time is a clock that keeps ticking…
I’m starting to feel time. A few weeks ago, I glanced at myself in the mirror and started to see the slightest appearance of lines, and I began to feel the weight of responsibility and I could hear clocks ticking. The cultural currency that was once familiar now has a patina. Kids don’t know Donna Summer and old movies, and when I talk about the origins of ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’, few recall images of a blanket of bodies in Guyana and a preacher called Jim Jones. I grew up in age free of the internet, where the only means of communication were letters, phone calls and trips on a subway.
Time. I write a lot about it — how there’s never enough of it, how we can never get it back. I’m not speaking about vanity and the appearance of lines and wrinkles, which only marks a life of experience, a life lived. What I’m talking about is the subtraction of now and then. And I think about this picture taken at my college senior ball, and how I was naive and wide-eyed and a bit too confident. I had the whole of my world mapped out, charted in graphs and tabulated in scientific calculators, and I never imagined where the day would take me. That photo was taken thirteen years ago, and the woman I was then is markedly different than who I am now.
I was intense, hyper-intellectual, insecure, abrasive, judgmental, Republican. A few months before this photo was taken, I had lost my mother. I locked that pain away in a box, tied it with a neat little ribbon. Who knew that it would take me a decade to climb out of the darkness. To arrive at a grey place where I wholly understand the woman that she was — a woman who didn’t know how to be a mother, perhaps shouldn’t have been one — but quietly wished I had someone to cleave to. She was my whole world and all I wanted was to get lost in the thicket of her hair. Funny how I felt at turns safe and frightened in her presence. And back then I drank often. There are patches of time I’ve lost, and when I talk to my friend Liz I shake because she remembers things I don’t. Because of the drink, there was so much of it. You see, even in the picture above I’m holding a drink. I flip through photo albums and nearly all the photographs are of me, drinking.
Three years sober and the weight of what came before sometimes puts my heart on pause.
I had a dream last night, one I can’t explain. Something was wrong with my brain and they opened me up and declared they would have to make incisions and deletions so that I wouldn’t burst. The doctors told me that I would lose time. Short-term memory and simple things like subway routes and bus fare. And I remember me in a paper gown sobbing into my hands. Take away everything, but not my memory, not what’s left of it.
And I woke, frightened. Time. Now minus then.
A word like regret hovers. Makes you wonder what it would be like to rewind, live it all over again. And while I love my life right this second, how I wouldn’t trade the bulk of it to arrive at the woman I’ve become — confident, smart, less judgmental, more patient, liberal, kind, still a little insecure — I wish, wish, wish I could’ve shaken that kid in the picture. I wish I could have pried open her eyes, take the drink out of her hand, and make her see.
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true. – Nathaniel Hawthorne
February 21st, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Thank you for this post.
February 22nd, 2010 at 11:07 pm
You’re welcome, Lisa!! xo