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In the end, I had come because I knew enough to enjoy myself. This was not knowledge I had acquired in these weeks; it was not my reward for taking a risk and leaving home. It was knowledge I possessed, was reminded of, and put to use. Over and over again.
So far I'm enjoying myself. That is good enough for me. Anyway, if you summon a loss of control, is it actually a loss of control? Or is it just another way to be in charge.
I'm reminded of a man was involved with years ago, whose proficiency with grammar in his texts charmed me almost as much as what he was texting (sometimes more). The extra time he was taking with those commas and semicolons felt like their own sort of love letter. It was only later it occurred to me he just had the highest level of autocorrect turned on on his phone. The deception of language, the truth of body language.
Where was the grown woman out in the world, bringing all her hard-won self-knowledge and experience to this adventure? Nowhere, was the answer. Instead, Hepburn's Jane Hudson was a Sabrina with wrinkles. Insecure. Silly. A child in middle-aged clothes. more It felt to me like Hepburn, a woman who had flouted belittling herself. Kowtowing to some diminished idea of spinsterd onm. Sad, convention her entire life, was innocent, pathetic, naive, underdeveloped. And yet, some inadvertent truth had been captured. The mistaken but seemingly commonly held belief that when one is involved in the activities we associate with young women, one is experiencing them with the mind- set of a young woman. That only the exterior has changed.Here on this island our enjoyment is filtered through the deaths of parents, the deaths of fiancés, cultural exclusion, shattering divorces, overwhelming financial uncertainty, the shouldering of life, and a bone-deep understanding of how to enjoy life, even when you're told how you do so can't possibly be satisfying in a real way. And then enjoying it anyway.
So much past experience remains a present truth for so many of us, even when the present contradicts it at every turn. When the inciting incident in your life is having been left, by marriage, by family, by parents, by culture- by the person or place whose very role it is to hold you closeit is not something you overcome once and get on with afterward. It is something you are always overcoming. It is something you are always trying to get on afterward with. But maybe each time you overcome it more quickly. Maybe the wound does not pierce as deeply. Maybe when you're having a bad night of dancing in the Bois, for instance, on a trip that is meant to satisfy months of solitude, and you find yourself awkward and out of step as though you've dropped through a wormhole to your worst adolescent self, you only languish in it briefly before getting on to the afterward. Maybe when you fall off your bike after organizing a birthday dinner and are left behind, you let someone help.
I know, too, that what the person in that video did not have was a sense of self. A belief in herself. A seriousness in life. Do I have it now? Do we ever fully have it? I sit in the cove with the water and the sky on this island in the Atlantic and I think about my current photos and how my life would and would not appear to others were I to capture and push this moment out to the world. What would it invite others to think? And then I think, But what do I think about myself? That is the key question. The missing link this past year when I became a silhouette to myself. I don't quite know how to answer it yetI have been successful in my determination to only feel this month, and not to think-but it seems the most important thing to be able to answer.
My beach of choice happens to be closest to the house, a downhill ride of three turns, and long stretches of road. It's called Plage des Sapins, the beach of pines, because between the beach and the road stands a thick strip of pine trees. Their tall, straight trunks remind me of the Black Hills of South Dakota. But here, the smell of pine mixes with the smell of sea. When I first come upon it after swooping around a curve, I feel as though I've slipped into something not quite real, as though this small forest may disappear in the night and not reappear for one hundred years.
"Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations." I am always wary of advice given by men who've spent most of their lives doing what they please, and then, when it suits them, discover the joys of family or comradery. What else is there, they say, age fifty, wealth and success behind them. This marriage and fatherhood business is great! What else, indeed. We hear it as affirmation that the lives women have been living are in fact the correct ones, and not as an argument that perhaps they only feel like the ultimate choice once every other avenue of experience has been exhausted. A type of exhaustion women rarely know.
Remembering the sensation of cutting through liquid, weightless. It is the only place, other than my bike, where I feel completely at one with my body.
“It’s a matter of trusting the water,” I say. “It will hold you if you let it.”
With birthdays come assessments. I sometimes have to work to understand my life not as one long missed opportunity.
Yesterday, my friend Rachel sent me a decade-old video of us leaving our lower Broadway office when we ran a networking company there together. It's only forty-three seconds long and in it we are singing along to "Working Girl"-our office was on a high floor in the same building Melanie Griffith's character works in—as we navigate passersby on our way to the train. I watch it again and again and stare at my own beauty, which leaps off the screen at me, delayed ten years. My jawline. My eyes. My hair. I find myself coveting myself. And then I remind myself, I will covet this self too. This trip. This freedom. This joy.
This movement and this skin I have now, even if parts are less vibrant than they were, they are more so now than they will be.
Panic needs an audience to be useful.
Movement is only enjoyable when it’s a choice. Bookended by places of respite and permanence.