I self identify young.
But not like that, not like what you’re thinking.
More like, there is the kid.
The noir kid. That outsider, you know it too, falling into adulthood and the void. Being pressed, pinned down with gravity and the weights of this world all warring against that fire pushing out, wanting to spread, rampant with exhilaration.
Gravitational forces, nuclear forces, all of this love affair expanding the space in which we dwell.
The kid does not want to go back, relive those things from which our stories are derived. It’s not that the content is too much, rather, the sentiment kills him. Your love in his eyes, the glimmer of your presence, our embracing, vanished into the distortions of memory, sleeping in dust on your window sill in cold NYC apartments full of relationship vignettes and escapism. Our hearts quieted forcibly, the singularity drawing matter nearer, and supernovas shining long after their heat has been quelled.
I have, mostly, felt confident in pursuing those matters I warranted worthwhile.
(Wait, I am lying to myself, I must be. It is boldly stated on the front page on all the papers. Just look at all the anguish, the conflict. The obsessions with headlines, with moving images and scenes, dialogue, while our warm bodies cool, away from those humans we can touch and know and comfort. It is hard to push off that understanding, that regret, a crushing regret, that I have spoken out as though with authority, when the world’s borders offer no suggestion that an understanding has occurred.)
I shared that often heard universal declaration that does not allow for regret, at least confessing to regret.
Today, I have a completely different, and better, I think, attitude regarding such things. I confess, there is much I regret and allowing for this detail to manifest as a means toward growing, enables for the bloom to intensify. It would be silly of me to state, “I regret nothing.” First, because I am unsure how to quantify “nothing,” exactly, and, secondly, regret runs a broad spectrum and some matters simply cool into a solid form, regrettably. Some regrets, too, are large, so much so, that awareness of them yet waits. It is not that night has fallen, only that their shadow cast is vast and when the sun casts its light over the many landscapes, there’ll be even greater reconciling.
In High School, I was declared, “most aloof.” Probably because I was acutely sensitive to details and shy as a result, having rushed on occasion, a torrent of contemplations onto peers and, in turn, being ostracized for having done so. I took myself incredibly seriously, thinking, what the soul desires, is genius. To observe it, to perform as such, with the fluid shimmer of mastery, all vessels articulating in the living body, the sublime expression arriving, seamless. I could not feel hung up on being misunderstood, because the right person, the good room, will want to work at getting you, not shutting you down. But this meant moments of anxiety, fears of abandonment, loneliness between the braving it out, since, when you are green, a novice in your execution, the sapling might fail, even under normative exposure.
No, I am young, like bold sentences, or unabashed enthusiasm for Hemingway. Fresh, still not caring for what’s in vogue, not afraid to stand outside of boxes, isolated, unhampered by the needling, the bullying of those posturing over insecurity. Not fearing the accuracy, the space necessary for pithy advances. I am hiding, kind of choosy and unafraid of committing, fearless in the face of loving. I am daring you, devilishly, to seek me out.
I anticipated becoming older, like a bloom unfolding, and without question the pleasure of revelation pleases the soul, the wine ages, complex changes occur and you evolve, G-d helping, into a better you. But the chance to be something like the way you see yourself, will be one day come to rest under the top soil and clay.
Please G-d, I do not want to stop being concerned with caring until then, no matter how steep the hill’s incline, growing slopes until mountains face you down, and there, at Your modest peak is the crown revealed.
Oh, how I empathize with you, I do. I hear you out there, precious soul, beyond diamonds, obsessions, and priceless is what you are. Worthy of true attention. But there is more, the kernel of recklessness adolescence provides, offers a deeper secret, and therein is youth found. A dynamic that I have known to be remissed often, even in the young.
Our imaginations, only adolescent with contrivance, but coupled with disciplined intent become inspiring. We might nurture strong desires for newness, embrace the metamorphosis change provides. Continuously redefine, refine, and mold the fruits of our hands, humbled before the limit of our knowing. I do not want to stop and define myself. Rather, I want to know more, feel more, understand greater, deeper matters, until the world bares its holiness to me with even greater intimacy. To continue all these things, until I cannot.
I remember meeting my former wife, I was a Yeshiva University sophomore, she was a Barnard sophomore, but we had an age gap of 9 years, my having enrolled at university as a 25 year old. I had younger, upper class-men friends, we would get drunk at the Dublin House on 79th and Amsterdam a few nights a week. One of them would teach me how to invest, another would hate me for abandoning him to marriage. But, when her and I were together the dynamic between us made sense, we were, each of us, who we wanted to be, we shared an equitable concept of what the future should look like; essentially, we both wanted meaningful lives.
She and I would hang out in her dorm, my dorm being male only, and I would listen to the 3 or 4 of her 6 other roommates talking openly about being authors, writing great American literature, and their boyfriends espoused the same too. I spent considerable time with them, having the kinds of conversations I miss today, when that kind of connection is not around. Outside of a social context, the desire to avoid small talk, I could unravel on any topic so long as being earnest counted. We all wanted and expected greatness, not because it was valuable or we were conceited, but because there was no reason to limit what might be the future. We had the privilege of expectations.
