I know what time it is – the plants on my balcony fade from green to beige to dead-brown.
He knows what time it is but doesn’t want anyone else to know – but they know.
She knows what time it is but doesn’t care about me anymore – her life is on track and going very well.
They know what time it is – time to continue on as ever as the light fades away.
When I was little, Fall was a tall pile of crunchy leaves in the backyard. It was the great expanse of our place in the world made bigger by the absence of foliage – more space to play. Fall was the shrugging on of colorful, warm coats pulled from the front closet with the wide swinging doors.
Look at the girl, grinning. Dream of that girl, dreaming. Back before everything became different.
What do you remember? What will she remember – little sweet running thing, tiny small jumping thing, precious baby laughing thing? What can we make, build, burn, do for her? What did you ever think you could do?
Beauty staring into beauty, fading like colors of Fall, fading like memories of childhood, staring backwards at everything, staring forwards at everything. Take more pictures – they don’t fade as fast.
I miss the smell of grass cut from your own yard, way in the back where the neighbors can only just hear the sound of the push mower, a little buzzing noise from a motor unseen. Cut the grass around the apple tree, newly flowering, around the old car, left slowly rotting.
I have been eating too many cherries this season. They are deep purple-red, sweet, tart, juicy. One tastes like soap. One tastes like the sour apples I bit into too early in the summer – tart, bitter, sour, green. Not ready yet.
No longer mine – the grass or the apple trees or the push mower, or the land that held all of it.
The grass still grows there – and is cut. The apples grow, ripen, fall, rot on the ground in the shade, or are nibbled on by deer, raccoon, fox, squirrel, rabbit.
The stream will trickle by, as it did before I arrived, and long after I am gone and gone forever.
The sun beats down brightly here, but it is empty warmth – a smile without friendliness. Much is missing. The blue sky smiles sadly at me, the clouds offer their best wishes for future summers full of smells.
Hey Infinity is 6 years old now – being just have had a birthday this month. And no, no one sent it or me birthday cake. Yes, we are offended.
This means I created this little space on the internet when I was 20. Back when I wasn’t legally allowed to drink – one year before I bought my first (and only yet) bottle of adorably pink, strawberry Boone’s Farm wine, and tiny rainbow-sprinkled cupcakes for the crazy 21st celebration I had with my friend and her cat. One year after I voted in my first Presidential election, smiling as I colored in the tiny bubble with a pencil to support Barack Obama, thinking to myself that much-younger me would have been shocked to know that my Republican parents’ opinions hadn’t stuck with me to adulthood.
When it was a new infinity and not a 6-year infinity veteran, I ordered some tiny business cards that have the website on one side and “I think you’re beautiful” on the other.The idea was, I am pretty sure, to give those away to people so they knew this place existed, or forcefully leave them on cars, or stick them in random places wherever I found myself – all of which I never did. When they arrived in the mail, I opened my package to find someone else’s cards, listing actual helpful information like a contact email. I emailed the lady, told her I had gotten her cards by mistake, and suggested the following: She would probably get my cards in the mail soon, and when she did, we would swap, and also report the error to the printer, thereby getting another order for free from them. And she agreed! It worked out well in the end. And so, yes, I have two tiny boxes of tiny business cards that I still am planning on someday giving away. Probably. Maybe in 6 more years.
I’ve been thinking about that statement a lot recently. “I think you’re beautiful.” Six years ago, I was infatuated with newness. With people. With places and all that they held. The world was magical to me. I wanted to see all of it. I wanted to tell everyone that they were a beautiful story. I wanted to write them all poems about the sky.
Right now, it is so hard to feel that way. Is it not? There seems to be so much more hatred and violence and sadness and fear and global warming. Our planet is dying, and we are dying, and our teeth are falling out.
I know it is all still there, everything I used to see. I am searching for it, still. I want to feel all of those things again, and just as deeply. It was a wonderful way to be.
There is goodness and beauty. There will be safety and logic. We will keep going, together. Please send cake next year.
It is a small thing. It is not as big as you think it is.
Imagine a wedding-type ceremony, with two people standing next to each other in front of a room full of people. Imagine them promising not to spend their lives together, but to never speak to each other again. Imagine them walking back down the aisle, all the people watching, and from that moment never interacting again.
This happens all the time, in some way. It is a small thing. It is not as big as you think it is.
There are more fish in the sea, says some mother figure in my mind. I agree with her, staring off into the darkness of my bedroom at midnight on a work night..
The years have only taught me that the people you love now will become shitty and/or get tired of you or start to hate you.
I can hear my upstairs neighbors watching Friends. The theme song gives it away. It reminds me of childhood and family and sitting on a big green lumpy couch in a tiny living room.
I am beginning to understand why people get married. After some amount of failures and sadness and shitty people, they find someone to watch Friends with at midnight on a work night. And they think, not this one, I won’t lose this one. Not this time. And they involve a ring and a room full of people and a nice cake. And if they promise in front of those people and with that cake while wearing the rings, it means something. It means they can never leave each other to watch Friends alone.
I can now name the feeling in my stomach. It was apprehension. Knowing that not much good could come from anything, that sometimes it’s too hard for people to understand each other, that they won’t listen and can’t comprehend. That they have to protect themselves and always believe they are right. That it is so easy, now, to push a button and make it all go away. To not have to face anything difficult, to not have to fight for it, so easy to be apathetic. To be angry and stubborn and foolish and stupid and young even though we are all getting older.
