Look out

foolishness

Tired of essays so here’s something a little different.

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Checking the blooms, the wind reminds us we were naive. We were too soon and too late. Hoping for better weather and expecting the best. Train rumbling above. Thank God it’s not thunder. Almost feels like luck to get caught in a torrent of wind and impartial drizzle. The pavement begins to smell like summer. We could walk for miles if it was much warmer. That’s how long love takes.

That brush of cold keeps coming back, like your hand against my skin in public, occasionally when I’ve forgotten to reach out. Where we were once shy, we’re much less afraid now. Our legs were unsure like fawns, safer not to stand than reveal ourselves in plain sight. No one’s looking anymore. Like me, they’ve almost forgotten any time that we weren’t together.

You lead me where I need to go. I surrender any map. If you’re walking in front of me, my cardinal direction is as obvious as red cheeks from the dropping temperature. I’m going too.

Someone told me I needed to try to be a fool for a while. I’ve always been a good student. I’m trading up days of toil for something easier. Flirting with anything that is streaked with simplicity. The newly lingering light. Endless splendor. Walking around, the same song looping through my headphones like a religious experience. A voice like revelation. Words I don’t try to decipher. I know I’m doing everything right.

I want to play. We play almost every day, you remind me. There’s no hardship to be found. Sometimes it can be like that. I like that I can define life this way—by play I've had rather than the work I haven’t. If I wake up and there’s nothing to do but go to the park and then a party, I’ve done something right. If you’re beside me and can take me home later, you’ll put me to bed so I can dream it again. If that day was a dream, it only becomes real if shared. Twitching in my sleep, I wake with only hope there’s no turning back.

The spring is about hope. That’s where we are now. Without pain, there’s no hope. I believe that. I don’t care for sidewalk philosophical debates anymore. No one is changing my mind if I don’t want it to be changed.

Because of that stupid hope, I’m born back into myself. During this long season of depression, I did the opposite of loving myself to death. Days I didn’t know what it would mean to see it through. But I held onto a shred of belief that things would turn around any day. I woke up, just days ago, and the kitchen window showed me birds, the first real blooms. I always had tomorrow and only needed to wait.

For this, for something bigger than my sadness. To make it here. For once, stillness can’t be misinterpreted as sadness.

Strangers in adoration everywhere I look. The twenty-somethings drunk and staring into each other’s eyes on the train. I try to hear what they’re whispering but I don’t. The older couple beside them, arms linked and eyes closed. Wedding guests, too formal to be among the plainclothesed. I don’t know where any of them are going. Whether they’ll make it. Whether they’ll have each other or have tomorrow.

These fragments will always miss you by a long shot. Canonball myself into the pool of your life and still my feet don’t touch the bottom. I wait, like that glorious moment before resurfacing and sun splinters through the water calling me up, up, up, but I stay as long as I can hold my breath. Willing you to be there when I return past the surface. And there you are with your thousand ways of showing up with your little toolkit.

A miracle that this is shared between us. No us without you. No us without me. That love which is given is also returned. Deep in the coming green grass of the park, something tells me we have to dig our heels in. Stay quiet in reverence of all the good that’s yet to come.

The fool doesn’t look back on their life and realize how many years they wasted worrying. The fool keeps thinking time and life are infinite as their own blind hope. Still wanting more. I didn’t think I was born to be a fool, but maybe that’s all a girl can be.

I won’t turn back now. There is no other way. Where was I going when I realized I was running? How else would I be caught, except flush with all this dedication? A car won’t go as fast as I go. These wheels will always turn. They’re yours to love. I’m done for the day, but I’m not done.

Masculin Féminin, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1966)