Like those times when you slap on tube
socks, brace yourself against a wall, take a running start and slide across the
hardwood floor surf-style only to catch an uneven notch on the ground with your
foot and go flying head-first into the wall opposite, we can glide surf-style
through life to have our minds catch on the uneven little pieces of our past--
memories, thoughts, words, people rise, unbidden, and check in as guests in the
hotel of our minds for a weeklong stay.
(As one of my close friends describes his
own experience via text with having things caught in his head: "At this point I'm far beyond convinced that they're mindreaders and that they're implanting themselves in my mind")
My own mind is fixated on endings, on
finishes and graduations. Perhaps it's instinctive: for most of my life, June
has been synonymous with endings, graduation and change.
When I was in grade 12, on one of the last
fading twilight days of my high school life, I tramped into my teacher's office
before class, as I was wont to do when I was out of ideas for pranks to pull
(these would range from blasting a 10-hour "Batrolled" videos on the
speaker system with the monitor shut off to off to drawing phallic animals to
put on my self-designated Artwall, which to be completely honest, was really
the Amywall). But that day he told me that he had found something on the
Internet that reminded him of me-- and he handed me Marina Keegan's essay The
Opposite of Loneliness.
Marina Keegan had been an intensely
talented young woman who had died in a car accident 5 days after graduating
from Yale; her essay, The Opposite of Loneliness, was one of many essays
she had written over her undergrad career, but was specifically written as a
graduation exercise. An exit essay.
Loneliness was
Keegan's reminder to the rest of her class- to everyone- that we still had time, that we still had the
rest of our lives to do what we want, what we dream, what we hope for. The
terrible, heartbreaking irony is that she died shortly after, accidentally, suddenly.
When my teacher first handed it to me, when
I made that initial scan, I don't think I completely understood what she was
trying to say, or I understood it in a very sideways, slanted way that tangibly
related to my then-present experience.
When I was 18, it was that part where she
described accidentally trudging to an administrative building on a cold
winter's night that made me stop:
"In the heart of a winter Friday
night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a call from my
friends to meet them at EST EST EST. Dazedly and confusedly, I began trudging
to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn't until
I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends were
partying in Yale's administrative building. Of course, they weren't. But it was
cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was
quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass.
And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place
where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle
of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe."
And I was suddenly back to a moment in my
own life, some weeks previous, back to when I had been fiddling around with
machinery on the Earl stage for the band banquet, only to look up and realize
that I was the only one in the auditorium.
In front of me: rows of those chairs
covered in soft burlap-like fabric that made those distinct
"dunka-dunka" noises when you got off them.
Above: the disco ball, swallowing and
spitting out the stage lights.
Through the open front doors: the faraway
echoes of mirth and laughter and loud conversations.
Me: alone, shaken free of the timestream,
frozen in the infinities stretching between seconds ("~and in dis moment I
swear we wer infinite~"), and my body was suddenly so awake and aware to
all the time I'd spent in the auditorium, in the school, and of how I somehow,
some way, managed to find a place for me.
And in that heartbeat of a second, just
like Keegan, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe, and so remarkably,
unbelievably fortunate. In that short breath I had to myself before people once
again began streaming into the auditorium, all those Lonely Years were worth
it: all those lightless days and all those years of uprooting and replanting
and uprooting and replanting and uprooting again and again were okay because
I'd found a place and a people to love and who (hopefully) loved me.
I'd found an opposite of loneliness.
On the day before school ended, I made a
facebook post about my "squinchy feelings" on leaving this place I'd
come to love, and how this love had blossomed in spite of my curdling pre-teen
anger and fury at having moved to Kanata in the first place. I was on the cusp
on university studenthood and awfully excited, but I was equal parts angry and
sad and scared when I wrote it: it seemed that I was just destined to keep
moving and moving and moving and moving. I was angry that I was being uprooted again,
sad that I was leaving it all behind, and scared that I'd never find a
tonic to my own loneliness again.
And that's all I got from Keegan when I was
18: a sad muddled mess about leaving and goodbyes.
