one year later

It’s been a year. We hold tight unto coffee mugs in our rooms, thinking of drinking the same bitter taste in coffee shops that felt like home while we laughed with songs from the day in our head. The songs still ring in my ears tonight and I remember all the words. It seems like yesterday, you say, but it’s hard to look at old photos and think of it as anything but a distant dream. I think of our conversations then late at night – tucked now back into our past like the flowers we tucked into our hair. I don’t think we would’ve been so fast to tuck them away if we knew what was to come. But then again, I don’t know. We’d lie, now with a year past, if we said everything turned out the way we expected or that it was greater than we dreamed. Such a true statement was said when Scarlett said in Gone With The Wind, “Nothing has turned out as we expected” and Ashley replied “It never does.” It never ever does. However, it has been something. A something we didn’t expect – blurred with disappointments, goodbyes, jealously, illness, and unwanted answers – but it’s been a beautiful something despite all of that. Isn’t that life? A beautiful something despite the trials? Despite we’ve what we’ve been through, what we are bound to, and what people in our world go through, I still believe in a good and right and lovely and worthy world. As we sip this coffee, wishing we had year old coffee instead – we know what a precious world it is and how privileged we are have our memories of one trip a year ago and every day since. In these dimmed lights, we remember faces and conversations and the city that stole us. It still has us, and even in our dreams we see it still. Those city lights illuminate us tonight as they did three hundred and sixty-four days ago.

on the sea

I am fascinated by the sea. Every year, when I return with the people in my family (this year with around 20 of them) to it, I am reminded by this. While, sadly, many seem to blur the reason the beach is called relaxing in the first place with primarily tourism purposes, it is not hard to peel back the thin layer and understand. There is so much to take in that is beautiful, not meaningless trying to be some type of beautiful. There is early morning bike rides and afternoon bike rides on hidden paths, there is the splashing salt water on your skin, there is glistening lights on the docks at night, there is reading an old Gone With The Wind copy on the porch at night time. There is so much. Yet, above all there is the sea. The sea, that bursts and waves and splashes and beats and goes on and on. Nothing in nature is quite like it and its vastness. The sea reminds me of life, and of us, and the way that we go. As long as I have lived, I’ve written about the ocean and the way it puts me under its spell and I am afraid I shall never stop. But then again, neither shall the waters. Neither shall time.

so we beat on

It’s spring now. The tulip tree is blooming in our yard the same way it always does. It blooms first but loses it blossoms first as well. It symbolizes the beginning of everything new. It also, I suppose, shows how fast that all goes away. That’s the thing about beginnings, they always have endings. But endings always have beginnings as well, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

The other night I finished The Great Gatsby again and it reminded me of the first time I read it last summer at the beach when I never wanted summer to end. Last time I was on a balcony in the darkness with the sea crashing in the distance; this time I was in the fading sunset by a playground while I read. It was the same playground I went to when I was in first grade. When I sat staring at the empty place, remembering a young me swinging there nine years before for the first, it made me sentimental. The book reminded me of an ending, the playground reminded me of a once-beginning. My personal favorite quote from Gatsby is the simple “So we beat on” from the last paragraph. It sums it all up: The American Dream, life, time. It just keeps on going and we keep on searching. We keep on beating, with the waves of time that will never cease to beat in and out on the shore of this life. There are beginnings and endings and that’s just the way it is. All I seem to write about is beginnings and endings, but that’s the way it is.

It’s beginning now and that’s the way it is.

when the lagoon freezes over

I got home from New York City last night around midnight. I can’t imagine that only 24 hours ago I was sitting in the NYC airport finishing up The Catcher In The Rye and thinking of how much I loved the depressed Holden Caulfield, while wrestling with not wanting to go home but facing the inevitable of doing so.

Here’s the thing about going and leaving: it’s uncertain. Some experiences leave you with this zeal for leaving you never ever want to forget. New York left me with a so said zeal. That’s why I dreaded going home. I dreaded the uncertainty of such a zeal leaving. It makes me think of Holden Caulfield, dreading growing up. Why? Because it’s uncertain. As he asks the Taxi driver about where the ducks go in the winter, he’s actually asking about himself, “By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance?” Where does he go? And in the same way, as I leave one place journeying to the next I ask myself:  Where do we go from here? Where do I go?

I don’t know where I go from here. But I do know that less than twenty hours I finally arrived home, tucked myself in my own bed in my own home, and it all felt good. I thought about the sun reflects off the houses at sunset around Greenwich Village and creak of the Subway rails and thought about  ‘How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard’. Here’s the other thing about going and leaving: you always come home at some point. And when you do, you realize how beautiful going home can be and you wondered why you dreaded it all along.

When the lagoon freezes, birds fly south for the winter. If they can move on every winter, I can too.