, unspoken-for time. I'm even starting to nurture fantasies about taking this summer off from work entirely and making some kind of big change to my work life after that, since a recent inheritance gives me a financial cushion (but then, any use of such money feels frivolous). It probably is true that I need to make more money so there is less sense of living-on-the-financial-edge grind, and find tasks that feel less compromising, and that things would feel better after that. But I still think we all deserve, for no reason at all (not because of our status or amount of money, etc.), to have the time to exist and search for ourselves and have wild pointless sexual encounters that never go anywhere, and write poetry about it, and eat too much dessert, and visit a beautiful place and stay in hostels and just breathe, and let the garbage bags accumulate around the side of the house and throw the recycling out the window for deer to graze on! and spend four hours choosing a shade of lipstick or an outfit, and look through old photo albums and cry, and tell someone to fuck off and not feel bad about it, and not say "I'm sorry" when someone is blocking the aisle at the grocery store, and light a lot of scented candles, and make a sculpture out of pine needles and spaghetti that represents a lost moment of our adolescense.

Time warp

I joined Facebook the other day, which suddenly put me in touch with people I hadn't seen or spoken to since high school or college (or shortly after college, which also seems like way long ago). Since then, I have been getting a vivid feeling of different times in my life existing simultaneously. Like, it is still 1989, my family and I just moved to Middlesex, New Jersey, where every strip mall and restaurant is new to me so I am kind of off-balance, and my mom and I are doing some boring shopping at Karin's Kurtains. I'm sulking because I hate being dragged through stores looking at curtains or bath towels and because, well, I'm 14. It's the summer before high school. Now somehow I am in my mid-thirties and some moments I can't remember anything that came between being 14 and now; it's like the 14-year-old inside me is given a preview of her life later, which is this life I am living, with a sense of "Oh, so that's how it turned out." And if somewhere I am still 14 then there are still all these other possibilities for what could have happened...except I know those possibilities are gone and I'm not going to get any younger from here on out.

At a certain point a switch happens where the future becomes less a source of joy and hope than--just the next thing, possibly a source of dread or worry (middle age, death) and the past becomes something to wallow in. There is no limit to the ways in which I can make myself feel bad for not being 17 or 24 anymore, for wasting whatever presented itself to me then; and the ways I can fear what is ahead (since in our culture, women seem to become invisible somewhere around their mid-40's unless they can afford to inject bacteria into their faces, etc. to keep themselves looking 5-10 years younger, except they don't really look younger, they just look--stretched. Like they are trying. That's what I think, and sign me up for the bacteria injection).

And yet inbetween high school and now, a lot happened and I felt all of it; it wasn't like going into suspended animation or having a dream and waking up. But increasingly it feels that way...and what is real, anyway? The dreams I brush off when I wake up every morning, don't they constitute just as much of my consciousness as whatever story I seem to be living or have lived? I don't know but sometimes I feel there is such a scary vulnerability to aging because you have to do it, to go through time, whether you want to or not and you are on a ride that you can't get off except by death.

And I guess I can't help but feel disappointed in my life now when I look at it after looking through my high school or college year books. Because I feel less fresh and attractive, that is the superficial part, and because never again will there be that sense that there was then that the story wasn't written and that everything was ahead. So no matter how miserable the young are, they know that there is a huge future waiting to be written on, so there is always a way out of whatever unhappiness.

But I don't want this to disintegrate into whining about not being "young." It is more a sense of awe that things really do end and pass. I remember sometime during the high school years, over a summer, taking a tennis clinic or class and practicing at an indoor court. For some reason I was miserable. It was a big echoey ugly building we were in with dividers separating one tennis court from the next; and maybe I wasn't doing well at my game or I didn't like the other people at the camp; I don't even know anymore. There was just an intense feeling of misery, time dragging on, of this-will-never-end, and then a sudden liberating knowledge that seemed to lift me up out of that building, that self and whole time of life, and say, No, this will end and something else will be true, you won't be 16 forever.