Chill Chaser II: Next Year Nostalgia
372 days ago I sat at a different computer in a different home in a different town and wrote my first blog entry. It was even on a different blogging site. I wrote about the same thing that I always write about: the power of film and music, screens and sound. It was about letting go, for an hour, two hours, and being somewhere and something else. It was about turning into rhythms and noise, becoming the static crackling through the clouds. It was about escape.
At 12:00 a.m. on the day of my first blog post I had just turned 22. It was my birthday and that afternoon a few friends and some family and I drafted our own teams of “what ifs” and “if onlys” for a fantasy baseball league online. Now I’m 23. “I keep forgetting how young you are,” a friend of mine always says. She’s older than me and has a tendency toward forgetfulness. “Wisdom comes with age,” she said, as if it’s there, smoking and dancing on top of sugar and yeast. As if it’s there, wisdom, hot and bored and melting inside of candle wax, stuck inside the sleepy monotone of “The Birthday Song.” As if it’s waiting for you. As if it’s granted.
In a year’s time things have a habit of happening. Changing. You get a new computer, a new keyboard. You get a new TV, a Blu-ray player. You get a haircut. In a year’s time, you send out resumes and work above your pay-grade. You write a book and try to read more. You give up cooking becuase you live with your parents. You swallow pills. You start wearing colored socks instead of white.
I wasn’t being sappy when I did this: pulled a heavy cardboard box from the top shelf of my closet. I wasn’t being curious or sentimental. Practicality told me to take it down, open it; it told me to feel around the ridges of stickers and taped-on song lyrics I had applied too long ago to remember why. It said to eye old birthday cards and dump the contents of a worn old Ziplock onto the comforter on my bed: some marbles from when I was this [---] tall, guitar pics from ~rd grade, two dyed rabbit’s feet.
It was practicality, me scavenging through a box buckling with the weight of past’s debris. It was to get rid of stuff, stuff that doesn’t make sense anymore: plastic crucifixes, old wallets, a pitch pipe, the broken wingtip of a cardboard rocket that I made in high school with an old girlfriend who launched herself into the sky one day and got tangled in the clouds, drizzling down for years in tears of ink and acid letters.
When I touched the wingtip, I felt like this: [ ____________ ].
In a year, you tire of symbolism. Irony gets wrinkled and lame.
“Are you having fun?” A happy girl with distracted eyes kept her balance on the outskirts of a dance floor and looked at me. She was in a blue dress. Guys with shirts unbottoned to the middle were walking by and ordering drinks. Her friends were there and she was celebrating growing up. “Birthdays are overrated these days,” she said to me once, then hugged me for a long time, so long that I noticed the feel of her hair and just exactly how she smelled. “Are you having fun?”
I nodded, as you do, felt sweat from the bottle I was holding run cold across my fingers. Fun was an experience I found harder and harder to gauge these days. I knew I had it when I was small. I knew I had it playing “rubber ball” and “tennis ball” and ambling through haunted houses and making forts. I knew I had it just before I fell, from the very top of a basketball pole I was climbing just to prove that I could. I was having it, I knew it, just before I fell from that pole, dragging my leg down the metal and across a protruding screw on the way down. It was the first and only time I’ve ever had to go to the hospital. I was 10 or 11. I could’ve been 9.
These days, fun’s face curls up in an enigmatic grin to show its teeth. It stares out at weekend skies from ambiguous eyes and wonders, Is this enough? Wasn’t the week worth more than this?
In a year you write and watch and read and drink, and you wait and look and feel in darkness for those moments, those peaceful, quiet moments–those “surreal walks through breezy backstreets in perfect weather.” To capture them inside the empty jar you’re holding, to watch them spark and paint the inside yellow. But every time the wind blows, changing the current of the air, you think you hear the flutter of delicate silken wings against it, brushing past your neck and heading away from you. They soar, pulsing toward a brighter light that’s somehow always at your back. They beat and you follow them, for a year you follow them, into the burn of a greater sense of urgency, into the crack of another morning breaking.
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 3:02 pm and is filed under creative nonfiction, portfolio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
