sometimes it’s great when you see your life unfold before you like a movie, it makes banal moments into little bits of live action poetry, barely able to contain their own beauty and poignancy. a nice sunset, overhearing a kid say something funny to another kid, a stranger walking down the street singing to themselves, catching a glimpse of a rabbit dashing under a hedge. how could life be anything other than what it is? why shouldn’t it be so?
other times you watch yourself in the third person as you run into an old friend as you cruise the discount store, buying more socks because you didn’t make it to the laundromat (again.) you made and then broke eye contact and you’re sure she knows your feigned surprise is full of shit. you make small talk and then wonder if your spontaneous summary of the the time since you last spoke vibrated as pathetically in her ears as it did on your tongue. you have no good reason to offer as to why you are back in your hometown, you don’t have the time or the will to admit that life you carved out in the next town over folded in on itself like a fallen cake, but at least you hear yourself say ‘we’ came back and not just ‘i’ came back. she gets in line to pay and the cashier remarks ‘ah, no baby, no dog today’ in that friendly, familiar tone that moms are never quite able to use when talking to non-moms. she says she almost brought them but they were in a state, and you aren’t sure if she’s referring to the baby or the dog. your brain retrieves some dusty facebook reference to her job and it occurs to you that it’s a good enough job that she’s on mat leave, while a second ago you hastily blurted out that you work at the grocery store where she probably shops. ‘decent!’ she said to that. was that damning with faint praise or is the word ‘decent’ coming back into vogue? didn’t she used to say that all the time? you can’t remember. at least you didn’t tell her you make the pre-wrapped sandwiches there, that you spend your shift earnestly trying to wash lettuce faster in the faint hope that someone will tell you you did a good job, that you don’t even cook things over heat, that you can’t call yourself a chef because it sounds marginally better, more deliberate. that’s frankly none of her business. maybe she’ll assume you’re a manager or something. will she recognize your handwriting on the sandwich lables where it says ‘roast beef’ or ‘ham and swiss’? you exchanged more than enough notes back in the day and your writing hasn’t changed that much. she says goodnight and you say see you ‘round and then you aren’t sure if she was even talking to you because the cashier shoots you a look like you just butted into their chit chat while you, the next person in line, are clearly a separate, discrete unit. you start to dissociate a little while she rings you up. you thank the universe that you don’t need to buy smokes right now, although even if you did, you wouldn’t anyway.
you watch yourself do and say all this and you’re privy to all the smart alecky intrusive thought narration in your head, the superlatively pejorative worst things you obviousy never would have said, that your auto-pilot would have aspirated your own spit rather than let you say, but that you could have, that you had grounds to say, that were factual. you hear yourself make justifications you’ll never deliver, about how you’re only buying frozen microwave chinese food because your husband has a cold and it will make an easy lunch for him in his weakened state and he really likes that kind for some reason, how you’re so close to being finished that undergrad degree, how you honestly just aren’t sure if you even want to have a kid at all. these things have truth to them but right now it doesn’t count. You chide yourself over how there’s no sense in trying to compare yourself to others, and how she probably has tons of moments where she feels like she’s trapped in a hell of her own making. i mean don’t people with babies do that a lot? that she probably isn’t thinking of you even remotely as uncharitably as you are thinking about yourself right now. why would she? she’s always been so nice, she was never judgemental, she was such a warm and caring and beloved friend, you admired her so much for how kind and sincerely genuinely friendly she always had been with everyone. she even forgave you when you betrayed her, and long after you followed suit and forgave yourself, something she said then would come back to you over the years in remorseful moments and strike you in slightly different ways each time-
“you don’t realize that you can hurt people.”
and despite her graciousness the tight knit friend group that you had so sorely longed for for your entire life up until that point was never the same again. well, the friend group survived, they all still get together and have lunch, and hug and support each other’s projects and smile in each other’s pictures. it just wasn’t the same for you because you weren’t in it anymore. you left town. you made new friends somewhere else, who if they were here right now would smile in your pictures and hug you, but they aren’t here, they are there, so right now it doesn’t count. they are there. you were there.
but now you’re back here.
and you’re not particularly proud of yourself, it would seem!
you remember that today your horoscope said ‘hide how you feel so you can get things done. something or someone from your past might pop up.’
the movie is always poetic but sometimes the poignancy is at your own expense.
