2000-12-23 :: 06:06:51
goodbyes taken by and from me, first loves and light waves, eight footnotes
Soundtrack: The Smashing Pumpkins, "Adore"; Fountains of Wayne, "Fountains of Wayne"; Jurassic 5, "Quality Control"
Boy, this is my heartache album. I haven't listened to this in a long time, and it's not like I've really suffered a major heartache, more like the minor twinge of separation anxiety. Separation from school, from my school friends. So I'm back home; I've been home since... Sunday, the 17th. The road trip with Jenny was fun, if not a little crazy (mostly due to lack of sleep on my part, to the tune of four hours in a two day period). Between a 5x10 chunk of climate controlled public storage (the place looks like an X-Files shoot waiting to happen) and Jenny's Celica, I managed to pack my entire dorm (the lack of sleep follows intuitively). We ended up taking naps after moving the stuff that was going to storage and leaving at 4AM -- the upside being we made incredible time since there was no traffic anywhere. Straight down 95, slicing New York, no using the Tappan Zee. The sunrise wasn't much to look at, unfortunately.
I'm off topic. Here comes "Perfect," right in time.
I just got back from seeing Cast Away (I am so sick of my inconsistent choice in film/album/book designation -- underline, quote, italics, what am I doing! Argh!), and it was far better than I ever expected from the previews. I really enjoyed it. I remember my favorite shot coming at the beginning, when a package pops into the truck in the United States and then blips out a moment later in Russia. It crossed my mind as I mailed my study abroad application that Fedex and UPS are about as close as we've got to teleportation devices: I put an envelope in at the Shipsite in Providence, it reappears three days later in Melbourne, for crying out loud. So it was neat to see someone else with the same kind of giddy thoughts. The end got me thinking about something that seems to have been popping up in my head lately: the problems with goodbye.
There's a girl at school that I've cut out of my life. A malignant tumor. And at first when we encountered each other again this year (she'd been abroad last semester), my heart would race, but I'd force myself to ignore. Furtive glances over computer monitors and awkward run-ins at the cluster printer, I gave no acknowledgement, no matter how much I could feel my adrenal glands' hyperactive effects. But then later on she'd sit down behind me at the library cafe or at the computer next to me -- with others available -- and I wouldn't really pay much mind at all. Sure, it would register -- she's there -- a blip, and then it would fade out, or be snuffed out automatically, some internal firing squad would do it in without thought. It was easy, eventually. She wrote some emails, dropped a few instant messages. Whatever.
It's kind of weird at first, the tumor, when you take it out, you think you won't make it, you're sure that you never could, surely there must be a way to keep --
No. You end up taking some of you out with it, some of the good. But some of the good had to go out to cure you, otherwise you can't remove all of the sick cells that would never change, that can only sicken others. And so those neighboring bits, seemingly fine as the knife goes in, they might already be infected and they have to go. Then you hang your head: that's so easy to say when you're the one with the scalpel, and you control the cuts, and you can take your time with the stitches, mend when you want -- if you want. Some might think it nasty, unnecessary. Cruel. But two times is too many, especially when I realized the original apology was a sham. So out it went. Goodbye -- but with no real goodbye ever given. I took my goodbye. She can resolve it for herself however she wants.
