I'm sitting on the cusp of finishing the semester: It's a nice view.
Considering that two big finals are tomorrow, I'm surprisingly not stressed-- I can only think about cozying up with a big glass of wine and my friends tomorrow night in Philly. That'll be nice, we have lots of catching up to do and fun to be had.
Still, it's weird to think about saying good-bye to people: those who are going abroad, those who are graduating from school, those who I'm just used to seeing for hours a day and won't be seeing for at least a week. Whenever gears shift, it always hurts a bit: you look out on the horizon and you see that your patterns won't be the same. Thinking back on all the good times, you have to wonder if they'll ever get back to that, how things won't ever be the same, how you'll never have those same people in your life in that same way.
And yes, that's sad. But hope has a way of sticking in the air, and it's the relationships that really matter that somehow burrow themselves deep into your life and hanker down for the long haul...forever really. It's those friendships, those good times, that keep coming back again and again; so no matter how many times you have to say good-bye, or feel sad, or change gears, they'll always be a next time. They'll always be a party or a reunion or a weekend or a vacation or even just a quick phone call that throws you back to the past as you tread the uncertain future.
Relationships air out, people change, the way we define eachother goes to shit, and yet we can still always reach across eachothers pathes and make them cross again.
January 22, 2004
The car was beautiful and blue,
Like a wrinkle in the ocean that’s made just for you.
It was a car that was made for an exciting trip,
One through the air for a tiny guy named Skip.
Now Skip was real small, like the size of a seed,
He loved living at home, but he longed to be freed.
He liked smoking cigars and swimming nude,
And in his high-pitched voice, he called everyone “dude!”
Now Skip was ready to see all the world,
So he packed all his bags and his sails he unfurled.
All morning he drove through the hairy woods,
The dandruff bugs scared him, he’d get out if he could.
So once in the open, he felt much less fear,
And he whistled a tune to the blue sky so clear.
But after a while, he became kind of bored,
So he made a quick right in an effort to head ‘nord.
Yet all of a sudden, Skip gave a quick shout,
In his effort to go one way, he’d really gone ‘soud!
Suddenly Skip was going real fast,
Past eyeballs and cheekbones and then this was last…
He spun…
He whirled…
He bobbled…
He burst…
In beauty and boom
He sailed to the moon…
He twirled…
He twittered…
Tootle-loooooo…….
Now Skip found himself in a new land,
On the edge of a thigh the color of sand.
It was fun to think of his glorious flight,
But not he was lost and wanted an end to his plight.
It was then, like a kiss from the moon he had touched,
When a gift came to him that he needed so much.
A telephone sat on the knee of time,
A teleportal home, an excellent find.
Skip called a friend from the home he had lost,
Who said, “I love you Skip, our friendship has no cost.”
So Skip found his home at the top of the ear,
Where he had lots of smiles, but one memory he kept near.
He never forgot of his journey through space,
He loved it at home, but oh, what a place…
THE GAME. You know what I'm talking about.
I think this semester has been the semester of THE GAME. The break-ups and make-ups and make-outs and almost-marriages of my friends and my family have got us all hashing out the details of relationships. Every week someone is going to someone else, analyzing the hickey on their neck or the disappearance of the condoms from their bathroom vanity or the date that they're freaking out about. And then when friends see friends it's hashed out all over again, going over different angles, hearing another opinion, letting the flutter in the their stomach get alittle stronger again.
And I realize more than ever now that we all play it. In New York City, THE GAME is almost mandatory, and it works on many levels. Let's say you're in a bar: there's the game of finding someone you like, the game of eye contact and subtle body language across the room before someone caves and approaches, the game of flirting, the game of giving out a number, the game of making out/deciding whether to go home together, the game of whether to have sex, (a biggie) the game of calling back later in the week, the game of dating, the game of admitting how you feel, the game of defining the relationship....and it goes on.
It's really all a game: a game of chance, words, body language, eye contact, intimate conversations, mixed messages...And it sucks, and people bitch about it. It's arguably one thing that I DON'T like about NYC.