But now, at 20, wiser and so much older, I read Keegan's essay again and
new things jumped out at me, things that I waved away as a teen on the cusp of
high school graduation.
Keegan first came to the attention of
members of the media as a vivacious, passionate college student who despaired
about the huge volume of students leaving behind their dreams to go for Wall
Street, for finance, because of “this idea of validation, or rationalization”. She
was an enormous advocate for the chase, the hunt, the pursuit of dreams and
happiness and heart's callings.
“Selling out”,
in other words. This has been the battleground upon which artists and bureaucrats
have been fighting for years and years and years (“You’ve sold out to work for the man!”; “You’re not being realistic
because we all have to grow up and take on our responsibilities!”).
I’ve had one foot
in each my entire life, but it’s impossible to deny that I’ve started angling
toward bureaucratic life, and most of the time, I’m okay with this because I’m
doing something, I’m being
productive, I’m contributing to society in my tiny little way with my tiny
little voice. I like looking at the statistics, saying who this policy will
affect, and which ones we should be enacting. I’m addicted to that “I’m
contributing! I’m doing things that will affect people!” feeling—my workaholic-ness
is entirely devoted to feeling that high.
It’s pure
validation, pure rationalization: I have no qualms admitting these are at the
centre of what I do, and you can see echoes of this in my “birthday
post.”
I recently came into contact with an
elementary/middle school friend, and we spoke of how our young selves would
have never imagined doing what we were doing now.
"I always thought you were going to be
a cartoonist," she told me, "You were always a really good
artist."
I agreed with her but said oh well,
you know how those things happen.
But those words keep surfacing again and
again, when I would turn the computer off, close my books, and I lay in silence
at night, waiting for the Sandman to sprinkle dust on me. I think of my pile of
canvasses and sketchbooks lying in a pile in my closet and the stacks of empty
notebooks on my shelves often. I am uncomfortably aware of the chronological
distance between the last time I put pencil to paper, and now (something over a
year).
It’s weird and so bizarre and so human that such enormous parts of
ourselves can slowly atrophy and die in our hearts, or that we just... lose
touch with them. I remember how much I used to sit for hours
just nothing but scrawling away and drafting and making stories. I often ask
myself where it went, and if it’d be worth it or right for me to chase it, if I should drop everything, enter a
pre-animation program at Algonquin and then apply to Sheridan.
I worry
that I made the right decision and I feel again like I'm
standing at the cusp of some huge canyon of choice and future choices and
uncertain futures and plain old doubt,
like I did last year when I considered transferring and the year before when I
was looking at universities. But I don’t think this “cusp of a big decision”
feeling ever really leaves us (and maybe
the adults in my life can verify this for me) and that we always have a choice (they just might not be very good).
I envy Marina Keegan, for more reasons than
one. I envy her talent, the way she could make her words cling to you like
brambles, how she had Harold Bloom as a mentor and a job lined up at the New
Yorker. Sometimes, terribly, I even envy her for having died so young, at the beginning
of her incredible journey and imminent movement upward, for the purity of her potential, now forever encased in an
amber droplet of time. The good die young, they always say, and now we will
always remember her as this bright star that shot past us too quickly in the
night’s darkness. Meanwhile, the living stumble around blindly in this same
darkness, afraid of rejection and responsibility and disappointing themselves
and others and of not amounting to anything, of just being one lonely, tiny
speck in the faraway night sky that no one has noticed or bothered to name.
But she
says this:
“What we have to remember is that we can
still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac
or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything
is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t,
we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we
have.”
And I remember that even if we appear tiny
dots in Earth’s faraway distance, we still appear big and beautiful and blazing
to planets in our own orbits, but also that we can always still choose.
In my reread of Marina Keegan's essay online, it was actually two comments that stuck out most in my head:
One was a parent, older, saying that they had forwarded Keegan's essay to their children, and that "The future is theirs. I belong to the past."
But below them, I think in a way that would have made Marina Keegan proud, someone commented: "I think you are missing the point. It is never too late to feel the sense of possibility she describes. Please don't write yourself off as the past."
P.S.: I'd like to thank Mr. B for giving me that essay two years ago in the music office. It meant a lot to me.