But Cast Away made me remember another goodbye, my worst goodbye, the longest, the one where I had my goodbye taken from me. Heather.1 When Chuck reappears on Kelly's doorstep (and I think it not a big secret to reveal that), it's almost like a goodbye and a hello at the same time. But the scene was so familiar; I could see myself back in August 1997, finally walking outside Heather's house, the night having gone longer than we ever expected, the moment upon us. My car parked in her driveway, waiting to take me, sitting in the driveway where we'd had out first kiss.2 Where we had our last kiss, our best kiss. Awkward last words, tears poking forth but denied, we shut the doors on them and sent them home. Last embraces, a peck on her nose (which she disclaimed as "squishy" but I certainly didn't think so), and then --
Heather was so much prettier than Helen Hunt (though I realize that isn't saying much), but the whole waving from the garage thing... I remember her silhouette behind the slowly descending door, a weakly waved reply, trying to get out of the driveway but choking up, I couldn't move, I had to move, I had to get out, I got out somehow, I parked a street down and let go, read the note on the wallet-size senior photo she'd given me.3 The only picture of her I have, skin so pale and porcelain, eyes huge and deep-end blue, lips pursed, gazing off to the upper right (that is, her left), no smile, ethereal.4 Chuck had this habit of looking at the single picture he had of Kelly, a tiny one in an heirloom watch she'd given him just before his plane took off. The similar behavior on my part follows, embarrassing as it seems now.5 Every night. It was a long time before I finally took her out of my wallet and, rather than ritualistically placing her on the bedside table, put her in a bag in my closet. You know the bag. Or the box. That one, with the ticket stubs and the stupid scraps and the little scribbled note she found time to send, what with college and all of that.
We made the fatal mistake of saying "we'd see what would happen," which made for dramatic email tensions, platonic but awkward figs6 spent over her breaks, the whole litany. Of course I wanted to try to keep things up, and she wanted to see what would pan out at college and not totally blow me off, leave me as a safety, keep it as a definite maybe. Or at least, that's how it seemed to me whenever we discussed it and she fidgeted endlessly with her bracelet, eyes focused on the cushion between us on the couch. A strange and rocky year later, it was my turn to go off, and I decided to say what I'd been thinking but holding back; she hung up, furious -- the reaction that I told her I feared and yet expected -- and I floated downstairs, talking to Yuki until I couldn't talk anymore.
And then Heather and I didn't talk again for eleven months; somehow she found the website I'd been working on and did a voluntary electronic survey about it (anonymously, but it was obviously sent from her school), then a week later she popped up on AIM and messaged me. It was not a little surprising to say the least, "weird" by her own acknowledgement. And it's been... a year and five months since that. By her choice, so she took one more goodbye from me.7
In the rule breaking spirit, which I think I've been in recently, I just noted (yet again) how albums come back with new bits that suddenly poke you in the eyes when you give them some time off: "Hello, goodbye, you know you made us cry."
[ And here it is that I break the story up to announce that if you, like I, just fell asleep for several hours and had nightmares that involved Tom Hanks being a Scientologist -- which, as far as I know, he is not, I think that was the product of a brief moment during Charlie Rose when I realized that both Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise seem to be the most reliable Hollywood juggernauts there are, and wondered if the name Tom carried some kind of weight, and why more kids aren't named Thomas these days -- if you had this happen, or even if all of that just put you right out, you are not alone.
I want to continue the story, here, now, but I think sleep is going to win. So I'll be back in a few to polish this off.
Sleep @ 5:50AM ]
[ Begun again @ 1:15PM ]
[ Paused to bake brownies @ 1:50PM ]
[ Back @ 2:20PM ]
What was the point of all those adolescent recollections. I'm reading The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, about Paul Erd�s, a crazy, super-specialized genius of a mathematician -- so focused on math he couldn't even take care of himself; he would forget to turn off the faucet and lived out of a suitcase, literally. Erd�s is a wonderful example of a man who chased beauty where he saw it, and he saw it in numbers. He also crossed paths with Einstein, and there was a great quote from Ernst Straus, on Erd�s' seventieth birthday, on page 126:
"Einstein often told me that the reason he chose physics over mathematics was that mathematics is so full of beautiful and attractive equations that one might easily waste one's powers in pursuing them without finding the central questions. In physics he had the 'nose' for the central questions and he felt that it was the chief duty of the scientist to pursue those questions and not let himself be seduced by any problem--no matter how difficult or attractive it might be. Erd�s has consistently and successfully violated every one of Einstein's principles. He has succumbed to the seduction of every beautiful problem he has encountered--and a great number have succumbed to him. This just proves to me that in the search for truth there is room for Don Juans like Erd�s and Sir Galahads like Einstein."
