Both sides now

hinges

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I keep saying summer is over. No, my friends will respond, What are you talking about? Summer isn’t over until October. It doesn’t feel this way. My senses are tuned to a frequency that seems to not be shared with anyone else. The weather shifts into something distinctly unseasonal. There isn’t a season that feels right to compare to what the last stretch of beautiful days has felt like on my skin. Time is passing in a weirder way than the already weird way time passes. I feel an ambient malaise when I think about the things I usually enjoy doing. Hard to want to do anything but sleep or drink or waste an entire day avoiding writing. It’s even harder to seek alone time. Summer is over. More departures than arrivals. I can’t go into a store because then I’ll have to stomach all the back-to-school displays. It revives a primal dread from when I was a kid living through these last sweet days before the rhythm of my life became normal again. 

During July, I found myself wanting to stop time altogether, the same wish of all those school summers. Let the month crystallize into a hard stone of amber. Store it in a shoebox that I can take out from under my bed whenever I wanted. 

I read in starting from nix that she’s been feeling weird about the fact the year is halfway over. I hadn’t thought about the year itself being almost over, only the summer. When a friend and I are talking about the times we’ll see each other over the next few months, he says and then it’s basically a year. Maybe that’s what’s been wrong these last few weeks. My sense of time is measured in a countdown. I text Charlotte that we’re in the hinge of the year. The hinge between season and season. Morning and full-on day. Night and too late.

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A very important friend moved away a week ago. This friend has come to be such a distinct feature of my life in the city that the day he left never really felt like it would arrive. There are moments his absence is easy to accept. People leave New York all the time. But most times when I think about the fact that he’s gone, I have looping regrets I can’t seem to pause no matter how many times I try. Several friends have reminded me it’s not over. It’s just different. Annie says New York is quick to forget. It moves on way before you have. It’s your job to remember. 

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There was a beautiful afternoon during which the person I was in love with introduced me to Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. He read me a passage from the novel as we drove from a bookstore off-campus back to our dorms. Early fall light leaked through the windshield. The passage was a sprawling description of the Romantic, a person whose description very much matched how I would describe the person reading the passage to me. It was among the most romantic experiences I ever have had, that saturation of infatuation, the sheer force of my desire distracting enough that it felt like I was driving drunk when I was dead sober. I wanted the car ride to last forever.

I later read the book because I believed, as I always do, that this would bring me closer to the person who introduced me to it. I was right and wrong, as I always am, and my relationship with the book became both part and parcel and separate from my relationship with him. The book lives very much in that moment when he read to me the passage, less so in my own private encounter with the novel. I remember much of the description of the Romantic, but the quote I find myself returning to all these years later is not about the Romantic, but one spoken by the novel’s realist narrator after a car crash. Where there is the chance of gain, there is the chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise. 

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I have this malaise on the other side of so much happiness. It feels not unlike a hangover. I spent the last month gathering as much happiness as I could to bide me over for when the other side arrived. The quote, from memory, supposes that happiness’ opposite is sickness. A problem of having too much. There’s a risk in overdoing it. It’s a scarcity mindset that I found myself falling into.

Recently, I’ve found myself on the other end. That nothing could ever be enough. The dopamine hits once and then the craving becomes stronger. Charlotte says, of course you want more. How couldn’t you?

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Mitchell tells me that I’m placing a lot of pressure on hindsight. He says what I think would have saved things might have only caused more harm. I find myself saying but what if to almost everything. That if I had acted differently, I would feel much better now. If only we had gone with a different apartment. If only I’d taken my cat for bloodwork sooner. If only I’d known. If I had been someone else. If I had been braver or if I had trusted myself. The if is unachievable when it’s in the past tense. And what if you never have the chance again? That’s what bothers me most. That loss.

The conditional is another hinge. On one side, absolute knowledge, and on the other, ignorance. One side is action and one is inaction. One is risk and the other is reward. Regret can exist on both sides, but what the conditional really hinges on is the possibility that everything could change. In either direction. I want to believe that regret has the potential to turn into gratitude. I’m coming around to it.   

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You need distractions, Mitchell also says.

My usual distractions aren’t distracting enough, I say. 

I get it, Mitchell says. When I’m stewing, it’s hard to want to read.

Or write! I say. 

I can’t read new things or write in a way that feels right or like it will free me from the present moment. I turn to what’s familiar. Rereading Normal People by Sally Rooney to feel something. Or to hurt my own feelings. I’m not sure. 

There’s a scene I forgot about prior to my reread. While Marianne watches Connell in the pool, she feels nostalgia for the moment that’s in the process of happening. I’ve felt this lately. I fight nostalgia when I can, but when it comes, it’s a powerful shudder that renders me almost immobile. To be stuck in the present should be a blessing. I watch my friends, watch them kiss each other, watch myself kissing them, watch the moment pass into some other time.  

Why isn’t there a museum of the natural present? I’ve realized that every time I find myself in love with the past, I’m avoiding imagining a possible future. 

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What if we lose each other because we need to? What if this is the change we needed? What if that change is as good as it is bad? What if everything gets better from here? What if you and I were in the right place at the right time? What if we trust that we will be again? What if we believe in what we have in each other? That we will not find it again with anyone else? What if we trust that it can mean different things to us, but that doesn’t make it any less meaningful?

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My malaise has been put in its rightful place when it gets to be too consuming. One morning I wake up with Madeline and we immediately get bagels. Christian takes me to an outdoor concert of a singer whose angelic voice brings me close to tears. We go back to his and cook zucchini two ways. I walk home from Park Slope listening to the same song over and over. Jessica hugs me on the street before calling me one of the smartest people she knows. I hang onto that. Charlotte makes me dinner yet again. Pasta with so much bright dill it tickles my tongue. I’m taken care of when I probably don’t deserve to be. Krysten throws a dinner party and I leave with two new friends and a plan to start a book club. Mitchell and I watch golden hour slip into bright blue twilight on his balcony. My cat isn’t imminently dying according to recent blood results. I’m staying up late and waking up early, by accident. Drinking water at the sink in the dark listening to the across the street neighbor’s party wind down. I have bills to pay. A novel to write. Friends to catch up with that have been patient with my absence. I have a life to keep living. 

On the last night that my friend is in town, I say to him I think we’re two sides of the same coin. The heat breaks two days later. The sun keeps coming back. Blue skies like I haven’t seen them all summer. All the things I expected but forgot when they weren’t there. There was so much else we could have done if we had more time. I won’t apologize for wishing to have those minutes back. I know there will be more time, we just don’t have it yet. You said I’ll be alright. I’m going to prove you right.