1st
Opening the time capsule.
For the first time in a month I’ve felt okay. Not okay with what happened, not okay with the way things are looking, not okay with myself. Just the feeling for the sake of itself, because, truth be told, it’s been far too long.
About a month ago, when I was reading a lot of books on Zen, I remember considering the difference between the relatively tranquil, almost emotionally sterile world of the Zen adept compared to the roller-coaster, up-and-down horror flick the normal anxious person goes through every day, not realizing they could simply get up and walk out of the theater if they wanted it badly enough.
Well, I want it badly enough. I feel like I’ve seen this movie a hundred times before, and now I’m tripping over soda cans and popcorn containers to get out in time before they play the part I don’t want to see. Just as I shove the door open, and step into the blinding light of day, the musical score kicks up again, reminds me of what I’ve lost.
But the antidote to raging emotions offered by certain Zen teachers—cold detachment—didn’t really seem all that appealing either. Sure, it’s comfortable after you get used to it, maybe even easy. It takes the degree of the burn down a notch. But fun? That’s a different story. So I thought there must be some middle ground. Maybe you don’t have to choose between having no control over your emotions or becoming a human statue. Maybe it’s possible to sit back as an observer and experience every emotion for what it is, all the while understanding that you simply don’t have to be sad forever and you simply won’t be happy forever. So when you’re crushed, realize that it’s going to pass, and it’s a band-aid on the wound.
Simply, simply, simply. I’m realizing now that philosophy is simply untrue—maybe not untrue, per se, but impractical, almost impossible. This last month has been one long orgy of indulging in memories, what-ifs, conversations I never had, things I might have said, could have said, never did say. I stayed up too late and thought too much, with old ghosts chasing me around like I was some old Pac-Man on a fuzzy old arcade screen, except I’d run out of dots to eat, and there wasn’t a chubby eight-year-old shoving quarters into the machine to play again. This was it. Game over.
I’ve found that experiencing sadness and happiness is being those things—there’s no other way around it. If I could say that what I’m going through now is just sadness but maintained that I could step out of it anytime I wanted, then firstly, I wouldn’t be here, and secondly, it wouldn’t be real sadness. When you’re crushed it feels like the world is sitting on your chest and won’t get up. There’s no thinking, “Oh, this is only temporary, and because I realize that, my pain is lessened”—not when it actually happens to you. My emotions aren’t a TV I can turn on and off when I’m bored after school. My emotions are the TV and so am I. If I dropped a hundred-pound weight on your foot, it wouldn’t hurt any less because if I said I would take it off in ten seconds instead of twenty.
The thing is, I told people to do this. I told them to be sad, to be happy, to be frustrated, but to realize it was part of an artificial spectrum, a play of sorts. I should’ve told them to take it head-on and destroy it all. But it was so easy to convince them to take the middle way—so clear when I was looking in from outside. The light was at my back and every choice, every possible outcome, they could make laid out before me in an all-too-obvious master plan. But when it was my turn to stare at the sun and pick up the pace on a road I hadn’t even had the chance to look down yet, it was a whole different story. I couldn’t see anything; direction made about as much sense as a spinning compass.
Sometimes I miss her. I miss every inside joke, every laugh, every late-night conversation, everything we planned we would do but never did. The sensation that everything is ruined is a scary, crippling, false feeling. It wraps itself around you and keeps you in bed all day. It ties your hands behind your back, blindfolds you, and spins you around.
And sometimes, I have enough self-respect to not miss her at all.
But now that the burning sense of absence has started to quell, I’ve decided that enough is enough. I want to feel passionately about it. But I can’t anymore, and I definitely shouldn’t. It’s a trade-off of sorts. I’m left weighing one hand against the other, a makeshift scale, wondering whether or not it was all worth it. Now, then. Before, after. Heartache, lesson. I’ve stopped trying to recapture the fleeting feeling that is everything I was chasing after, everything that made life feel perfect. And the feeling’s stopped trying to recapture me.
