Growing up, I realized not too long ago, involves doing a lot of the things you'd swore you'd never do when you were younger. I'm far more like likely to say, "I'll never do that again," than swear off something initially. Some of these things are fun, wild, irresponsible parts of being alive, like traveling to another country where you don't speak the language, swimming at night in the ocean, going on a blind date, etc...but more often than not they're more harrowing experiences, the kind where you actually learn the depth and dimension of consequences that stick with you for a long time. Like the decision you make early on in the evening when you realize you're about to have sex with someone other than the person you're dating, and it just sort of washes over and you and you think, this is going to be fine, this might still work out, and then later in every subsequent relationship knowing it's not other people you have to be watchful of, but yourself. Or losing touch with a best friend, and knowing there's been too much time to ever repair the distance between you, in years of miles, and remembering in all your other friendships after the importance of a letter, a late night phone call, a simple text touching base.
Sometimes there's also the reversal of things I've sworn off of, you know when you say you'll never talk to so-and-so again but then you slowly forget why you were so mad and you become close again and the cycle repeats itself weeks or months or years later. I'm bad at holding grudges. Which I think is mostly a good thing. It feels good to forgive someone. It's easier to forget slights and perceived insults than to let them simmer in the back of your head somewhere. And yet...
Around this time about two years ago my dad wrote me a letter, outlining not only the ways I've fucked up as an individual but also with the weighty end note saying that he would rather not have a daughter than have me as his. We were very close when I was younger, but after my parents divorce and then my very hard-headed adolescence we went through years of spotty communication, to put it lightly. Every time we got in an argument I'd say, ok, that's it, I'm done, and then a year later I'd end up talking to him until we would have another, eventual blow out. The letter he sent me sent me on sort of an emotional tailspin, as you might imagine, and all our communication ceased. I was on tour maybe 8 or 9 months later with my band Rose Cross, and my step-mom called to tell me my dad was in the hospital, and had just had a heart attack. I didn't tell any of my band mates, until we were in Pensacola.
We were partying after the show, in a steep two story apartment that two really nice kids invited us home to. I can't remember their names for the life of me, but I remember being so cold that I kept waking up in the middle of the night to try and get their dogs to lie on the bed with me, and ended up sleeping under orphaned jackets and backpacks. Lying awake, so troubled by the cold (I remember it was a very cold winter because our Atlanta show was canceled because of an ice storm and all the roads in and out were shut down), I turned to my drummer and just said, "there's something I sort of need to do in the morning." We had been up doing drugs or drinking, or both, it does't matter, but Jon and I woke up and drove our dodge conversion van to the hospital there. I have no idea what he did while I was in the hospital, but it meant a lot to me that he woke up early and took me there, and then didn't tell anyone else in the band later when they asked where we went ("oh, just out for coffee"). No one in the hospital said anything to me, I remember thinking how wild it was that no one stopped me, and I wandered through blindingly white corridors until I found where he was suppose to be, connected to tubes and bandaged and gowned (he had ended up having some sort of open heart surgery, but it was only vaguely explained to me, in passing, months later). And my dad, Parker, who I really did like so much for so many years of my life, just laughed and said, "fancy seeing you here!" So that was that. We never talked about the letter. We exchanged some weird hugs, and then we resumed our normal, strained communication.
Recently we got into another fight, and we aren't speaking again. He insisted that I was a loser, and wasting my life, or ruining it, something to that effect. Coincided so perfectly with fall, when I'm already filled with a sort of shadowy, intangible nostalgia, like the creeping deep shadows that get colder and fuller, when there's something about the chill in the air and the smell of fires that makes me sad. I start thinking of all the ways I have fucked up. All those letters unsent. Rejection letters from the few graduate schools I actually wanted to go to. People younger than me moving on with their lives and having different adventures and experiences when sometimes I feel like I'm stuck on the same page, living the same story as four years ago. I think I know enough now not to say I'll never talk to him again, but I think I at least know better than to mail him the letter I wrote in response. I'll just tuck it away for now. I wrote him a letter explaining all the ways I'm not, in fact, taking anything for granted in my life and how even though I might not be any sort of a professional anything, there's at least a lot of things I enjoy doing and am lucky enough to have a good group of people around me who care about me...but why bother explaining anything to him? My biggest fear as a kid, and the one thing I can safely say I have sworn to never do, is that I'll never be like him. Still, the dialogue in my head, where I'm telling him everything I've done so far in my life and everything I still have a chance to do, and how lucky I am and who-the-fuck-wants-to-be-a-lawyer-anyway, all that? It's pretty good motivation.
"They're all useless questions. There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken."*
Maybe this is just a season for regret. My mom sent me an envelope full of essays I wrote as a kid about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Always an artist. Always a published writer, from a very young age. Reading those sloppily written essays, on faded, grey elementary school paper, touched a nerve in me for sure. I imagined schools I never went to, places I never moved to, opportunities put off or missed completely. Then, the weather gets beautiful all of a sudden. I read a few good books, went out walking, took a bubble bath, cooked dinner with my boyfriend, and everything once again seems alright. Fall once again presents itself, like a truer new year, full of possibilities and things to be learned.
*The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vasquez
