Now there’s a cruelty easily available in mocking your younger self. Howanever, I don’t want to fall to that here. I want to have generosity of spirit. I want to let him be as he was, honour him in all his innocence and, I’m going to say purity.
-Niall Williams, This is Happiness
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Looking out at the morning stillness of Turtle Lake neatly folded into the cornfields of southern Wisconsin, an interruption of birds periodically demanded our attention. They playfully ripped through the October skies, cracking through its hopeful blue – a hue that felt fitting for the unseasonably warm weather. If they had any concerns about time, how to stretch it or freeze its picturesque peace, we had no way to tell. All we could do was witness their existence.
Grace would call out their breeds. A woodpecker, blue jay. I even can recall a couple red-winged blackbirds — the same ones me and Cody swooned over in our city’s bird sanctuary in early summer. As we settled into the morning, I took note of the months between that moment with Cody and this one. The way my skin had tanned, hair had grown. How when I wound the ends of my hair around my index finger, split ends erupted with each cyclical revolution. These physical parts of me were of the same body from months ago, and yet, I had changed.
I grounded myself in the warmth of the adirondack chair at the lake’s edge. Preheated by the morning sun, I pressed the backs of my legs into its wood and began rereading an old favorite, Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson. As I reacquainted myself with the characters, my old friends, I found myself silently crying. Being moved to tears while lost in a book is a reliable depiction of how I exist in the world. Sometimes, I can’t help but unravel. The gentle melody of Nelson’s poetic prose had caught me plenty of times before. I was no stranger to needing to take breaks while reading his books – putting them down to make room for a quiet sob that demanded to be heard.
Nelson had mastered the art of unraveling. With ease, he’d layer vignettes that captured the full spectrum of what it means to be human. Joy upon joy met with ache upon ache. Within these vignettes, his characters would dare for both space and intimacy in a world that fought to keep them small. And just as I would grow familiar with one view of the story, he’d pull the bottom layer out from the pile. Everything I had once known to be true would come tumbling down. But Nelson did not leave his readers in rubble. He’d let us take a moment to catch our breath, to sit, and then, finally, stand. It is here Nelson would ever so delicately turn the narrative on its head. He’d lead us to the same place, but this time, as a changed person capable of viewing these vignettes from a new vantage point.
On that October day, I put down my book when I felt my vision of a pristine Turtle Lake blur. I knew this went beyond being moved by words. My overflow of emotion was triggered by the realization that I had read this book a year ago. I could feel something within me trying to make sense of what I was experiencing in real time. Just to be sure I wasn’t assigning false meaning to a gut feeling, I looked at my phone’s calendar to cross check the dates. Opening up my photo album to see where and when I was on this day, investigating my past self’s existence. Rushing into me I confirmed this certain, divine feeling — yes, on this exact date a year ago I had read this book. Time was, in fact, a spiral. The synchronicity felt much larger than me.
A year ago, I was in the afterlife of someone. He and I had a late summer romance that caught fire quickly and burnt out before I even understood what was happening. A chance meeting, an easy camaraderie, a thoughtful learning of each other, and, of course, life and circumstance halting a bud from full bloom.
At the lake, I began thinking about the person I was, the people I loved, the desires I had. With a deep, grounding breath, I picked the book back up. This time, I began intentionally flipping through the pages to read my past self’s thoughts and interjections sprawled in the margins. Again, I was trying to find a trail of clues that would help me understand why I had arrived at this moment.
Early in the novel, the protagonist recalls a memory of a Ghanaian dish – a spinach stew. He speaks of its allium aromatics surging through his childhood home, the memory of his sweet mother that it conjures. On the edge of the page, I had written “tell him about this one day”. No punctuation, no need to define “him” with a name. My past self knew I would remember exactly who I wanted to share this with. There was no need for formalities. It’s as if I knew he’d be someone I’d come back to time and time again.
The feeling I experienced when coming across a note to myself to reach out to this man about a chapter in a book was familiar. I remembered this past self. Historically, I have a habit of communicating indirectly through words. I had once mailed another former lover, T, a signed book from an author he loved. Though that book collected dust on his windowsill, I still spent months writing poems about him. I even invited him to a poetry reading where I read those poems out loud. I always found a way to perform for him. So it didn’t necessarily surprise me that I would make a note to let this other former lover, E, know I have begun seeing him in my world. My way of trying to nudge the fact that I am making space for him. I am almost certain I texted the former lover about this chapter instantly. I likely sat on the text for all of five minutes before I decided there was very little to lose and much more to gain from this human leaning towards connection.
There had been a time where a past version of myself had hoped he’d cook that dish for me. While letting the stew simmer, he’d tell me more about his mother. More about the silver chain she had gifted him intertwined with the one he picked out for himself. I’d wonder if he took them off to shower. He hadn’t with me. But maybe in his usual routine in his own company, he would unclasp both chains and lay them on the top of his dresser neatly. He knew the hard water and soap would be full of silver-tarnishing sulfur. He seemed like that kind of person, the kind who would take care of what he loved. As these old feelings and even desires came back to me, I was unexpectedly meeting my past self, someone I had grown unfamiliar with in the past year.
