This One is for You
The first time we met, I couldn’t decide if I liked you. I spoke too much, you too little. I was younger, more inclined to confession, either to fill the silence or endear you to me. Being young was special in that way, being guided entirely by this need to be admired for no reason in particular. You admire me sometimes. When it suits you. When it makes the most sense. When you are well-fed, unstressed by your responsibilities, and free of any bodily pain. And I suppose it’s the same for me.
You warned me against changing too much. I don’t have the heart to tell you this is the only hope left for me—this desire to erase myself, leaving only the faintest impression of this past self visible beneath the reinvention. You may or may not recognize me afterwards. Only from certain angles, when the light hits me exactly as it did that afternoon, or when I say something with the same intonation and cadence as the first time we met.
It shouldn’t be so easy to make a promise. But I made one to you regardless. Language is so flimsy. How can we have any faith in it? Fernanda Melchor: “We want to give a faithful account of reality, of a small fragment of reality, and we end up saying more about our own finitude, fears, and desires.”
I understand. You’re tired. You work nonstop. You must remember to feed yourself three times a day. You try to maintain your friendships, remember to text people on their birthdays, and somehow still find yourself lonelier year after year. You live in the heart of this oppressive, genocidal empire and feel powerless. You cling to your comfort because you know it is momentary. You see others suffering. And you know the boundary between you and the same misery is arbitrary and impossibly thin. You think being beautiful, or being surrounded by beauty, could be a shield as if outward appearances reflect an inner, private morality, or serenity. That an outward change might reflect an internal transformation. And sometimes it might. Maybe this is why you warned me against this change because your comfort depends on your life remaining relatively the same, abiding by the routines you’ve established. You are tired of coping with the rising cost of living when your wages never keep pace; noticing the way your skin has started to sag or wrinkle because you never remember to wear sunscreen or reapply it; buying new underwear when yours are frayed or shit stained.
You think this is a betrayal of the unspoken parameters we established at the beginning of our relationship. That I have somehow deceived you, made you a victim. Fair enough. I have considered betraying you—often—because I understand it is a possibility for us both, and I would like to remain the decisive one between us, whose mouth opens first and thinks second, never hesitating to consider the potential consequences because I understand our relationship is built on having to resolve how we feel about these consequences.
I could tell you I am happier. This is what everyone wants to hear, I think. As if happiness is the only reason to change. I found someone unpleasant once after they told me their primary concern in life is happiness, and I decided we should never speak again. What kind of barometer is happiness? I can be happy in one moment, like when we are together, or in the immediate aftermath of being in your company, and fall into despair hours later, convinced I can never replicate the experience again, like a dish cobbled together from leftover ingredients without a written recipe, those explicit instructions that allow me to feel a false sense of security. Even though I know the ingredients themselves vary in quality and come with their own unpredictability. My happiness is the same. It is always an imitation.
Can I ask a question: Are you happier? Would it make a difference to know this change made me happier, even incrementally?” I wish I could hinge my happiness on yours. Decision making would become easier if I never had to think of myself again. If I never experienced another moment of doubt. I was not happy before. So whether I’m happy now is of little consequence. I look to you. And you are another country, somewhere between the memory of happiness and a desire for happiness.
Image: Greer Lankton, Coming Out of Surgery, 1979.
Current obsession: Anne Serre’s The Beginners. The novel’s protagonist falls in love with a man after she sees him walking in town and finds herself trying to decide whether to remain with her loving partner of 20 years or risk everything to venture into a new love. It was an interesting portrait of a woman agonized by a decision she does not want to make.