[ Unfortunately paused @ 3:20PM to shower and go to a holiday party ]
[ Back @ 12:55AM, 12/24/00, after falling asleep at 9PM upon returning home ]
Not bad. Einstein, of course, proved that light acts like a series of discrete particles, a paradoxical fact that I learned in cosmology freshman year, but was equally alarmed to be reminded of again in light of the problems in our own sensory physiology that lead to questions of how much gets filled in when everything is digital, yet feels analog.8 Something in me popped when I read about light again, somehow tying these light particles -- shooting out in discrete chunks to be measured in discrete ways -- with relationships, people you see that blip in and out of life, with all of this gap space being filled in, however infinitely short (a quick glance down at your morning paper's headlines) or long (above story -- or longer). I imagine people appearing like they're television broadcasts, atoms ready to be torn asunder by quantum mechanical failure, fizzling out in static bursts, reappearing halfway across the room, the globe, the universe, another time. We're enjoying a glass of wine over dinner, you're in another supercluster four hundred years ago. Sure. Why not.
Perhaps that's a poor justification for cruising back into high school to talk about first love, summery brief perfect endless giving, and all the after-sadness. It's so odd, a faded t-shirt in the bottom of my dresser I'll never be able to throw out, can't help but try on now and then. The last time I did was after reading High Fidelity. I almost wanted to call Heather, or show up on her doorstep (I can still picture the drive from my house to hers, the first drive I ever made on my own after getting my license), and give her a quiz about the whole thing, where I got it right, where I filled in the gaps wrong, vice versa. A little post-operative debriefing. Except I don't have five serious ex's and everything in the story ended pretty badly after Rob tried that idea out. Besides, when I see how people feel at my age in these situations, this feels like a TV movie, and Jennifer Love Hewitt is saying Heather's lines wrong, could never write poetry like her, she doesn't even look a thing like her, and who would play me, for godsakes. Kirk Cameron, haha, that's who. All older and out of place, and not looking a thing like me.
It's a day late, but I'm always late, so happy first birthday, Diary. I never thought we'd make it this far. On an occasion such as this I don't feel so bad addressing you directly.
1: Not Heather.
2: Right after I handed over Fountains of Wayne's self-titled album for her to borrow. Taste the High Fidelity moment.
3: And as my blurred eyes read and reread, I felt the deep irony of my remarks that night decrying the societal stereotypes of boys and crying, all stemming from some precient discussion of The Cure.
4: The picture on the frontpage of Annie's site at the moment is maybe 75% representative of the picture I'm talking about. If that means anything to you.
5: Though I don't know how fair that is. It always feels misguided to me to look back at myself and condemn: "Bad self at 17!" Because at the time I'm sure it was very real. I know it was, I have the bad poetry to prove it.
But really, there is beauty at each step; I was 17, for all I could know of love, I knew it then. I wish there was an easier way to capture that blind innocence in words. From where I am now, I just remember a remark someone (I think it was Peter, who delighted in being an uber-intelligent bisexual asshole that took pride in all of those qualities, especially the last) online made to me.
"Your first love?" he asked. "Yeah, I think so," I replied. "Enjoy it while you can," he said, "you'll never give yourself away like that again." I laughed it off then, chalking it up to the words of a bitter man, but he was right. And I don't know if that makes me bitter, or just older, or if it's such an easy distinction.
6: Friendship gigs. As opposed to, say, dates. Ho ho!
7: I feel it necessary to note that I was probably rather terse in my electronic reception to her greetings, but I sent a short email (two or three sentences) a little while later acknowledging that and asking if there was anything else, to no reply.
8: Further disturbing is the relativity of time and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Physics is a good way to get frightened about reality. I suppose that is what's strangest about the net, really, when we have so many interstices we're trying to pave over to begin with and we add one more layer of gauze to it for good measure. But that's covered ground. I was just reminded of Mike saying "consciousness is discretized," and the endless frustration that comes with our phony sense of it all being perfectly continuous -- and I mean that in both the reality-wise and the people-wise ways -- the very lie that lets us deal with it all.
last five [im]personal journal entries: