my only swerving

Dear K-

Sometimes I wonder whether happiness was made for people like you and me. I keep thinking back to something you said the other day, when we talked on the telephone.

We should try to talk on the telephone more often. To each other, at least. I am not good on the telephone, but somehow you help me get past that. It doesn’t matter if I am crying, or laughing, or even just sitting quietly, listening to the sound of your life so many, many miles away…something about it feels relaxing. Enjoyable. I feel comfortable speaking to you in ways I don’t talk to anyone here. I don’t mind that you know I am damaged goods, that I worry about everything in such excruciating detail, or that you know I can be a terrible person. Sometimes it feels good to talk to someone who knows your faults. The faults that don’t always readily show.

Anyways, I keep thinking about what you said the other day, while you browsed for groceries and I folded my laundry. You said that perhaps happiness isn’t something we should strive for. Perhaps happiness isn’t the culmination of a successful life. For some reason I have always thought of happiness as something like the end reward, the proof that you’ve done everything well in life, worked really hard and put in your dues, and in return some unknown force of the universe provides you with happiness and contentment. Maybe you strived away at a miserable job for years and hated every moment but you put in good, honest work and tried to always be nice to your co-workers…then one day, out of the blue, you are given the opportunity to step into your dream job. The job where you look forward to working every day. The job where you feel fulfilled and productive. Or maybe you have been very attentive to always treating others how you would like to be treated, never turning away from someone in need, even when it might have put you out…And then viola! One day, you meet that perfect someone and you get married without a single god-damn doubt in your mind, and you live a beautiful and satisfying life until you both die, after which your children tell your grandchildren about how you and pop-pop were so in love, and how you died within 20 minutes of each other because you couldn’t bear the thought of living on without the other.

But I’m realizing that is not how life works. Especially if I’m behind the wheel. Even if I am in the perfect situation, I seem to find a way to steer everything off the bridge and into the river. Is it because I am a person that isn’t meant to feel happy? Maybe I don’t know what to do with happy. I’m trying to stop thinking about trying to become happy. Maybe, just as you aren’t ready for romance, maybe I’m not ready for happiness. As much as I want it, maybe I can’t have it right now. Maybe I will never have it. As you said, this whole show ends at some point, so perhaps I shouldn’t waste so much of it lamenting over what isn’t meant to be.

The other day I was thinking back to when we used to meet to play chess in a coffee shop that probably has long since closed its doors. I was reminiscing upon it so fondly, wondering why my life couldn’t still contain such simple pleasures. But then I thought about it a little longer, and remembered that those games also used to cause me great stress and frustration. I was so competitive that I wasn’t easily able to relax and appreciate the game for what it was supposed to be: a mechanism to bring us together to chat and share some coffee. Instead, I became so concentrated upon the embarrassment of losing that I shied away from those meetings.

I wish I could slap my younger self, tell her to straighten up and look beyond the game. I would kill to be able to wander to the local coffee shop every week and kill a few hours moving pieces clumsily over a board while talking about life, writing, relationships… Instead I sit in my office, staring at a wall covered with little snapshots of my past life, sipping at some lukewarm, instant coffee blend. Why do I keep these pictures here? To remind me what I’ve lost? To remind me what a beautiful thing it is to be alive?

I listened to the radio this morning. They were describing a man as “the most humble, caring man you’d ever meet”. “He’d never talk about himself”, they remarked. Such a selfless, compassionate character with wit as sharp as a knife’s edge. It got me to pondering. Maybe I think too much about myself. I always twist everything into my perspective. Perhaps I need to become a shadow. Listening attentively but physically incapable of being in the spotlight. Perhaps then I wouldn’t take everything so personally and the world wouldn’t hurt so much. But then I wonder what the point of living would be if I wasn’t meant to feel at all. I’m going about it all in the wrong way.

I can’t be kinder to myself. I’m still too dissatisfied with the product. We both seem to have difficulty finding the good parts in ourselves.

Remember the good times for what they were, but know that they can never occur again in their original skin. You will never again hold her in your arms the same way and breathe in her scent, I will never sway back and forth in the trams of Brno with my head resting on the shoulder of a gentle Slovenian, and we will never return to drink on a couch-covered porch at twilight on a lonely street in Kirksville. We are both longing for feelings that can’t return. But maybe we can find something similar to fill the void, at least for the time being.

Our lives are a poem. There’s so much meaning lurking between what's visible on the page.
-K