Anniversaries
So today is ten years to the day since I moved back home from Amsterdam.
I cannot even begin to know how to process that fact. Ten years. In a heartbeat, in an eyeblink, ten years. That makes me feel incredibly old, as if this is a story I should be telling a youngster while I rock on a front porch and churn some butter.
I’ve been back here in St. Louis more than twice as long as I was gone. They say that your four years of high school have an everlasting impact on your life, but I think my four years in Holland had a much larger one on mine. I still remember how it felt ten years ago today, to wake up in a city where everyone spoke my language, and look around and see all these strangely unfamiliar things from my childhood. I remember making my bed that first morning and wondering how I was going to put my life back together. I was listening to Nina Simone “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life” on my old CD player, and I heard my Dad talking to my Mom, right through my closed bedroom door. He said “Listen to that. It’s like she was never gone.”
The thought of that panicked me to no end, like all my personhood had just been stripped away, along with my job and my home and my friends. Like everything I was and the person I had become was going to be lost somehow, was going to slip out of me and slide between the cracks of the hardwood floor in my childhood bedroom and disappear forever, leaving me blank and helpless and completely unreal.
The first thing I did that day was go buy a computer. The second was to get online and do something, anything to distract me from my newly bizarre reality. I don’t think I’ve every really stopped that part.
I had no way of knowing, of course, where my life would go. That I would still be in this city ten years later. I had no idea who I would meet, or who I would love and who would love me. I didn’t know where I would work, or what I would spend my time on, or how indeed one builds a new life out of nothing but one’s own knowledge and strength of will. I had no idea where I was going. But of course none of us do. From minute to minute our lives are infinitely unpredictable, completely out of our control, careening wildly in some direction we can’t ever see until we run into it full speed. In some ways I feel like I have something to show for the last ten years, and in other ways I think I have only the same exact thing I had before – myself.
I don’t have any great philosophical insight on this anniversary, which is momentous to no one but me. I don’t even really know how I feel about it. Happy or sad or numb or indifferent, I am not really sure. But I felt that I should make a note of it – if only because life passes very quickly and you will never notice it as it goes. Everything is very uncertain and ephemeral, and you cannot predict where you are going to be one minute from now, much less years later. But you can remember where you’ve been—and for ten years, I’ve been here.
And what have I got?
Why am I alive anyway?
Yeah what have I got?
Nobody can take away..?
Nina Simone – Ain’t Got No, I Got Life
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