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moments

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Nothing worthwhile is ever easy. My AP Euro teacher wrote this as a disclaimer on the reading assignment he gave us in the summer ahead of the semester’s start. In the inclusion of the disclaimer, he was attempting to preempt complaints from students that we’d have to spend the summer doing school work. I was a high school sophomore prematurely taking the course. Most people waited until junior year because the class was notoriously demanding.

For a long time, I believed that maxim. It became my motto. I even wrote it somewhere in my college applications. Anything that would have meaning would ultimately be difficult, challenging, at times all-consuming. I wasn’t afraid of hard work. I wanted to work hard, so I worked hard in order to get what I wanted. That went for relationships, too. The more challenges a relationship faces, the more rewarding the love will be.

Then I turned twenty-eight. And I realized I get everything I want, sometimes without trying so hard. I’ll admit it. I live a charmed life. Every day feels like my birthday because I’m surrounded with all the love I didn’t need to work so hard for after all.

In bed, I tell you my former mantra because we’ve been reading passages from Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke advises that we should love our solitude as well as the pain it brings, because in that pain, self-actualization is possible. We disagree with this—you and I who both hate to be alone. Why suffer when you can do something better? I pause my breathing treatment in order to read a passage to you about having patience with all that’s unsolved in your heart. I believe in that. We take Rilke’s lessons and apply them to our love. I promise to stand guard over your solitude, and you promise me the same.

Earlier, we were in the park gazing at each other under the purple sky. You called our relationship pure bliss. When I tell you that I used to believe ease was not worthwhile, you remind me that our entire relationship is easy—but that ease is what makes it more than worthwhile.

Worthwhile is a marker of time. An investment, an endurance between the beginning and the payoff. When you say our relationship is more than worthwhile, you untether it from the future reward. You anchor it in the present. 

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The air was saturated with sweet iris in the nighttime springtime. I’d just seen an old friend for the first time in five years. I took a picture with my film camera of her and her fiancé in front of my favorite apartment in the neighborhood. Delayed gratification, she said about the wait time between the moment I take the photo and when it’s developed.

I’m in a constant pursuit of momentary pleasures like these. I don’t mean momentary as temporary or fleeting—though they can be. I mean that the moment is so saturated in intensity that it doesn’t feel temporary at all. It feels like time, and life itself, could go on forever. 

Almost summer when my life begins to elongate. So many summers were spent packing my things and moving across town or the country. Now I’m stubborn about staying. My friend asks if it’s New York for good, and I tell her I’m not going anywhere else ever again if I can help it.

It was this friend who first demonstrated to me how one could make a beautiful life as an adult. She has the best taste of anyone I’ve met. We met as neighbors in Boston. She took me under her wing when I was twenty-two and fresh out of college. She taught me about wine, good recipes for dinner parties, to give tokens of gratitude when your friends help you out. A Sunday evening offer to share leftover split pea soup. In other words, I began to learn how to live a life richly thanks to her. 

This friend has also lived in so many places that sometimes it surprises me when she mentions a city she used to live in. The other day, my boyfriend had a similar experience when I mentioned living in Boston. We forget about that era, he said.

So much about my life didn’t make sense before I moved to New York. I was swimming against the current in other places. I couldn’t find a corner where I could sit comfortably. I didn’t live for momentary pleasure, because I couldn’t stay present long enough to enjoy it. If it took all of those misfits to get to here, then the growing pains were worth it.

Two years ago, on the M train, I took a photo on a disposable camera. The film had been exposed to light, but I didn’t know that at the time. Only one picture would be developed of the whole roll. I would be sorely disappointed so I treasured the one that did come out: a collage of skyline, a shadow of a body, with the sun slicing through all of it. It still hangs on my fridge. Every morning when my eyes are still opening from sleep as I reach for the half and half, they pass over the photo and remember very little about that time in my life.

So now I’m trying to remember what I felt that day I took the photo, where I was going then. Late during the night before, a man I met texted me to apologize for ghosting, which he would do a second time days later. Little did I know it was a jump scare not worth flinching over. Another ghostly artifact to dredge up when some other more important memory-in-the-making is happening. A year later, some other pleasure was closer than I realized at the time. 

When I think of the picture on my fridge, I also think of how several people recently have asked me how long I’ve lived in New York now. I’ve lost track of time. Two years. The years collage together in a similarly strange, fragmentary way. I have deja vu. I become convinced I’ve always been here. I’m anchored to the present moment. But really I’m anchored to a series of present moments. I’ve never been happier in my life than I am now. “The present is so powerful, so riveting, that the future and past seem light years away,” Annie Ernaux wrote, which recalls a friend’s lyric, “Avoid a future where I’m drowning in the past,” which echoes Maggie Nelson, “That the future is unknowable is, for some, God’s means of suturing us in, or to, the present moment.”

Being in love sutures you to the present. All you want to do is live in the spectacular right now. This is a distinct feature of the honeymoon period, a period I’ve been thinking about because I’m in love. 

I became fixated a few weeks ago, when I was very sick and you were doing your best to take care of me, that we were exiting the honeymoon period. I was convinced something shifted. What I perceived to be distance was only your immense worry over my well-being. I came back to myself. Then the sun drenched everything. Summer broke through the cold, rainy days. We rode our bikes around the neighborhood, looking at each other in disbelief that our life could be this blissful. 

What I mean to say is I worry that if I put words to it too often, I will somehow shorten the honeymoon period’s duration. But that’s the thing about honeymoons, they come in cycles. They can last for a long time. Then another one will start. A honeymoon is an act of preservation. It’s endurance. With infatuation, you desire the ephemeral.  

So I’ll correct myself. When you fall in love, you want to stay in this moment of the honeymoon because you desire something that lasts. If you can’t stay in this moment, you look forward to the next one. And then repeat. It’s a perpetual cycle of extension, which in mortal terms, is another way of hoping for the future while staying in the present. 

“It often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise,” Maggie Nelson writes in Bluets. I’ve been measuring for so long. Dividing increments of time into their measuring cups so I’ll stop worrying I’ll have too much of one and not the other.

What’s a promise you can give without promising? A promise towards the future though we can never quite know. A promise to always feel this way. A promise for honeymoon. A promise to love the moment rigorously, a demonstration of your dogged belief that it will endure.  

One spring night, I exited the train station in a downpour. You told me to exit on the south side. I was confused (cardinal directions evade me) and chose the wrong exit. When I emerged from the station, I knew exactly where you’d be. A song about miracles played as soon as I saw you on the corner. You didn’t see me. I was overcome with the feeling that I had waited my entire life for that moment. 

But then I remember the many other moments that I’ve experienced that feeling. The yearning walk I took over the Manhattan Bridge the night before we went out for the first time. That late summer air I wished would cool. This recent night in the park as you lie in the grass with your eyes closed. Often when I bike behind you, and you sit upright, right arm hanging by your side. I don’t think I’ve ever loved someone more. 

It’s been two years since I moved to New York. Before I turned twenty-eight, I had two aspirations for the year ahead. One concrete and one abstract. The concrete: Learn more flowers and trees. I’m still working on that. The abstract: fall in love. With something or someone. I did that. I chased love again and caught it. Early in the fall, I wrote in my journal: When will the dream end? 

I’ve wondered the same thing about New York. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, One day I know I won’t feel the same about New York. Meaning I’ll love it less. But I also want to be like a dog. To believe that only the present moment exists. To stop quantifying time. To remind myself we have all the time in the world. I’ll continue to feel this way. So I’ll go ahead and cut the additional clause—“until I don’t”—because there’s no until. There’s only right now.

The Comfort of Strangers, dir. Paul Schrader (1990)