Steeped by History Two Wise Hands Reaching, Touching, Grabbing for a Veil
I am the exception to the rule
The wind off the river made it a cold April, but I’m not entirely sure if it was a cold spring, or if that is just how I remember it. No one was ever around when I left work, and the night was never blue, but a total kind of darkness interrupted only by apartment buildings and bus lights. I didn’t like my life then, but I could do nothing about it and the walk was not far. It was perhaps the only thing I liked at the time. Those long lone avenues stretching toward busier streets where I was alone. Crossing toward broadway, as the red hand flashed and the cars didn’t come because no one was there, a song began. For a long time, I couldn’t explain what happened, but suddenly I was not alone.
I walked on, together, visited by some force that felt steeped with every April, of every instance where, in going on despite everything, I managed to make it out. At the time I knew something I couldn’t yet know, and I knew something about the year previous when I felt precisely the same way I did then. History was repeating itself, actively. A clairvoyance but in reverse, if possible working in both directions, forward and backward. Each step burned with possibility. Like I might hit one shadow in the cold of April and find at the other end January again. I thought maybe the year had been a joke, maybe I could do it all over with whoever was there then with me.
I get this sensation at times—that I will be awarded a do-over. Somehow I am the exception that proves the rule that we can’t go back. February hits and I feel the year will reverse itself for me and I can try it again, make it good. Or on a casual lazy afternoon, I will walk into a restaurant and I will be 20 again. A combination of potential, that there was something to go back to, and melancholy for the things I had once said too late or had never said at all. The things you realize after the fact probing at this strange seam in time where the year has begun but life has halted.
Standing at a crosswalk a deli on the corner on the other side a spire-like shape jutting upward. There was a window with its light on cut through the darkness like a beacon. I’d stared up at it on my first day, walking in the wrong direction to the wrong job for which I wanted to redo knowing what I had come to learn. The song played over and over again in my headphones as I kept going back to it. This was not one of those moments. I would not be 20 again because I had never desired so, to begin with. To sit before a long-lost person and do what, exactly? There had never been anything to say. This was a different history. This was a different crossroad. The same past, but with a future added on because I realized it was easier to want to go back to something for which I had no regrets at all. It was why I believed I would be awarded such a precious useless thing.
No, through time, without ceremony, the purple haze of the future was reaching, touching, displacing the blue of the past to some further distance. Like hands or like shadows, suddenly longer and further than you remember and the day is over. But here it is not over, it is beginning again and I remember again.
There was hope here, more than despair. I knew where I was now, knew where we all were. The present was the moment I’d been awarded back.
Sometimes time is just that close. How they say, your older self is looking back at you through memories. I feel my many selves. Felt them there before that deli though we were not then looking at one another. We all had arrived to a four-way intersection in time. Something has drawn us all this way, converging at the center before spiraling off in many directions. Rarely if ever do I know what one instance brought us all together. What undercurrent drags us before spitting us back out but something in my chest feels aligned. The future and the past, the universe next door, and the marooned universes far far away. All these women I am and am not. Time has warped itself just perfectly to press us closer. Maybe I need it, someone close, someone who has seen inside me and knew.
I was just a block now from the subway and I was sick. That proximity of all my time in this life pressing in on me. But I get it now, have the words. Sometimes the present is the awarded do-over. It happens carelessly. I begin to know things I can’t yet know about my life. History is repeating itself just by happening now. And I get so terribly hungry for the future I can’t touch but feel, and am left with only the hope that it exists. And it overwhelms me so much I begin to cry, because the fact of the matter is, someone has come back to this moment and I don’t know why and I’m afraid, and I don’t have a lot of money, and I’m not sure when I will start having more. The future will not reveal its hand, all it says is I know you’re tired, but you can’t quit, because the joy that can’t escape you right now is coming. And it feels so good, that joy, so sickly good, that my life might happen as I believe it will that it makes me sad. It aches, it burns, all that potential, all that belief with nothing to show. So I cry for a long time and I am not sure if it's because I’m happy or sad.
