We fall in love with music because of its predictability. Its patterns-- measure by measure and chord by chord-- wire us to expect the next thing coming, and when the subsequent note hits its resolve, our expectations are met. Our brain rewards us for a job well done as we sit through the next two and a half minutes of whatever fresh new indie artist Spotify recommends, or whatever next twenty four seconds of some caricatured, romanticized life we find on our instagram reels or tik tok 4u page.
I am sitting well into my twenties today, and every so often (which is more often than I care to admit), I find myself mindlessly scrolling through social media, lulling myself into an elsewhere I don’t know. The thing is, when I do give myself time to think, I find myself falling into a reverie-- or maybe it’s down a canyon or gulley or valley (I alway did have a hard time telling them apart anyway), and instead of facing the sun, I find its shadows at my heels. Evening presses relentlessly in, and I’m running, close to falling, trying not to stumble over the exposed roots and was that a snake? I am only 50% sure I am on the right trail, but down is down, and sooner or later we’ll make it out alive, right?
Gone are four year plans and scheduled life markers. No more gold stars and diplomas to validate my progress, and it must be that I am holding the map upside down or something, because I can’t possibly be this bad at route finding. I’ve lost the melody, the path, and the mixed metaphor I’ve been building for the past 300-odd words.
At yet, here I am, staring at my laptop screen in the fourth city I’ve lived in this year, wondering if I am even slightly in the right direction or if I have made the right decisions, if I am going anywhere, or if I have gone somewhere and will have to backtrack when I finally realize I’m off the path. Or, worse yet, what if I have really messed everything good up, and I’ll have to rely on “fortitude” and “grit” and whatever psychologically motivated platitudes anyone cares to give? I’m scared to look behind, because what if I do and I realize it’s all rubble? And I’m scared to look up, because who knows how high these mountains climb, how many false summits there will be.
I am at treeline, and I can’t breathe.
(Wait for me.)
I am a grating, a clanging, a banging, made of indistinguishable, unpredictable noises.
(Listen to me.)
I am floating in the ocean, consumed in the belly of a whale, completely surrounded.
(Come and sit with me.)
I am wildflowers sprouting from cracks in the asphalt.
(Grow with me.)
I am holding questions tightly to my chest, and if the furrow between my brows means anything, it’s that there are more questions than answers.
(Stay, and learn with me.)
People talk about resiliency and moving forward as if we have a choice to be and do anything but. If I felt like I had an option other than to be a shark, constantly moving forward as I try to navigate the quagmire of the last few years— the maze of what even this past year has been— then maybe I would take it. But instead I feel like I am scaling this mountain scape not with leaps and bounds but with knee scrapes and bruises, hustling my way up, dust covering up my shoes like a layer of paint barely hiding the graffiti underneath, and my muscles crying out with their voices sour with lactic acid.
I am burning daylight and tearing muscles, and I have to remind myself that I do not have to measure my life by anything. Not sunsets nor sunrises. Not good days nor bad, and especially not by any sort of productivity, or the number of things I have accomplished by the time I turn 25. I do not have to measure out my life as if tablespoon by tablespoon I will somehow run out. No, I can be happy when I am happy, and sad when I am sad, because it is simply enough that I exist.
Sit, watch the days go by with me.
Comments