When you fear living an ordinary life, everything within your touch becomes an opportunity to shapeshift into something larger than it was perhaps meant to be. These moments are timely. They must be jumped on immediately, held dear to the heart, locked into long-term memory so they may be returned to over and over again until they have settled into the perspective of your choosing. When you comb back through your tired, rumbling, brain, you convince yourself there was something more there.
When you fear living an ordinary life but also suffer from sporadically crippling anxiety, you enter a frustrating stalemate. You want to live wildly. You want to have lots of casual sex. You want to travel the world but mostly just want to adopt rollerskating as your predominant mode of transportation. You want to cut your hair and wear thong bikinis everywhere. You want to go back to school, just because (oh but the joys of learning of course!). You want to reach out to people from your past, just to see what will happen. You want to believe you are that person, and you convince yourself that if it weren’t for your hyperactive orbitofrontal cortex and genetic dispositions and environmental triggers and all of the factors that eventually shoot your brain beyond its threshold of dormancy, you are that person. Instead, you only wear thongs under your jeans and go braless under sheer shirts, and lay naked on your bed with the blinds open for all to see to remind yourself of her. Instead of learning how to scuba dive, you take the indistinct moments you do have and place a significance upon them that perhaps would not be there if you hadn’t forced it to the surface. Every passing moment must be something. You are too anxious to do anything more than that. But still, you must find a way to not lead a boring life.
I cry when my friends tell me they’re in love. I can’t help it. I watch their faces quietly and carefully, and I see it. It’s true, you know, that look of love. It’s there in the form of a sharp secret cast upon their faces, a small but not stifled smile. I’ve realized that when people are in love there rests little to no embarrassment in the matter. They will openly admit it as if it is something that has always been ingrained in their identity from birth. It is as easy as telling someone what country you were born in. Because it simply is. There’s no reason to dispute it. And that makes me cry.
I cry when I have happy days because I take the phrase “It doesn’t get much better than this!” literally. I hold onto my memories for dear life for this reason. I turn over images of my friends and me singing in the car in Texas, a cracked window pushing the air from the highway so harshly across my face that I attribute my dangling, wimpy tears to the wind rather than my own disability to resolve the pain in my chest. I look around me and will myself to remember the feeling.
On good days, I will look around at my friends, overwhelmed by how wonderful it is that we have chosen to be in each other’s lives after all this time. And then I will go home and stare at myself in the mirror and realize I can no longer identify as a teenager. I will replay the day’s events over in my lethargic head. I will pick it apart from hour to hour and attribute a weight to it. I convince myself that these moments are a rarity. “What a good day that was,” I’ll say to myself. “I wonder if I’ll ever have a day like that again.”
I’m working on curbing my sentimentality.
It’s good to be analytical, I think, with a limit. I like to be generally skeptical, although I’ve been working on curbing that when appropriate, as well.
On my last day in Texas, I got up at 6 am and sat outside for a while before calling my car to the airport. I felt it coming on, the urge to lock the moment in. To force some epiphany, to come up with some lesson, some reason for my time in Austin. The mosquitos began to bite my ankles and I went back inside before I could come to some dramatic conclusion.
Later, when I sat at my gate eating a cemented bagel, I realized that moment may have been a sign from the universe that I am doing too much, and not to my own benefit. Sometimes moments are just moments. My perspective on them does not change the fact that they happened. Their existence in my life should be enough. There is no need to clutch onto them as if they will eventually go extinct because their extinction will only come with my own. I can allow them to pass without wondering what they are teaching me. I can believe I will have many more wonderful moments because I definitely will. They will never be exactly replicated, but of course, they won’t be. That would be dumb and impossible and boring.