Time

It was fifteen years ago today that I met JP.

To think that 1991--a year which took on the proportions of myth in my life before it was even over--is now fifteen years behind me...Fifteen years is a long time. A child born in 1991 would bow be a high-school sophomore, nearly able to drive legally. Fifteen years before I was born, rock 'n roll hadn't even been properly invented yet. In fact, fifteen years before I was born, the civil rights movement hadn't been invented yet. Fifteen years' difference would have made it impossible for me-as-I-am to even exist in this world--to live where I live, believe what I believe, care about what I care about.

Think about the number of everyday things, things we take for granted now, which didn't exist fifteen years ago. If, on that August night in 1991, you had mentioned to me "blogs" or "Hurricane Katrina" or "September 11th" or "JonBenet", I would have had no idea what you were talking about. Nobody would have. If you'd mentioned "the Internet" you might have got a glimmer out of me, but the Internet was what those nerds in the basement of Allen Hall were doing far into the night--a cool idea, sure, but as remote from me as Pluto or Mars.

Fifteen years ago I was about 100 pages away from finishing my first novel. That novel is still sitting in a box in the back bedroom of my house, having survived eighteen moves, five or six subsequent attempts at other novels, and the total upheaval of my life on at least three or four occasions. It's still about a hundred pages from completion.

Fifteen years ago I had just moved into my first post-college apartment. It was a sixth-floor semi-walkup in Rogers Park--the elevator worked about seventy percent of the time. I'd been there such a short time that my things were still in boxes, mostly, and my roommate hadn't moved in yet. That roommate--the career girl, who wasn't going to get married because it would slow her down, who was going to be a famous journalist--is now married with two or three kids. We haven't talked, except for once, since 1995. I still miss her.

Fifteen years ago I was still engaged to my high-school sweetheart, my first boyfriend. I was beginning to have doubts; we'd gone on a camping trip with friends a week or so before, and I realized that I had feelings about my friend Darius that went a little deeper than I would have admitted. I'd written him a note on the way home, telling him that I couldn't talk to him anymore because I was supposed to be getting married, and my feelings for him were getting in the way. The silence between us lasted a week; at the end of that week I'd called him, because he was one of my best friends, no matter what else I felt for him, and I couldn't stand not to talk to him anymore. His response to my collapse of willpower was to invite me to a party, one where I'd know nobody. It was at a friend's apartment, he told me, and when he told me where that apartment was--near Michael Reese Hospital, just off Lake Shore Drive--I knew this was going to have to be a trip made on the sly, without my mother's knowledge, because if she knew where I was going to be driving--alone, at night--she would have absolutely forbidden it. Looking back from fifteen years, I have to laugh; the neighborhood into which I drove that night was safer than where I went to high school, probably just about as safe as my mom's neighborhood. And looking back at the idea that my mother's edicts would have mattered to me, despite my age and newly-free status, I smile--especially knowing now what would come a very few years after; I would go to some wild places in those next few years, without anyone's permission, against everyone's advice. But on that night I was afraid, because I'd been told to be afraid and I didn't know any better yet. I learned, that night. I learned a lot of things. One of the many things I learned, maybe the most important: there was, somewhere in the world, a place where I would fit. I'd been promised such a place for years, but this was probably the first time I'd really believed in it. I learned that it was fun to be spontaneous and wild and alive.

From fifteen years later, and the wreck and ruin of everything that night brought me, I remember what it was like. I remember what it felt like, driving home up Lake Shore Drive at four in the morning, knowing somehow that my life had just changed, that the people I'd met that night would be tied up in everything that came after. I know it sounds like hindsight but I remember going home and writing in my journal an entry beginning "Remember this night." I'd just met JP, and somewhere down deep I already knew that knowing him would change me.

And it has; and lately I think, maybe not for the better. Not that I regret knowing him--god, never--but what good is it to know how it feels to have all the time and all the hope and all the potential in the world, when all you can do with it is remember? What good is it to remember things that only serve to remind you of what is gone forever? I sit here on the far side of 30 and the rest of my life looks very bleak indeed, no matter what changes I make. I could break up with LJ and get a better job and go back to school and get enough money to fix up the house, and not a single one of those things will bring back the feeling I had when I was 21, that everything was possible and the whole world was out there for the taking; or the feeling I had when I was 25 and I was loved exactly as I was, in all the ways that matter. Nothing I do is going to bring those feelings back, and I sometimes wonder: what, without that hope, is the point of living?