I shut the book, curled my legs underneath my current self in the adirondack chair, and watched as the lake woke from stillness and my heart experienced a tiny death. I no longer recognized that version of myself anymore.
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The passage of time has the ability to knock the wind out of me. It never announces its arrival despite rearing its head straight at me. In the past year, I collected an accumulation of moments where my heart was untended. I am just now beginning to allow myself to feel the grief and sift through the ways it has changed me. Friendships ending, abruptly and unceremoniously. Romances halting just as I stocked my fridge with a lover’s favorite dairy-free milk. It has felt as if the moment I warmed up to the idea of someone’s life intertwined with mine, platonically or romantically, they decided the time between us wasn’t worth investing into anymore. This peculiar sliver of heartbreak renders me immobile at times.
In my year of departures, I had to come to terms with many painful truths. One that has been especially difficult to come to terms with is that there will be a version of me that is not known by someone who once wanted to be a part of my future, even if that was just the following weekend for coffee. I mourn the lost hue, its brilliance gone unrealized, created by overlapping shades of our lives. Our colors stand distinctly apart by choice. And in fact, those colors that exist alone have changed altogether. I have changed.
In the past year, I have settled into a comfortable space of not wanting to share myself. In falling into a bitter disbelief that someone would want to get to know me. Moreso, that someone would want to get to know me long enough for some kind of commitment to form. It is a hardened part of me that a younger version didn’t know. Of course, that breaks my heart even more. As time has progressed, I have equated growing comfortable with my own company to not needing the company of romance. Or, at my most lonely moments, not believing that it is meant for me.
I have experienced enough heartbreak to know that healing is not linear, but what I am more attuned to as of late is that time is a spiral. Our lives repeat cycles as we are met with the same moments over and over. I don’t necessarily even see it as we are met with the same moments until we learn a lesson. I don’t think that there is a finite lesson to learn. What feels true to me is that we come back to the same moments, the same wounds from a changed consciousness. With that, we are able to meet these old friends with new understanding and skills borne from a life further lived.
Shame is a feeling that plagues me. I am not special for this, I know. But it doesn’t change the fact that it distorts my image of myself. At Turtle Lake, I don’t tell Grace about how I am thinking about a past lover as I read the book. I watch her preoccupied on her morning pages and don’t dare interrupt her peace to talk about someone I dated a year ago. Rather, I turn inward and away from my best friend who didn’t know the person I was when I was once opened to romantic love. She knows a version of me that is put together and emotionally disciplined. She knows a version of me that appears to have her shit together. I feel this arbitrary need to uphold this one specific version of me – she can’t see me spiraling.
But as time inevitably unfolds in a spiral, we have the opportunity to unfold with it rather than trying to close a loop. In this unfolding, I learn to acknowledge things that once felt too overwhelming for me to approach. For instance, one painful truth is that my past lovers do not know me because our lives have grown. I have moved in one plane, they have forged in another. It is inevitable for us to become strangers. As difficult as that has been to contend with, I must. With clarity, I know that there is no reason to speak, no foreseeable road towards friendship. I feel absolute about not wanting to be with them. But still, from time to time, my mind circles around the thought of them, the thought of a former us. It is here I unravel.
But the freeing truth is my past lovers do not know me. There’s no need to be known, to be understood. For me and for them, our existences may orbit similar spaces, but, ultimately, we are strangers. There are months and years between us that we have both decided to detach from. And that is something I am learning to be okay with. Learning that I won’t always be understood and my point of view is not one of merit for everyone. It is here I choose to unravel out of rules that simply don’t fit how I wish to move through the world – with undefined spaciousness while leaning in towards intimacy.
There’s something to be said for the unraveling. It is where you have warmed up to someone just enough to find ways to loosen up your life, to undo the top button and breathe a little. The rigidities that have kept you safe, or whatever form of safety you’ve convinced yourself you’ve been operating in, begin to weaken at their knees. If I can find that with another person, I certainly can practice the unraveling with myself. I can honor that time is, in fact, a spiral. I will continue coming back to moments in my past, but every time I do, I must meet it with the trust that this version of myself is wise enough to learn from it again and again.
With clarity, I know I no longer want to be with this man. It’s been a very long time since I have. And I also accept I will come back to memories of him from time to time. But each time my mind leans towards the kindness we intimately shared with each other, my life will have grown around it a bit more than the last time. It doesn’t hurt the way it once did. There is less shame when I find myself unraveling to thoughts of my head in his lap and watching a movie. I no longer scold myself for thinking about someone who has had an entire life before and after me. I witness the moment take form out of thin air in front of me. Watch the vapors of the thoughts that have grown their own legs eventually disperse and take a less recognizable shape until they have passed completely.
I will always arrive at this truth: I want to be known. No matter how much my life grows, I will return to this fact over and over and over and over. I want to be understood and seen and held and adored. This part of me exists in every version I know and all yet to come.
It is not January, and I am back at the bird sanctuary in my city – this time alone. The sun is high, providing some respite from Chicago’s winter. It’s 40 degrees. It’s been almost a year since I last spoke to him, a year and a half since we last saw each other. I watch a cardinal break the surface tension of a pristine puddle by bathing in the 40-degree false spring. I’m entranced and make a mental note to tell Grace about this. To send a photo to Cody.
so so good!!