Audacity

In the end, I hope there’s no kicking or screaming. Hope it finds me the way I came into this life: a low humming on the precipice of the arena, the pictures of my life flashing intermittently, lodging themselves deeply in my psyche to be lived some other time. Familiar in a dozen tattered, gleaming ways. I hope there’s some other time. Some other life beyond this one. Somewhere to begin again. Hope it’s not exactly how I remember it but close enough. Not exactly how I imagined it would be but better. I will find pockets of fleeting euphoria in some distant and unannounced future. There will be no knock. It could be years and it could be tomorrow. In some ways, it could be both. I hope to have audacity then. More than I do today. Hope it’s not too late even when it feels like it might be. Even when it definitely is.

In between memories, I spend a long weekend in a different city sight-seeing along several paths, my eyes gluing and peeling themselves from thing to shining thing. I am moving slower than I ever have and it’s got me sitting inside of things longer. It’s not that I require the slowness. It’s that I haven’t spent any time tracking down my attention and bringing it back to where I am in each moment. The slowness requires me and I am finally starting to notice the way it makes way for every beautiful thing. Ain’t that just a life.

The night is bleeding on, dripping down my arms, and I am squeezing every last moment of joy with my white-knuckled fists. I am holding every transient moment as if its embrace freezes time. I’m making faces when we exchange glances long enough to see each other in the good light. I want to be remembered as a stranger to strangers, one that they think about in small moments, saying to the person next to them that night, “do you remember when that guy with the brown backwards hat was grinning from ear to ear about something they saw along the Manhattan horizon?” It’s not natural for me to want to be seen but never noticed for long enough. My eyes don’t find others for any prolonged moment these days. I’m not being easy with myself. Hoping everyone else meets me where I’m at instead of the other way around. I’m not being easy with others either, I realize, and in every moment of misunderstanding, I see myself out the door I came through to meet them. I’m flinging myself towards some unknown, godforsaken moment, not because I want to be there but because I feel like I have to. Because it’s what this series of gods has written for my life, this iteration of gestures.

I hope we remember each other–all of us–as time presses on. I hope we find the courage to sit with ourselves as we figure, time traveling to the last few days and thinking about the next time we’ll be in a moment like this with each other. In laughter and in kind. In warmth and sun-kissed. I’m counting. Days and hairs and times I notice myself going to a familiar, dark place. All the moments I’ve noticed you watching me and tried to turn the light in a specific direction to be seen as a projection of myself, whatever good thing I can muster. As if the unfiltered version isn’t good enough. The moments stack jaggedly on top of one another, stretching and sprawling. Soon enough, this room I’m in is a cacophony of all the times joy leapt from my skin and tomorrow becomes new. Even as I wake, that same low hum finds its way into the day and I am transported everywhere.

Counting down the time in between times. The end of times. The beginnings. The worst of times. The hopeful. As I get older, I’m holding onto every precious thing as I inventory harm done to the world. Neatly-placed on purpose. The ways I’ve perpetuated systems, cutting someone else from flourishing because of selfishness. Changing a mind isn’t as easy as the movies show. It’s messier. I’m messier. I overthink and underperform in between really good, honest moments of change. It can’t just be the straight and narrow line between good and bad. Along the way, I can’t help but marvel at the excavations. How did that get there? Who put this in a heart? Why did I lock away that which needs to be sun-dried in the middle of June?

We joke about a dozen cereals, rattling off alternate names for each. Someone says Lucky Harms and I think about capitalism. How it considers someone lucky to have bootstraps at all. I think of my father and how his death curled me into a question mark. How these four years are still teaching me how to say the things that feel honest and true to the people in my life. How I tell all my friends I love them and can’t fathom a life without them. How I don’t want to. How I want to be the first to die amongst them. How I will have audacity then. It’s selfish, I know, and I’m rambling about it to anyone who will listen, anyone who will ask, but it’s something I am stirred deeply about. I will not be able to function in a world where every love of my life is not also here, finding ways to seek solid ground, a place to build a fire, to find water and build a life despite the rapture.