Vienna, Austria — 8/28/12
Looking back, there have been things I didn’t expect — struggling to find work, moving to New York with $250 to my name, becoming a bartender, volunteering at the World Trade Center on 9/11, living at my aunt’s apartment five-sevenths of every week. There have been things I did expect — the U.S. government proving once again the old adage that the opposite of progress is Congress, the awesomeness of Breaking Bad, and the reality that this would be, and continues to be, the most uncertain time in my life to date.
I do at times miss Spain. I miss my friends there, and the way of life, and the independence I had. I miss being able to go out on Friday and Saturday nights because my current 9-5 is from p.m. to a.m. I miss my dog, Shadow, and the house where I used to live.
Shadow
All in all, though, this has been one heck of an año.
Being away, I had forgotten how nice it is to be close to your family. While being out of the country for two years provides you with incredible experiences and mind-opening encounters, one of the drawbacks is that you don’t get to spend as much time with the people who have been there all along. I have truly relished the opportunity to be — to be — with my parents, and my sister, and my aunts and uncles and new baby cousins. Tuesday night tapas dinners in Madrid were amazing; Tuesday afternoon lunches with my grandmother will stay with me even longer. Holiday traditions, reunions with old friends, the simple pleasure of being able to call people I care about for less than $25 per minute.
New friends, too — some really good ones. A few great ones. It’s been interesting to see how we build and continue relationships even as our lives move in very separate directions. I can’t tell you how many awesome people I’ve met over the past few years — people who shared their stories, their dances, their beers, their hearts. I can now tell you, however, how many people are indispensable in my life, because that is a much smaller number. The story of every person’s earthly existence involves major characters, minor characters, extras, and a whole slew of people behind the scenes. This year has given me insight into who fits where.
It’s not like I’ve stopped adventuring, either. I was able to re-visit Madrid, and Chapel Hill. I journeyed to Ocean City, MD, Monticello, NY, and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I’ve ridden the Staten Island Ferry, attended the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, toured the United States Constitution Center, rocked karaoke at a Spanish wedding, and etched my name in Sharpie on the interior walls of the new One World Trade Center. (Don’t worry, I had police permission.)
There have been plenty of ups and plenty of downs, bursts of inspiration and bouts of self-doubt. That’s normal. Life is less like a forward march and more like a salsa dance — a few steps ahead, a few backwards, and a lot of spinning around to the music.
The real question for me now is: Where will I be a year from today?
There’s a certain manuscript of mine that’s been, oh, six-and-a-half years in the making. It’s close to done. That work was the major impetus for my move to Spain (other than the flamenco dancers), and it is one of the primary reasons why this year has been difficult at times. It is extremely tough, when you’ve been working on something for so long, to draw close to the finish line without projecting into the future. In other words, it’s hard to know that you’re close to completing a book without being scared to death about whether it’ll be published, if people will like it, and if it’ll be what you wanted it to be when, one day in May 2007, you were driving back to the house where your family no longer lives, and you had an idea and thought, “I’m going to write a book about that!” That day — during the summer in which I was living and working in New York for the first time, in between my sophomore and junior years at UNC — seems so long ago now. And yet, that day is every day of my life.
Years are ideas — they don’t really exist. We give our memories a timeline because it helps us write our lives’ narratives in an orderly fashion. One night this year, when I was at dinner with my father in Monticello, he described how his mother and father took him there, to the Catskill Mountains, when he was a boy. As we dined in the only decent restaurant in town, he recalled those days, when the Catskills thrived, and he told me his mother’s stories of when she was younger and the Catskills were the Las Vegas of the East Coast. I tried to spit out this idea that, in that moment which he and I were sharing — that somehow, in that space, the Catskills were all they had ever been, all they ever would be. That his mother, who I never met, was there, and that my phantom descendants, should they ever come to be, were there as well. That all time was a single moment.
I couldn’t find the words to adequately explain it then, I can’t find them now, and I doubt I ever will. Perhaps this is the closest I’ll get: As I write to you, I do it now. And when you read these words — tomorrow, 10 years from now, 100 years from now, you will still be reading them now. Not that people will be reading this blog in 2113 — hardly anybody reads it in 2013 — but you get the point: It was now when I had the idea for my book, now when I wrote the first page, now when I discovered the ending, and it will be now on the day that I send it off into the world to be what it will be, to whoever it will be.
This post began as a Facebook status; I certainly didn’t see it getting this philosophical, or this many miles off-topic. But, as this collection of time that we call the past year has taught me, sometimes, things go as you expect … and other times, a Czech seagull poops on your head.
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