I couldn’t count all of the people crossing over the Schuylkill. It was apocalyptic and eerie to see so many people of the city in one place. I started getting lost, looking too far into their mannerisms and gestures. I ran into a little boy as he made a break for the other side of the street. I caught him by the shoulder and smiled and mumbled a quick sorry. I could hear his Father giving him a shallow reprimand from across the street. He had to have been no older than five or six but he had a comical face–like he was a rather small man instead of a young boy. He looked up at me and smiled an even more comical grin and dodged through the rest of the crowd to the sidewalk. He stood in front of his Father, looking up at the fireworks, mirroring his Father’s expression. His Father put both his hands on the little kid’s shoulder and I refocused my vision just in time to avoid running into a tightly dressed teenage girl. She shot me a look and I smiled nervously and kept walking. I could see tiny figures and shapes of people lounging at Boathouse Row. Even from here I could tell they were all white, dressed in nice clothing. We kept walking a past the bridge, past the corner stores and up to my apartment block. There were huge speakers blasting rap from the barber shop below. I walked in between the speakers. No one moved to let me pass and I tried to keep a straight face on as I passed but I could feel my face going wrong.
My brother spoke first, “If I lived here I would go right back up and come right back down. This is crazy.”
I tried to avoid thinking about what he had said for a few more minutes but as we climbed the stairs to my apartment and opened the broke knob, all I could think about is how I would never just go back out.
I would never go out into the crowd. That was a different lost–no, that was being lost. All caught up and vulnerable in the chaos. I was never lost and this realization burnt in my fingers and toes. I ducked into the bathroom and kicked off the ridiculous shoes I had worn that night and wiggled my toes. I could feel all of the knots and tangles undoing themselves. There were no windows in my bathroom and in between swallowing all the tangles and pressing my fingers to my eyes, I could feel myself putting this strange notion together–that somehow if there was a window in my bathroom, that everything wouldn’t be so bad.
It struck me as sort of odd and annoying. How isolated and ridiculous I had become. I had put my faith and control in the absence of a window. I could hear my brother and Mike moving around in the living room but I couldn’t bring myself to unlock the door just yet. Why not them? Why didn’t they make everything okay?
I sat on the sill of the bathtub and pressed my fingers into my eyes again, hard, until the fireworks were erupting again behind my eyelids. I opened my eyes again and stared at the dirty blue grout lines in the tiles in my bathroom. They never really got clean. I could never really clean all of the dirt out. The lines started to blur and I kept fighting the urge to blink because I knew once I lost sight of this tangible thing, this silly observation, that I would lose it.
But when I closed my eyes all that I could think about were the families I saw sitting on balconies in the apartment buildings right behind where we had set up our blankets for the night. We couldn’t see the stage, but I remember walking past it a few times and staring at the enormous amount of people huddled in front of all these purple and blue lights. I thought about Max and Melissa dancing down the sidewalk and all the people that smiled back. But mostly, I thought about all the people.
And then, selfishly, I thought back to myself. I thought about sitting on the cooler and drinking without ever really getting drunk. A few of the tangles in my stomach loosened and I opened my eyes again, desperately looking for some sort of center of gravity. There was toothpaste all over the sink and a candle filled with cigarette ash but it didn’t work and I stopped thinking that any of it mattered.
I probably wouldn’t change in this lifetime. It’s funny though. I’m so full of shit, you know? What a bullshit piece of shit liar I am, dolling out advice like I have some kind of clue as to what the fuck is going on when I’m falling apart in my bathroom because I didn’t have the guts to walk into a crowd of people or go after anything that I actually wanted in my life. I thought about high school. I thought about people I met in bars and parks and libraries. I thought about the self-deprecating witticisms and desperate calls in the middle of the night. I thought about college and dropping out. I thought about smoking and drinking and about the people who are vulnerable and what that must be like. I thought about Soupy and Cody and Aaron. I thought about their faces and all the missteps I took and all the selfishness and wrong that I’ve done.
Whatever the fuck was happening had been happening for years. I had been doing this for years.
I’ve been trying to do this for years. I keep staring at this blank page as if I can write the code down, like I can crack this hilarious joke that is my life–as if I can read over it, edit it, and make sense of all this bullshit because even the thing that’s supposed to untangle the bullshit, and finally choose to hollow out and let go, and be torn apart into a million pieces of glass and paper and steel and iron and wool and organic matter and molecules and bullshit–all of it never worked because I made it the center of gravity.
I didn’t cry.
I won’t cry now. It’s a hilarious twist. I can’t be mad, and because it’s logical and moral and right not to be, I’m truly not angry with anyone. I’m finally completely in control and the only thing I could ever want is this utterly gorgeous idea of completely and totally fucking up.
Posted on July 9, 2011
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