Status Updates From Old Flame

You miss it. The feeling of not knowing whether something will happen. That time when the question is more important than the answer.

If I were to see those pictures now, I know I would feel nostalgic. Not because I was happier then, but because Wes had captured, with those photos, something essential about the way I was back then: in all of the photos I looked slightly different; I was still malleable, changeable, and open to that change; I hadn’t solidified yet, and there was freedom there; I could be anyone I wanted to be, in any moment.

I knew what it felt like to be alone in the world, yes, but my response to that aloneness was to surround myself—with friends, lovers, anyone who would fill up the emptiness. I already knew Wes and I were deeply different in this way: my defense mechanism was togetherness, his was separation.

I noted how easy it was for Wes to give compliments, remembering how he’d praised the writing of Zoe’s friend at the park. It took a certain kind of confidence to be so free with flattery, and also a touching kind of devotion

I didn’t actually like the feeling of smoking itself, it was the choosing to smoke that I liked, the tiny act of rebellion that felt like freedom, or at least a gesture toward it.

We were asked to follow so many rules, to be so many things. To
follow our conscience but follow our heart, even when they conflicted with each other. To be desirable while disregarding our own desire. Sometimes, just sometimes, we wanted to not have to choose how to be. We wanted to be told to feel a certain way, to be hypnotized into feeling held.

He was handsome but not conventionally so, and this made me hopeful.
Conventionally handsome men always understood that they were handsome; they had known since they were small, which made them choosy and out of reach, too aware of their power. The way I saw it then was that Wes had not capitalized on his handsomeness, at least not yet.

“Knew what?”
“That you were probably a writer. The way you’re clocking everything,
storing it away somewhere. Like you’re going to use it later.”

This is all to say that when I met Wes in the summer of 2013, when I was twenty-nine, the idea of the future felt open and charged and promising, and the concept of real adulthood still felt far off, and neither Wes nor I had been significantly beaten down or rejected by the world yet.

The feeling was one of swollen possibility, as if the condensation in the air was not the gathering humidity but the collective mist of youthful perspective: we were all going to become something, but we didn’t quite know what or when, and until then we were content to sit in small or large groups on small or large blankets on the patchy grass drinking wine in the daytime and talking about art, books,free concerts...

I didnt know them yetso I could ascribe to them many qualities and narratives that might or might not be true.Because of this room for speculation and interpretation,the space between meeting someone and knowing them is intensely charged,erotic almost by definition,because its within that space that the person might fit perfectly into my lifefill all my emotional craters be exactly what I’ve beenlooking for all along

Work friends were specific: you only went so far with each other, never pressing past a certain outer skin, and there was comfort in this. By this point we’d known each other for three years, but she still felt one step removed from my heart and soul, which I liked. We were bonded by the DNA of our communal effort, the blood of our email chains. But we weren’t beholden to each other like real friends were...

Was I being the woman I had meant to be? The woman I had imagined becoming as a girl? Was this what having it all felt like? And if so, why could the phrase “clouds and letters” from a poem in an email make me question everything, make me crave some alternate version of myself...

But then it contradicted itself,
promising with its padded cubicle walls and cozy chat rooms and plush health insurance that it would hold your very mortality at bay. This promise made you want to stay. It made you feel needy and needed. Two years passed, and then three, and now it was October again. I was still here...

This was capitalism at work: the deep sensation that you were going to
start falling behind. Poverty was waiting for you, and then death. An office like this one—its organized plots, its waxy smell and coffin chairs—brought you very close to death; you could feel it lurking.