Gravitational encounters

orbits

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I’m retracing my steps. Somewhere only I know. Almost if I’m programmed to head in a single direction. I’m pushed forward. The wind picks up. Moving faster now with it. I look up at the leaves that rustle and almost lose my footing. If I called you, you’d hear the sound of my heels against the uneven brick sidewalk. You can’t picture it because you aren’t beside me. You don’t know which street it is. But if I’m alive, I’m moving. If I’m moving, it’s toward you.

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November is a month of nostalgia. The changing light must have something to do with feeling submerged anywhere but the present. More shadows midday. Obsessed by the ghosts of the way things were even if I don’t miss them. Another month of hinges. It seems all anyone can talk about is the new early darkness. It’s hard to get used to. The quick jumps. Confusing to go on a walk at two p.m. and notice the almost imperceptible dusk that is technically hours away. 

Recently, someone said to me he was having nostalgia for all the possible futures that wouldn’t happen. It wasn’t necessarily a sad thing to experience. Or at least from what I could tell. More disorienting. Triggered by being in a place that represented both the entire past and all those no-futures. I hadn’t put this to words but it’s exactly how I feel every November. I start experiencing that same textureless quality of a thousand, ungraspable futures. I might be girding myself against all the sadness December and the other winter months bring. Months I know will be hard and should do something to prepare for, but don’t. 

So I linger here where it’s good. Through memory alone, I take note of everything I’ve noticed. I’m cataloging for future Novembers when this feeling returns again. Not seeing things for how I want them to be, but how they really are. Seeing them makes me want to live.   

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Banana Yoshimoto: Truly happy memories always live on, shining. Over time, one by one, they come back to life.

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The last column I wrote for my college newspaper was about how once my class graduated, we would be replaced by new students. All the rituals you thought were unique to you and your friends would be repeated, refashioned, redefined by others. Your apartment would be rented, the trail you ran on would become someone else’s favorite route. This was a good thing. The scales level out.

Annie reminded me of this column when she saw a couple sitting on the same bench she once sat on with someone she was seeing. She sent me a picture of them. Bittersweet. A constant replacement. A story being rewritten without you being sure if it was finished yet. Somehow you’ve arrived here, but it’s the you of a future you didn’t get. 

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I tell Em and Rochelle how I’m moved by everything these days. It’s an abstraction to say I’m moved. Of course I try my best to explain what I mean. Colors are deeper, more affecting. Strangers reach out to touch me but it’s not startling. I’m not afraid to use my words about what I want and what I don’t. I am perforated by holes until I’m entirely see through (in the best way, Charlotte assures me, they see through you in the best way.) Every song I can’t get away from. Life is etched into my senses despite uncertainty. I’m only flesh and blood, I’m translucent.

Finally I just come out and say it. I feel crazy. My friends exchange a look between them because somehow they know exactly what I’m talking about. They tell me their love story as the late afternoon light passes through us.

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No one is a clean state. You can’t meet people in a perfect vacuum with no history, no heartbreak. Everything always bubbles up, unfortunately sometimes sooner or later, Charlotte said to me one month ago.

One of my favorite things to ask two people who form some relationship to the other—couples and friends—how did you meet? Maybe the better question is: what are the circumstances that brought you together? What were the individual steps you took to end up in the right place, at the right time so that you could meet? What led you to make the decision to leave your house that night, go to that party, get pulled into the conversation, let the moment escape into a night you thought you wouldn’t catch again, but somehow did? What compelled you to make sure you saw each other again, kept seeing each other? Despite history and heartbreak? Can you believe that you’re here now?

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A year ago, Madeline used an astronomy metaphor to help me make sense of relationships. People are planets. Our orbits are not always meant to last. They change to accommodate what dynamics need in order to remain in the same solar system. Distance was occasionally necessary. At the time, it made me quite sad. Now thinking of it, I feel different. It’s hopeful.

I’m no astronomer, but I do know that orbital changes are a question of momentum. A large number of encounters will make the planet move outward, a smaller number and the planet moves more inward. My own circles become smaller, more intentional. So a single encounter feels all the more monumental. Not all ellipses are the same. I don’t need to use a metaphor for you to know what I’m talking about. 

The orbit is rearranged. We were distant planets that only knew of the other’s existence. Then we crashed into each other. Now we’re neighboring ones in a small and delicate solar system. The crash came out of nowhere. Maybe some better astronomer could have predicted it. But we didn’t. At once a miracle and the most normal thing in the world. Now, we exist in the other’s orbit, our movements elliptical yet in comfortable closeness with no sense of direction.

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I read: Over and over, we begin again. 

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Later, Annie wonders if, despite what she thought before, there was nothing to learn from a recent heartbreak. I tell her that it’s possible that distance doesn’t always have a way of making things more understandable. Instead, distance allows for the confusion to become more livable. 

The planet metaphor feels appropriate here, so I repeat it over a voice memo. (It’s applies to my friendship with Annie. We had been distant friends for years but since the summer, our closeness has grown. One of the most surprising crashes that I can only describe now as the happiest of accidents.)

With relationships, sometimes it feels like you can only be conscious of what’s going on when you’re in the middle of it. If that’s true, then is it even possible to learn something? You didn't know anything before. And after, you’re only left with the residue of memories. Memory isn’t a lesson. It’s a revival of feeling. You can replay it, but you won’t learn by watching it again and again. Em says how surprised they are that only a few months have radically changed the way I talk about a previous situation. I don’t think I’ve learned anything through that experience, only recognized by contrast that what happened wasn’t a representation of something desirable.

Then Annie repeats what someone else said to me recently too. I know less now than I ever have. To pretend she knows more is against the entire point of the collision. 

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I’ve been redirected. My path, for now and an indeterminate future, has altered. To believe in moving forward. To believe in the promise that good love will find my friends. To forgive all acquaintances. Coincidence is the smallest possible thing that could make me happy. The small serendipities that astound me. Touch the flowers in the bed, reach out towards the light that cuts through the rapidly changing leaves. To let what is good be good, whatever it is. Live and love in unmade beds. To be worn out and continue to go on. To not hide the past in some thick gauze in order to cauterize unhealed wounds. To let the air in and out, to clear it when necessary. To get on a train that is entirely empty and headed to the end of the line. Turn off your location. I will be ferried to you regardless. By scout’s memory or my own conviction that I can’t let this be. Go and be with your beloved. Life is short. Being young and this saturated with feeling is even shorter.

Leave the window open. I’m not going far. Into these arms unless I’m told to leave. No, come right back here. 

Late August, Early September, dir. Olivier Assayas (1988)