It is too much and it is nothing. Another person gone, another death. More time to meet more people to eventually grow sick of, or love, or both.
It is some ending that needs a mark. Some little death that needs a tombstone. To be remembered. In memoriam.
We are all young and old and stupid and foolish, and we will always keep walking away and walking toward something else.
“I don’t need you anymore,” he says, pushing another pretty face in front of him. “I have her.” I’m replaceable. He doesn’t need me.
“Söpö poika,” I say, and the ocean is beautiful on my birthday, and I am lost beside it.
Was it always about filling a silence? A role he couldn’t keep himself? Not a friendship but a voice to speak to.
It is a beautiful language. One day I will learn, one day. And I put it off and off and off, forever.
We seek to understand each other. It’s good to make this a life’s ambition as it would take more than a lifetime.
He didn’t know what he wanted. And now he wants nothing. He can hide from it if she speaks loud enough.
It has been a year and it has been three years and it has been three months. Can you miss someone who doesn’t miss you?
There is no going back after an ending. There is no life in it. There is no point to try. Let him find another face. The epilogue is not a good story. I know, I have tried to live it.
I don’t know if this is a good way to think, or simply a truthful way, or just my truth. You can’t save anyone. You can’t save yourself. All you can do is try to stay a beautiful person, and live your short life beautifully.
I am walking around the grocery store with my little basket of harvested goods. I walk past other people with their little baskets of over-processed foods. This is how people garden in the city. This is how we gather our food. And we do it in a semi-clean grocery store in semi-silence.
I love people a lot. In general and specifically. I care about people a lot. I think people are the most interesting things on the planet. I love meeting new people, no matter how shy I am, and getting to know them, and asking them weird questions, and seeing how they respond. What I’m not very good at is losing people that I love. I haven’t lost that many people in my life. And when I have, it’s been because of their death — something permanent and impossible to change, something I had no control over, something natural and sad but simple and easy to understand. It had never been a loss like, “Fuck off, I don’t give a shit.” It had never been a loss like, “I don’t care if I’m hurting you, I’m not going to change.” It had never been hurtful, it had never been heartbreaking, not in that way.
“You have dimples!” I said, laughing at him. “I do,” and he sent me a picture later to prove it.
There are so many wonderful moments from wonderful people. But memories are from the past. People change. You’ll get over it. Yadda yadda.
I won’t. I haven’t. I’m trying, but not too hard. I keep thinking about his dimples, and the person he was when he took that picture. In a way, it is death. That person is gone, at least for me. Will they come back? I don’t know. It’s not the same as death. That’s why it’s hard. There could be changes, there could be resurrections. There could not be. I’m not going to keep checking the body, though. You can if you want.
Looking back, I should have ended it all sooner. I should have taken their word for it that they didn’t love me anymore, didn’t care, could be a person who could say such things to me. I loved them too much. I love them too much. I’m not going to change that. The world doesn’t need less love. It doesn’t need more silence in the grocery store. It doesn’t need more people dropping each other as easily as I drop bags of potato chips into my basket.
It is terrible and it is ok. They are terrible and they are ok. I love them and it is terrible and I love them and it is ok. I don’t know how to be anything else, or how to do anything else, and it is terrible and it is ok. They are still the people they were but they are also the people they are now. They no longer exist but they still do. They are dead and alive. I still love them and I don’t love them anymore.
Once upon a time — wait, no. This is real life. Let’s start again.
The one that got away. What a great catch. These sentences are fishing metaphors. They also, when girls I know tell me love stories that have these as the plot lines, seem to be magical, romantic, mysterious, beautiful. What could have been. If these phrases were movies we’d see soft sunny filtered images of smiling beautiful people in fields of flowers. But no story is one sentence long. Only distorted memories begin with Once upon a time…
The one that got away is a complicated tale. Maybe “one” is actually many. Maybe this isn’t even a Rom-Com. Maybe the one is someone’s father. Maybe it’s someone’s dream.
I love people because they are so complicated. If you dig deep enough everyone has a story; everyone is still writing it as they go along, just like me. Just like you. Good stories are always complicated. Good stories are hard to tell. Good stories get sliced into tiny pieces and boiled down to What could have been so we can try to share our stories with other people. We use words and we use pictures. We have Instagram (that comes with the soft sunny filter), and we have Polaroids of our grandmothers when they were young.
Our stories will always be incomplete. Memories fade or change so that every morning we are remembering and living a slightly different life. The people we love die or fade out of our lives in different ways, and the houses and cities we grew up in get torn down or repainted, or they stay exactly the same and our memories of them change so they end up feeling different just the same.
I have a Polaroid picture of my grandmother. She is not young in the picture, but I am. We are sitting together on the steps of her back porch some sunny Spring day in the early ’90s, a bright green apple in my hand and a grin on my face. I do not remember this story. My grandmother died when I was four. But luckily there are more pictures, more sentences from the story of her life.
Loving people and their stories is dangerous, of course. It’s not romantic or mysterious, though sometimes it seems magical, and often it is beautiful, at least for some of the time. People are like our memories, in a way. They change unexpectedly, they surprise you, they make you cry. The worst thing of all is when someone abruptly leaves your life when you were still writing your life stories together — cliffhanger forever. And if you don’t fully understand that person’s story, and your own story is still uncertain, how do you tell someone else about it, even if they care to listen?
Hey Infinity 