I’ve spent the morning listening to David Sedaris and doing a painting for Dani. She has mentioned in sincere passing that one strange thing about Anthony leaving her home in August will be the lack of my art on the walls, as these were all gifts for him. Her birthday was Thursday and we are celebrating by going bowling today. I won’t take it with us. Instead I will leave it at her house for her to find later. Dani’s sister’s birthday was the same day, and she (the sister) is throwing the bowling bash for us. I don’t want to insult her by not getting her anything, despite the fact that I barely know her.
Anthony will no doubt be heartened by this, both in terms of my fulfilling a painting goal — which has been rare for me in the last few years — but more to the point, by the mere fact that I was painting. In his mind time has no meaning, and despite the fact that my mother arrives with the uhaul in nine days he still seems to think the majority of my time should be spent where I really want to be: partaking in the leisure that was robbed of me during my four years of school. It’s a romantic notion but unrealistic. He’ll call while on break at work and I will mention that I’m at home.
“Painting?” he asks knowingly.
“Packing,” I correct him.
“Right…” he muses for a moment, but it’s as though his brain simply skips over the very real pending separation. “Too bad there’s no painting, huh?”
I hope to alleviate this problem by packing up the art room first, and had waited until this moment only because I knew I wanted to make something for Dani.
FABULOUS DREAM
With Dani and Anthony. Sitting around a round table. I see two cousins and joke about how they’re twins, when in fact, they are twins. One is a lanky, sporty blond girl and the other is portly with glasses and a messy blond ponytail. They stand next to one another in Bermuda shorts and tank tops, matching, the tall one standing tall, the other kind of slumped over and grinning like a mongoloid might. Dani asks for a trashcan, because she’s abut to throw up. Later I get into her Mom’s Ford Explorer, only to find the trashcan, with unfortunate hunks of vomit clinging to the inside and the stink already pretty foul. I get briefly frustrated by this but assume Anthony has hurried Dani off to a proper bathroom, and I go to rinse the bucket under the hose.
Shots of cold water puddles
(probably from the cows I saw standing in shoulder-deep water that had flooded their gully yesterday)
Then, beyond the Explorer, a friend of mine (who was also an arrogant ex-boyfriend for a while) gets out of his little blank Honda whatever. Leanne is nearby, talking to him in the bemused way she does when she knows the person she is speaking to is full of shit. He asks us what we’re up to. “Going to the lake!” she says. Oh, what do you play? he asks assholicly as if we are about to go off for water polo or something. “Broccoli!” she says gleefully. He looses interest in us and rather than say hi to me at all (in reality I haven’t seen him in about three years) he just gets in his car and drives off, and Leanne asks me where Dani and Anthony are.
Last night I went to the bar with work friends. It was my last day of work at the newspaper, and so we had to see it out somehow. Apparently Jennifer mostly hangs out with people from high school as well, which is interesting considering the conversations I’ve had lately. But I had fun. I showed up when only the boozers where there, and stayed until the diners came, and then even stayed when the rockers came. I watched people shake their fat asses and rock soccer mom haircuts and it was neat.
Hard rock isn’t my thing, though I like live music — of the jazz/blues variety. My ears were ringing by the time I got home, but there was a big new pillow waiting for me upstairs, and during the “should I stay” deliberation, I just thought my mantra quietly to myself: You best learn to live while you’re alive/
it’s better to burn out than to fade away/
(ha ha hey hey)/
best learn to live while you’re alive/
That has kind of been my mantra this whole semester.
I love that. I say semester, as though my life were still bound to increments of sixteen credit hours and deadlines and articles and term papers. No more. I could mark my life with anything. Decathlons. Road trips. In midnights, in cups of coffee. Something positive anyway. Something based on me, and not based on someone else that’s for sure.
You best learn to live while you’re alive
I guess that’s what really got me through this — besides the caffeine and Anthony and the Saturdays of laying on the floor listening to four solid hours of public radio without moving. The knowledge that at the end of the day, I would most likely get to be sleeping. Comfortably. At the end of the day, I could drink something warm and go to sleep. It could all end there. So it didn’t matter what happened from the moment my head left the pillow in the morning until my head hit it again that night. Because it would be bookended by sleep, and comfort.
It’s an insomniac’s method to be sure. And maybe not the most uplifting method, but it was helpful to me somehow. It seems familiar — similar to the thing I used to do in science class in the 6th grade. I would excuse myself for extended walks to the furthest possible bathroom I was allowed to go to, running my fingertips on the rough cinder block walls thinking to myself, time keeps moving. No matter how slow and hopeless it feels in this room, at this moment in this hallway, time is moving forward. Eventually it will end. It will.
It’s hard to remember that things aren’t forever sometimes.
People struggle with how ephemeral things are, but I think the possibility of stasis is even more frightening. Change can be daunting but what kind of person stays in one place while great waves of change carry other people in directions you envy? What kind of people resist the pull of currents? I understand having goals, ambitions, but what does it mean when you swim against what’s pulling you? What kind of person are they, these people who say no?
I’ve seen them. I’ve worked with many. They say I would but. They say I wish I could. ‘But’ nothing you can, could if you wanted and it felt right.
But none of them can do what Anthony and I will be doing, in two cities. That’s what they say anyway.
Really, they probably can’t.
But they can all meet at a dim building filled with harsh looking men and women, eat crabs and shrimp dumped onto the table with their fingers, and dance to loud covers of 80’s classics. They can do that. And no one should ever stop them.
