“Only dead fish swim with the stream.”
A regular at my bar the bar told me that the other night.
We have been acquaintances for a number of months now, but being the person that I am, I never told her my story. She asked the other night, and I’d had enough alcohol in my blood to be okay with that. What the hell does it matter at this point? It doesn’t even feel like my story to tell anymore. It feels like I’m retelling someone else’s biography.
So I told her.
About moving here and about homesickness and about the weight of seemingly impossible ambitions and about depression and about rejection and about replacement and about half-assed suicide attempts (do I really want to die or do I just want a means to make everything stop and go away for a while?) and about guilt and about disconnect and about isolation and about trying to build a foundation out of sawdust.
And I told her about my bar the bar and how it’s the only organic thing that I have of my very own in this godforsaken city, and the organic connections that I made through my bar the bar, and the jobs that I have as a result of cultivating those organic connections over the course of damn near a year now.
She didn't know that I worked five jobs now. She just knew of two.
And I told her the same thing that I said the last time that I saw him almost five months ago: this city is like quicksand. I recognize it. I recognize this tug. And all I can do now is try not to make waves, try not to struggle against it. I just have to float through this. I just have to make it across to the other side without being pulled under.
So she recited that quote that I hadn’t read since high school:
“Only dead fish swim with the stream.”
She urged me to see my accomplishments as the accomplishments that they are:
that I persevered through the dark and found my way on my own
that I re-established myself in a new city on my own two feet without any kind of an in-person support circle
that I worked a new industry job as a part-time cashier and have since been promoted to general manager in the timeframe of less than one year
that I also have four separate jobs in the industry I wanted to work in
that I created a foundation out of sawdust, and now it is compressed and sturdy and can rival the integrity of any one of these old brick buildings
She told me that I am not in quicksand anymore; I’m in the river, and the current can take me wherever I want to go. I just have to swim. Not float.
And maybe that’s it.
Maybe I’m swimming. Not exuberantly, but steadily. I’m still trying not to make waves. The quicksand is not a distant threat by any means, and still feels like a very real danger. And I am a creature of habit, after all.
But I’m not a dead fish.
Not yet.
I still have accomplishments waiting me on the other side of this goddamn river.
