surrender
It's strange to be able to feel the passage of time. It's in the air right now. If you pay attention, it’s thick. Viscous. Moments are heavy, like swimming through warm pools of honey. Your old college roommate is leaving the country indefinitely. You didn't know until you got a text today while leaving the bar. Your other friend is proposing in December. You talk about engagement rings, and weddings.
This is a year of surrender. A year to accept departure: of the people, and places you've cared for, the things that at one point were all you had, when you thought to yourself this is it, this is your world, and this is all that will ever matter.
Liminal states like these make me think of us in tally marks. Each person is comprised of a finite series of checkboxes. Another dinner together, check. Another trip, check. The boxes begin to disappear. What we have left to share between us is thin. We glance off each other in brief moments of impact. Seconds are shed in droplets of sweat.
You started to feel the threads unraveling as C moved out to a Boston suburb, or when N got a place up in Palo Alto. Says he was depressed, but he's good now. He's applying for a PhD. You meet for dinner since he’s in town for a few days. Only free Sunday though. That's okay. Let's meet then. The food is pretty good. How have you been? Oh nice, yeah it's good you're not depressed anymore Yeah it was rough but I ran a marathon and that kind of fixed things Oh really Yeah the hardest part of the marathon was being trapped in my head for hours.
You become aware of these boxes when your life is in the interim. That's the only time you’re forced to stop and pay attention to what's happening. When you’re snagged in between, you pay attention to where people are going. Where your own time is going, or more precisely, what you’re losing it to.
Ask an old person how old they feel and they will say they feel twenty-five. They get shocked in the mirror. Who is that wrinkled face? I can already tell I'm going to be like that when I'm old. A broken record, ensnared into repetition, swept into cycles for the remainder of my life, Katamari-like boulders picking up debris and strange tendencies and convictions from all the weird things that are bumped into along the way, lovable fragments and thorns jabbed into our sides.
I'm not saddened by the inevitability of loss. Surrender comes forcibly with time: this is how I lived and who I met and given the choice again an innumerable amount of times I would do it the same and relive it all, despite the lack of novelty, the familiarity, lulls of boredom and confusion and my mistakes, and the joys and pains of life will return to me, in plain form — subway rats scurrying by my feet, streetlights shrouding the evening trees in angelic glow, and the heat, the hum of cicadas in the night, where I became myself.
felt this in my bones