“One wasp can’t be wrong!”—Dad in 2005, singing Mom’s praises in the wake of a terrible sting.
i’m back in michigan until the 26th and am having trouble with time and space.
on the way to the post office before i left, i recalled a conversation with one of the employees who seemed to be having a bad day. she admitted to me that she’d just lost her mother, and we had a pretty long talk about it. this conversation feels like it happened yesterday, like it could have just happened when i walked in the door and saw her. and i wished it had, because then i’d be feeling terrible for her and not both of us. i’d be walking home thinking about how glad i was that my parents were still with me. but that already happened and i can’t totally get a grip on that.
i was disturbed several times yesterday by the realization that at each of the three airports i visited were features and landmarks i’d associated with another airport entirely. how does that happen? these are wildly different cities. you can’t just go to the restaurant in nashville because you remembered it as being in detroit. but that’s the paradox of air travel. this kind of confusion never happens on road trips because you see the signs and every inch of freeway and know how you got to be where you are. flying is different. you wait impatiently in raleigh and then wait impatiently in chicago and it’s all quite inconvenient and easy to forget, in chicago, how far you now are from raleigh. just because that change happened in a matter of hours doesn’t mean it wasn’t significant, doesn’t mean you’re not very far from home. doesn’t mean it would only take two hours to undo.
basically, i am going insane. i get annoyed by how accessible memories are to me, how fine the line is between the time dad was alive and the time he wasn’t, and at the same time i find myself embracing that denial. I picked up the mail at the old family business yesterday and found myself putting my hand on the door, which i knew was locked, but that was ok because i didn’t want to open it. i realized as it was happening that i wanted to be in the moment before any of the moments in the past that I flung that door open to see the store as it used to be, Dad behind the counter. i knew i wasn’t going to open the door. i just wanted, for a second, to feel like i could.
On a more positive note, something good happened before I left Durham. Drastic subject change!
I am in the practice of keeping many different types of journals. Some are rather untraditional in ways that make them safe to keep forever, since the traditional ones I always destroy when I feel they’ve outlived their use and been reduced to a mere liability. Destroying a journal is always a happy occasion for me, because it means that I’ve read through everything and no longer relate to the version of me who wrote it, that the things I thought were crises then no longer are, and I’ve worked through the issues that plagued me at the time. It’s a time for reflecting on growth and letting go. It takes me a year or two to fill up a journal, so this ritual does not happen often.
The last significant thing I did before coming home was destroy the older of the two journals I had filled but not yet been able to release. This one was from college. For many reasons, I’ll never remember my years at Duke as easy or happy ones, but I had forgotten exactly how bad things had really been for me. The pain of reading my thoughts made it clear enough that I had moved past a time I thought would ruin me forever. Remembering that it sucked is important, remembering how badly it sucked is not. It was time to let go, and i did, and i felt good about that.
It occurred to me that although I’m dealing with a lot right now, I am happier on a day to day basis than I was just a few years ago. I know how to take care of myself, and I do. I’m obviously really sad, but it’s usually not a desperate, thrash-y kind of sad. It’s helpful for me to remember when there was a day when I felt I’d ruined my life and things would never be better, but all those problems faded away with time. Somehow in all that chaos, I learned to be happy. I needed my Dad in those days, and I got a lot of his perspectives on how to face life. It seems almost irreverent to admit that I’ve been more miserable than I am now, but I think it goes to show how far I’ve come, and how better of a place I am, emotionally, to deal with this now. I never thought I’d be glad that everything that happened in college did, but on the bright side, I got enough advice from dad in those days to help me get through this now, probably to get through anything.
You made me cry,...but they were bittersweet, happy tears. Again..you’ve hit the nail on the head! Can’t wait to see you. xoxo ME
— Mary Ellen Dec 22, 12:15 AM [link]I think the threshold between life and death, in the beginning and end of life, is probably the most horrifying aspect of human existence. It is also the most exhilarating, and on a less emotional note, the most philosophically interesting.
I think even if and when we have a better model of consciousness, the fact that life generates out of unorganized chemicals, and then ends with failure of just a small part of its massive system, will never be a simple thing to think about.
And all along the course, of life, there are moments where we can choose to have our minds blown if we really think about certain dimensions of an experience—like what you were describing with the airports. The network of people amongs airports—- all these communities of people that are constantly changing—but the culture/ambiance at each airport remains consistent. And we can choose to see every airport as “the same”, or each group of people and crappy airport food vendors a delicate and unique weave, that changes drastically every hour.
I experience a similar phenomenon in New York—a lot of times I talk to people about how certain dimensions of different neighborhoods are identical block after block on the whole island, and how I want to look deeper and understand the communities of people in each one, why certain people settle in certain areas.
Every person with whom I have brought this up has INSISTED that I am strange and that every neighborhood in Manhattan is SO DIFFERENT.
To me, they all have restaurants and bars and similar standards of living and similar shops. It’s like, the urban, more cultured, non-disgusting but similarly boring version of generic suburbia.
I was going to elaborate on that a bit more but I am being called away for a family christmas photo and then various Christmas Eve activities. TTYS memorly.
— John Dec 24, 05:00 PM [link]