A New Year

NYMan says he's always interested to read my site after we've spent time together if only to see what I choose to write about.

"It's never what I think it's going to be," he's said to me.
"What do you think it's going to be?" I ask him.
"I don't really know, but it's never what you end up writing about."

And now when we spend time together--a weekend here, a weekend there, and most recently, 8 days over New Years--I can't help wondering "does he think I'll write about this?" and "is this what he would write about?" and "should I write about this?" And I think it might be a game we play now--an unspoken game--and I wonder if it might be a game I've been playing all along with myself: filing moments, memorizing dialogue, taking pictures, choosing mataphors, picking themes, trying to capture the unfolding narrative anyway I can so that I can write it and re-write and re-write it again and again and again later on.

Like over Christmas. Over Christmas with my family in Missouri, I thought of at least three main themes I could write about: aging, change, and resignation, and there were probably a dozen stories to capture those themes, and a hundred ways to tell the stories, and moments and metaphors and snippets of conversations I wanted to use, but were those stories and moments and themes and metaphors going to mean anything to anyone else, or should I just save them for my diary and therapy sessions? And is it even my right to share some of those things? What is too personal to me that it will bore others? And what is so personal to others that it will border on exploitation if I write about it?

All I really want to do is point to things I see in my life and say, "See? There's love in all its flawed and beautiful fucked up glory. And there's agony, and there's defeat, and that's what hope looks like."

On Christmas Eve, I saw all my extended family, including my 16-year-old cousin who had been in a terrible car accident in July that killed his good friend, put John in a coma for a couple of months, and that now leaves him so physically, and it seems, mentally changed, that his life will never ever be the same. And though everyone had warned me what he would be like, and he was exactly how I'd imagined, I wasn't really prepared for my conflicting emotions when I finally did see him, of being so simultaneously struck by the power and strength of human life as well as its utter fragility.

I didn't cry when I saw him at how different he was or even in gratitude that he's still alive, and I didn't cry when he showed me his dead friend's name on a bracelet that he wears around his wrist, or when he pointed to our other cousin's wedding album at a picture of himself taken before the accident and I struggled to hear him ask in garbled words and injured speech, "Do I look different now?" And I didn't cry when his mother patiently wrapped a towel around his chest as he ate, or when his father--my mother's brother--helped him in the bathroom and I briefly caught his eye on the way and saw not a hint of self-pity or frustration or anger or sadness.

It wasn't until later, back at my grandmother's apartment, when she mentioned the grandmother of John's dead friend and wanting to write her a letter, that I cried.

"He was her only grandson, too," she said to me. "I remember how I felt when we thought John wouldn't make it. I know it's not the same thing, but I think I can imagine how she might feel. I've tried to write her a letter several times, but I just can't. Maybe eventually."

I wonder if NYMan will be surprised to read this post-vacation entry, to see that it's not about how we spent New Year's Eve, or about waking up next to each other eight mornings in a row, or falling asleep next to him on the couch watching late-night tv, or seeing Letterman live after we scored tickets, or our first fight which wasn't even really a fight but more of an hour of silence because we both were so annoyed with each other after 5 days straight together, or walking across the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time, or meeting more of his friends and finding room in his life for me and imagining myself living there and how our relationship will grow and change and wondering if it will just get better or what.

But I'm not writing about all that. I'm writing about conflicting emotions, about the duality of strength and fragility in the human spirit, about at once feeling grateful and hopeful and excited and scared and nostalgic and anxious. Because as much as I love New York and everything that is there for me and all the potential and possibility for the life I might have, when I land in Chicago afterwards, by myself, where my friends live, where my lake is, where my cats are, in the midwest where I'm so deeply rooted, I feel home again.

"It's better this way," NYMan says at Port Authority in Manhattan where I catch the bus that takes me to the airport where I board the plan that brings me home and away from him, "Because we can't take each other for granted."

"I guess we should feel lucky," I say as I hug him good-bye. "Right?"

And maybe that's just what life is: the negotiating of gains and losses, of finding joy and happiness in reinvention while letting go of old ideas about how you imagined your future to be, of accepting your present situation in all its flawed and beautiful fucked up glory and saying: This? This is love.