Then, when we would say good night, she and I retiring into the privacy of our intimacy, I would say, “after graduation, grad school, they’ll be jobbers.” I was guessing, I had seen and met people, known others, who were killing themselves for their art, and this was, I told her, privileged conjecture. I didn’t know for sure, but I felt it. The talk wasn’t manifested in the endless need to promote your work, and that after you had spent all those hours editing, returning to edit edits, no one asking you to keep telling the world, this is me, this is my voice. Waking up, totally ignored, lost in obscurity, and resume the climb. No, this was the funny, in the moment, shouting, and listening for echoes across the canyon’s maw while vacationing on your parents’ dime. This was feigned scholarly rapping on TV shows that captured your attention between the occasional output of work that suggested talent but lacked the considerable amount of germination necessary to field a profitable harvest.
Shortly after the divorce, 16 years after our love had first blossomed, years of gravitational waves later, I was down in the East Village, back on Manhattan Island. I was visiting the furniture restoration store I had worked at during those early college years, where I learned wood working techniques when I was first married. I had gone from the none to handy musician to antique restoration guy in a couple of years.
Now I was just visiting. I had let go of that work years back, since having been told the job “didn’t suit a college grad, a married man with a future.” I took a post at a Washington D.C. think tank. I saw my wife wander, then choose, and settle into a career with education, like her Mother, and her Grandmother before her. She had wanted to be a scientist, maybe work in forestry, but as the pieces fell into place she had an opportunity to establish a career track that offered security and stability. While teaching she pursued graduate degrees in pedagogy and later, advancing beyond her predecessors, administration, maxing out on her potential salary bases.
But this day, I was walking the seven or so avenues from the shop to the subway. It was summer, dusk, warm, even congenial despite the day blending into the evening with heavy charcoal clouds opaquely rolling across the building cut sky.
Striding across 3rd avenue, it began to rain. Hard, then torrentially. The streets cleared in moments, but I had no umbrella and was quickly soaked. I just kept walking.
It was a warm rain, like I remembered from my childhood, and I felt like someone in Georgia who could drive in the snow.
I passed a block housing a retired Catholic church, there was an allee and when I passed under it, the rain was muted. The hard driving storm raged outside the trees’ canopy and underneath the leafy ceiling, the water fell lazily onto my wet form. I had an epiphany.
I called my ex right away, trying to protect my phone from the water and rapid fire spoke to her with the kind of exuberance that had prompted her to call me manic before the divorce and told her of my discovery.
Finally, our differences, her frustrations, all that grew into anger until becoming rage, were suddenly, years later, clear to me. She was little interested in the fact that my processing capacity could take this long but allowed me to speak of it to her of it anyway. And bless her, she never rejected the opportunity to listen, she only capped it when she had her fill and, though divorced, full of unresolved and broken hopes, who I am never left her consideration. She appreciated, albeit silently, my loyalty to these dynamics.
Loosely, I exclaimed to her these thoughts:
I desired the full soaking, I had this starving hunger for understanding, for knowing, cleaving and doing. I needed these heavy torrents of relentless consideration and now it was clear that this overwhelmed her when, in my youthful ignorance, I had wanted her keep up with me, I had wanted her as my partner.
We would walk often, thirty, forty blocks, rather than take the subway, and my pace, quickening, my thoughts unraveling, I would advance thirty feet ahead of her, stop, look back at her chasing after me and wait until she caught up and the process would begin again. She would anger that I was not walking “with her,” and I would anger for being hampered in my gait. I now saw that I needed the obstruction of the trees’ leaves to translate my love of the water* to another person and that effect on me, that lesson, though late for her and I, was good, appropriate. I cried, somewhat happily too, and apologized, espousing in a series of run-ons, my contrition and she called me dramatic, told me I rambled on too much, and the process began renewed.
But time had marched forward and neither of us desired that shared space with all the violence of contempt and instead of reconciling these differences, or seeing how such a parallax between two in love might give our lives depth and advantage, there was a caving into the attractions considered cool, a desire to reclaim that privilege of conjecture, or to simply avoid concessions, to abate change, keep progress in the realm of thought. The revision of that fear towards commitment, capricious tendencies, as observational discernment, being correctly choosy, and reconsidering your station as some new life other than that of your ancestors, simply because this moment of being was currently yours.
Breaking these habits is tough. Rabbi Yisroel of Salant had stated it easier to learn through all of Sh’a’S, than change one character trait. The manifest entropy of single life makes such an exertion difficult, the propulsion necessary to jet yourself forward into an eternal relationship that eventually replaces the patterns and friends cultivated in the evening leading up to middle age, with responsibility, allegiance, and compromise exhaled as sighs, hinting to a recollection of Van Gogh’s fabled last words, “the sadness will last forever.”
What was left for that genius, as he lay in bed, mortally wounded, facing absence, smoking his pipe, looking into the void and all the creations his imagination filled it with, except his brother’s sad and anxious words thumping away, that maverick loneliness, and the possible realization that it is better to be alive and loved, tempered, than unbridled and exhausted as the worlds advance into night.
Der vasser tregger 