Marking time like we do. Comparing to where we were a year ago, three years ago, upon turning 30, upon buying a first home, upon graduating university, upon leaving parents' home for the first time. How far back should I compare and contrast to now? How much change and how much money and how many experiences or college degrees or clothes sizes or cars or new perfumes or passport stamps or cities lived in or favorite new bands or friends that have come and gone - how to mark it all as something that means something?
I still retain a little bit of that preposterousness longevitous wish that I've always harbored since I learned how to consider my own legacy. What happens when I die? And what do I leave behind? How I will not be forgotten? (Good god.)
Upon leaving university I was certain it'd be the novel I published within two years. After this passed a few years later I was certain it'd be a couple more years to make that mark, mark my words. Years passed and instead it's a lot of other added up instead, tallied like precious unrecorded chapters making a plot I could have never crafted and might even write someday.
I'm looking at my hands in this dark room typing away and I see this gold ring with a red stone on my finger and it's writing and marriage that I see. Something else that I've gained in the last year, writing about symbols, is this Christmas necklace from my husband. Gold filigree drop with a mauve stone on a gold chain in the center, something to wear everyday, to sleep in, and to accustom to one's body chemistry, body wash and body odor. Symbols that I wear because I love someone. I think about giving them to some daughter or niece someday, maybe even a granddaughter, and in a way that could be just as satisfying to me as a book. One piece for one good young person. Does it seem a tad insular almost, too much of my own blood, desire, history, line - too much subjective, not enough objective?
Ah but maybe in the very distracting very busy future world we'll be remembered fleetingly, we will be captured in little mementos. Stories or necklaces, they will all be the same.
I remember a long time ago, in college perhaps, a very good friend telling me that growth for growth's sake was the philosophy of a tumor. Meaning - that just because we wanted to grow as artists, writers, musicians, humans then... I needn't finish. Life happening. The years going by - losing love, finding love, growing up, exploring new places and interests, knowing new people, trying new things, learning to accept yourself as someone worthy and meriting of a good life and healthy decisions - all of the lessons adding up to experience. That I will ponder, you know, and most likely I will overthink and overprocess, grind all this happening and history into an existential penumbra to the point of near obfuscation in which I think everything must elude, but really in fact I've failed to turn on the fucking light and see it all. It's just life.
I'm not a poet. I think I can safely and confidently aver this now without any question. Even though I see the world poetically, belying the truth of what we all really mean to mean, actions more meaningful than words, words more beautiful than sentences. I think real life really isn't the stuff of poetry. It's too hearty and raw I think, not so gentle - if that is indeed poetry. But that is the safe pretty side, I think. My poetry, how I understand it but don't write it, is these beloved too gritty daily characters moving banal plots forward, inch by inch the lessons learned shedding slits of light, and sometimes no light at all. Forgoing truth for acceptance, and only sometimes letting it slip for exhausted reality's sake, hoping to still be loved the same even so. Presenting as big, needing validation, asking approval, shrinking into self, requiring aloneness, begging companionship - all of these super human, contradictory, annoying, fallible, forgivable things as part of. I do know I sometimes claim guilty of those reflexively unkind and instantly sorry reactions, sparse but loaded words, poorly hidden and secretly lovely intentions that represent the every day human condition. That's why I keep hoping anyway - that everyone means beautifully despite the jerkiness of humanity. Like I do.
More than anything this year has year taught me (and here's the end of the year summation) that human relationships do best when we observe, report and accept. Watch those you love carefully, pick out their likes and patterns to understand them, to help them be better and bigger humans; report on their moods to help them know that they are seen and heard; and accept those things you see and know because those are the people with whom you are choosing to spend time and know above all the billions of others now living. Set the stage for everyone's (and your own) best performance, making all of this your life's real work. All the other legacy kind of work it will come in time when you figure out the first kind.