But here's the thing (and I attribute this understanding to a very special unnamed friend)...THE GAME is all about pain. THE GAME exists because we're older, and no longer in a childhood playland where we have a crush and then start holding hands. THE GAME exists because the older you get, the more baggage you have to carry, the bigger the burden on your back, the tougher the skin that's been beaten around a bit. With our baggage comes our pain, our break-ups, our first loves, the unaviodable defense that grows from being hurt. We all have it...and if you don't, maybe that's why you haven't won a round yet.
THE GAME was created out of those defenses, from our unwillingness to make ourselves vulnerable again. It's the result of the ego that rises when you've survived being ripped open from the inside: it's a battle wound that's ready to kick ass before someone slices you open again. It's that realization that the dating world isn't such a nice place, and all our egos clash together and make it hard to get to the tender flesh beneath.
We all know we're better than the foe that hurt us. We survived. And everyone else better know it too.
Is there a moral of the story here? No. But it's something that's worth taking into account: that our fear of getting hurt is the thing that keeps us away from eachother. Rejection is a scary animal that's easy to beat if you never expose yourself from behind the shield.
I'm back to hating on definition, for those of you who knew that I ever hated on it.
On so many levels I feel like rebelling against juicing out meaning and pinning down labels. Because what do they mean anyway?
What does it mean to define a relationship? What
is a boyfriend? What
is a best friend? Well, by definition they're people in your lives, but the way we each label them is individual and unique to ourselves; what makes my best friend a best friend is not what makes your's your's. And what is a boyfriend really, beyond the feelings that lay esoteric between two people, they way you decide to conduct yourself, the way he decides he must conduct himself too?
Our definitions are meaningless: simply societal constuctions that help us pin down an emotion or an action or a responsibility. It's a way of making ourselves feel legitimate in our actions, in our feelings and a method of protecting our fragile confidences. But in no way is a definition a course of action, or an immortal promise, or an actual change of attitude.
A definition is just words: formulated expressions that we construct in our heads which can be molded and conformed and altered and destroyed. And when I think about it that way, I have to almost laugh: because isn't our courage to truly feel, and to act in accordance with those feelings so much stronger than those silly words? Why do we feel that we need language to hold something together that's too strong and complicated and organic to even be expressed in words at all?
I pulled a piece of gravel out of my knee today that's been a part of my body since I was about 8.
I fell off my bike when I was on vacation one summer, and the gash that I cried over for a week ended up healing around a bunch of Eagles Mere gravel that was too painful for me to pick out. So it's there, all purple and concealed under my skin until today. My skin finally started the process of pushing out those little gravel pieces, expelling the excess waste from my body in the form of the little black speck I could pull out with a tweezers.
I wonder about temporality: about the comings and goings in our lives. The way we can be so bonded together at one point and then simply fall away from eachother with the greatest of ease. I wonder how our minds are able to fathom that, how the elimination of people and things from our lives is somehow acceptable enough to happen, despite how much we might fight it. How a friend or you can slowly change to the point when things just don't work anymore; how a relationship can disappear after years of unequivocal intimacy.
How a relationship can appear and slip almost perfectly into the hole that the others left behind.
For some reason this doesn't seem fair. It seems that we should be able to truck along with our individual lives and carry our friends beside us on parallel tracks. We should be able to keep what we work so hard to establish. We should have the solidarity to know that what we win is ours, is a trophy on our shelf, is a permanent prize in our hearts. It's funny: we're all travelling to the same place, but we can't all go together.
As a matter of fact, there's very little we get to hold on to. Most things just slip right by us, kiss us a bit of grace as they truck on by. And those that stick around, never do forever: our friendships, our boyfriends, our hubbies, our passions. They'll move on too...and yet they still
feel worth fighting for.
Even the gravel in my knee is starting to readjust it's own place in the world. I told my mom that I thought the rest of it would come out sometime in the future. When I'm an old lady in my rocker, I'll pick out the last piece of purple.