It doesn’t happen for more than a moment, maybe the length of a song, but they know where I am and I know where they are. Then the shattered pieces of my broken heart wiggle like a loose tooth or creak like an old floorboard, giving way in these instances to the weight of a history that has already happened but somehow occurs over and over again behind some veil I can’t tug down. There’s no seam between where I am and where I was. I like to think if I look to my side it will be like standing in a dressing room with double mirrors. I’ll see my reflection stretching out infinitely, but if I look right she’ll be older. If I look left she’ll be younger. If I place my hand up she will too and we won’t be touching, we can’t.
I descended the subway and I kept listening to that song, but it was over by the time the 3 train came. I tried, hoped, I might conjure my future a little longer, but as I said, we never have business in the past. We have so little regret, if any at all. It wasn’t for nothing. If she came for me, if she looked back it meant it was over. This moment ends, as I knew, as I always know. A far less lethal hope than what it felt to be so close to the woman I desired to be. The other day when I was walking downtown, walking home, far from where I used to work. Not a blue tint to the world or a place to go and I was sad, but my life was different, good different. I made it to the subway walking down and down and found a spot opposite a window obscured by no one. And that song was playing because even still I liked it so much, and I stared out the subway before, through the tunnels we stopped in wait. A door was on the other side. The light was on. I felt suddenly like I might get to go back somewhere.
I remembered that walk home, as I often did, and turned to my left where I imagined the past had landed and thought of that place. Felt for the intersection, felt the future still waiting for me because I was not there yet, but closer than before. We’d arrived again. When I glanced to my right for the future all I saw was my world. My present moment, even if the older self’s knowledge seemed to touch me, fill me, with an understanding. I turned back toward the light of the door. The sadness that had been there just moments before was gone. In my mind, I reached for the curtain but I knew there was only air, imagining the next time we all met. Wondering if anyone was watching me off my right peripheral where the future takes shape in my mind. I have to believe that curtain is being touched by better, wiser, hands.
“I took comfort in the illusion that I could go back [to my hometown]. But I’d been around long enough to know history is sealed and unchangeable. You can move on, with a heart stronger in the places it’s been broken, create new love. You can hammer pain and trauma into a righteous sword and use it in defense of life, love, human grace and God’s blessing. But nobody gets a do-over. Nobody gets to go back and there’s only one road out. Ahead, into the dark.” Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
This was the song I had heard that night. People like to make fun of me for how much I listen to it, but I can’t help but think of that night on my way home. Funny enough, I had to write a newsletter when I got back to my apartment and I was so overwhelmed by what had happened I cried in my room as I wrote. My mind had been cleared though, I had nothing to say, just stuck on the feelings that had happened just an hour before. I had to stop listening to the song, but by the time the thing got written I had attempted to write on what had happened. Half-heartedly as it was too big, the words yet to exist for me.
I walked down empty 72nd street late at night and the words ran through my head by memory but this time with conviction. I love you. I love you I mean it. I can be loved. Love is possible for me even if it isn’t happening to me. There is a future in which I am loved. Love exists even when it is not towards me. I’m different and I’m lovable and I always have been. I’m not saying it because it’s what you’re supposed to say, this time I mean it. I believe you universe. This time I know it’s true. I have learned my lesson. I’m no longer so young.
Looking at it now I think someone older, wiser, managed to whisper something through the veil to me. And I’m grateful.
I believe in so much—myself and the visual world. As well as the other world unseen and speaking to me in moments of brief hope. January 29th, 2023 1:09 PM
It is almost impossible now to imagine the life I used to lead in my own loneliness. Even now, even in my deepest longings. I would have let people treat me however they wanted just to have someone around. January 19th, 2023 2:19 PM
I hated being in the room with him the moment he said it. It wasn’t the words themselves that were so devastating but that we had been playing this coy game in which he would call and I would come and we were two people pretending not to need each other. January 16th, 2023 11:05 AM
This month’s mood board is peering through the dark at you. A blend of purples and blues for the present which we can only live in, but never return!
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If that’s not your thing, don’t worry about it. We’ll see each other somewhere groovy soon.
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Here’s to Starbucks Fridays, the past, the wise hands of the future, and those who look back on me to send word
Love always,
Chloé
I've never heard this before, "How they say, your older self is looking back at you through memories." But I like that. I'd like to think that there's an older self out there who already has figured out the things that I worry about today.
“It aches, it burns, all that potential, all that belief with nothing to show.” That sentence cut me deep. I also started listening to the song as I kept reading what followed and it was beautiful. If your words were music they would sound like that ♥️