Vertigo
I have a red folder next to me on the couch with about 200 pages' worth of my past in it.
I've been poking around the boxes in my apartment, seeing if there's anything in them that I should keep before they all get moved into storage. In addition to the boxes, I've got a battered gray filing cabinet, full of my old writing. Probably somewhere around 2,000 pages, I think. I yanked a drawer open and started going through it. One treasure I found was a black and white photograph of me and some other cast members on stage in Much Ado About Nothing, circa 1995. It's the only photo I've got from that summer. I was so young! And thin! It's on my microwave now, to serve as inspiration for taking off the pounds I've put back on over the past month.
Then I came across the aforementioned red folder. It's full of e-mails that Pea and I exchanged between January and March of 1998. We met at a Halloween party in 1997, and these e-mails are from the time right at the very beginning of our relationship. Every day for three months, sometimes more than once a day, we e-mailed each other at work. Not little e-mails, either...long ones, back and forth, hashing out our respective difficulties with this new thing we were doing. In between e-mails, we were talking on the phone. A lot of running towards each other and then running away, which is what I remember from that time. It's different having it in black and white, though. More concrete. Easy to see the pattern that was playing out. Bloody peculiar to realize that, just four years later, we'd be looking for a house together.
The patterns stand out, they really do. Each of us setting little rules, then breaking them: declaring a "time out," then being unable to maintain radio silence, sending e-mails about how confusing everything was and how we wanted to see each other more when we'd decided to take a break. Being an "us" and then not. Sleeping together, then deciding not to. Above all, there's a portrait of my great need in all of the words I wrote, and I can remember the state that I was in, how I tried to hold myself back and hide that need so I wouldn't scare her off.
I did scare her off, of course. More than once. But she came back. She came back, and we stumbled off into our future together. We lived together from September of 2001 until May of 2006. It is so very strange to read these exchanges, knowing what I know now. Nine years later, we're back to radio silence, only this time we're maintaining it. No confusion. No rule breaking. No late-night pell-mell drives into Manhattan to spend the night at her place, no trips by PATH train to Jersey City to spend the night at mine.
Who we were is clearly drawn in the e-mails: as people, we remained remarkably consistent throughout our relationship. Not that we didn't grow and change and all those things you're supposed to do as you get older. But the basics are there, plain as day, in every line. Everything that added up to the collapse of the relationship can be found there, obvious with the standard 20/20 rearward focus.
I can say, now, that I'm more myself than I've ever been. I've learned more about myself in the past year or so than I did during the previous decade. I know what I did, I know why I did it, and I know why I tried to do the same damn things at the beginning of this year. In that regard, despite the vagaries of my moods, I am strong.
I've got no regrets, except insofar as my self-ignorance has caused another person pain. It's a bit of a paradox: I wish I could've behaved differently, except that the only reason I know how to behave differently now is because I didn't then. At the same time, I wonder what I'll do now that, in a decade's time, will look just as obviously askew as some of what I read in that red folder.
That is, I suppose, the consequence of being a temporally-bound monkey. I can only strive for authenticity...to use the experience of where I've been to more consciously move to wherever it is I'm going.
Still...it's something of a burden, that folder. It's me, falling in love, in a way that I wouldn't now. I don't berate myself for any of it, but I do feel a certain weight. As though I ought to apologize to myself for not knowing better, for not being able to achieve what I set out to achieve, for hiding, for being dishonest. Make no mistake, I've apologized for those things, to the person most hurt by them. Somehow, it seems like it'll never be enough, and there's nothing I can really do about that.
I think that's enough of this particular pastward focus for this evening. I'm going to put the red folder back into the file cabinet, pick up the guitar, and write some songs.