I hate how I feel. I hate this total apathy, this lack of motivation that makes even the most basic tasks seem insurmountable. Every night I go home and I look around the house and I identify at least fifty tasks I could be doing--laundry or dishes or sweeping the floor--and instead I take a bowl of ice, some cans of Pepsi, and whatever there is to eat, and I go upstairs to my room and watch TV. I know that I'd feel better if I did something, but somehow I can't make that knowledge tip over into action. Then I feel even worse--lazy, undisciplined, pathetic.

My mother talks about one of my aunts, refers to her as a "non-coper"--someone who, faced with stress, just throws up her hands and looks helpless. I was raised to think such behavior is contemptible, yet here I am...wallowing. Wallowing in the past, in my distaste for the mundane world; in helpless inaction, in the lack of hope for anything better, in the knowledge that the days of grand passion are behind me. More and more I think about what the end of my life is going to be like, assuming I live to the ripe old age my maternal genes suggest. When I was young it never crossed my mind to think that I would be any different than the other women in my family; there would be a husband, and children, and eventually grandchildren. I foresaw my future, senior-citizen self to have a life like my grandparents had: a house, a pension, a dining-room table surrounded at Christmas and Easter by the evidence of a life well-lived. It's only lately that I've started to realize: that's not going to happen. And what happens to the people who don't end up with that kind of life? What happens when they get old? I look at the senior housing projects as I drive past them; high-rise buildings, drab and gray, with a bunch of draggled, wilted, lonely-looking old people sitting in the courtyard. They're generally men, mostly, but there's a fair number of women, too. These are the ones who are alone. They have no one to care for them, and they're not strong enough or healthy enough to live on their own, and so they end up shut away in buildings like these. I try to imagine what one of those little rooms will be like. I can't imagine they're very homey.

Mostly, though, I think about what it's going to be like, living the rest of my life without ever being touched again the way JP touched me. Even if I break up with LJ, I can't imagine anyone ever feeling anything intense about me. I remind myself sometimes that I weighed about the same when JP and I reconnected as I do now; then I think about the passing of those years, all the things that have happened since to change me. I see old pictures of myself and I look hopeful, alive; I look in the mirror and my eyes are just a wall. I tell myself I need to get out and meet people, give myself some options; instead, I go home and lock myself away, because it's too hard to risk even trying to let someone in, much less to risk being rejected once I let myself care.

I'm 36 years old and unless something changes, I've got the rest of my life to go through alone and untouched. It doesn't seem quite fair; there are some people who love each other after years and years together and still find each other attractive; whereas I can't seem to keep a guy interested. I can keep them AROUND--just not interested. Just that knowledge takes a lot out of me; it feels like a big rock pressing down on my chest. To know that two men in a row have gotten almost instantly bored, so much so that they can't even be bothered to hide it...it makes me want to die young, actually. I don't want to go through the rest of my life feeling like this, hating myself by default, wondering what is so wrong with me, and when it happened. When it was just one man who found me so untouchably dull, I could tell myself "well, JP thought differently" and dismiss CR's boredom as something that came from HIM. But now, I'm forced to wonder if maybe JP wasn't the one who was wrong about me; at the very least, he's been outvoted. I could break up with LJ tomorrow and there'd still be no one to disagree with him about me; I'd have to go through the effort and the risk of finding someone new, and maybe then discover that HE thinks I'm boring, too. That....That would be the end of me, to be honest. That's not a life I'm prepared to live.

Fifteen years ago I knew none of these things about myself, and so I could still imagine that someday, someone would find me beautiful; that someone would want me, and we'd be together and we'd have a life, and someday I would sit back and look at what we'd accomplished together, and I would be satisfied. Fifteen years ago that was still possible. I didn't know then what would happen between then and now.

I've made a point of not regretting anything I've done, any choices I've made, but that's getting harder and harder to maintain. There are moments now when I question whether I've done one single thing right, and moments when I wonder how, exactly, it came to this. I'm pretty sure I'll have a long time to ponder that question; that, maybe, is the most frightening thing of all.