It happens when you feel the other parenthesis, the one at the end, as it presses your skin, wraps itself around your chest like a tightening belt. You can still breathe, but not as well. You can still sing, but not with the notes you could hit before. You can still spit, but life has moved past the spitting stage. It’s when things fail to return to normal, that finally you get it: this is normal.
It happens as decades of mishaps and malfunctions befalling the bag of water and bones you inhabit add up to an irreversible mess, one that no longer feels entirely like you: it is you. This is what you’re told, by doctors, friends, cashiers at the supermarket. This is what you tell yourself, without entirely believing it. This is what you learn when people offer to help you when you don’t need any help, when people ask if you’re all right when you stop walking to catch your breath or buckle slightly under the weight of it all. It’s when good intentions leave a sinister aftertaste. It’s also when you entertain the possibility that you do, in fact, need help. If not yet, then soon.
It happens when you realize that your legs are no good anymore. They won’t carry you far before they hurt. In a bombardment, you will be the slowest, the others might have to leave you on the trail. Fortunately, you are safe for now, safe perhaps until the end, but the world is fickle and passing time alters everything. The streets you take no longer resemble the same routes in your memory, and the people on them walk differently, weighted down by days, weeks, months, years of private and personal wranglings that stick like burrs in the run of events. New people rush past you in a frenzy to kill time as recklessly as possible. You want to be like them, reckless and blind to consequence, but you can’t be. You may not remember the movie in much detail, but you have seen it before. The residue of everything is what you’d like to get rid of: the old streets, the old faces, the old conversations, the old ways of being known to others, but the facts are inescapable, their adding-up is the busywork of whatever powers that be.
It happens when they can’t immobilize you for the surgery because your lungs won’t survive the anesthesia, when you know that the final wheeze is closer to you than the last time you actually had fun. It happens when your ability to laugh it all off goes missing for longer and longer spells, when simply existing in time feels like a deflating challenge. It’s when your reserves have mysteriously emptied. Complaints take the place that effusions of happiness used to fill. Something is always going wrong, slipping out of control. The sensation of chaos overmasters the most painstaking displays of order. Nothing rings true, or rather, nothing feels true; there is always a foam of corrosion at the edge of any certainty. One thing that isn’t there is an expansive view of the future. The future has become little, like a baby bump.
It happens when your center of gravity drops below your spinal column. When your mind collects dust as often as it gleans information. When what is important boils down to what is necessary. To get through the next stretch of days, to clear up ambiguities, to get the bills paid, to keep the engine running. It happens when the outside world corresponds word for word with the panic inside you. When you hear people in authority say what you tell the blank wall at three in the morning, ‘These are dark times.’ Meaning: dark for everybody, not just for you. And you, alone, can’t fix it. It happens when you understand that you never were in a position to fix anything.
It’s the little moments in the day when you cannot remember the name of that actress that author that person you lived with in 1987. Bits of information fly around in your head eluding capture, as if you were drunk, and you’re not. You are about to finish telling a funny story with the words ‘gluten-free’, and suddenly you can’t find them, can’t find ‘gluten-free’ in a brain so full of words they become misshapen and stick to each other. Like gluten itself, maybe.
It’s discovering that almost everyone you truly liked has died, that you are now engaged in a dire, depressing contest with all those still living, and that winning would be the most inconsolable, loneliest victory anyone could achieve. Alive after all that, and in many areas of life, already dead.
Of any two people, someone always goes first.
It happens when you see yourself in a photograph, no matter when it was taken. Everything recorded is a record of the past, and this is how you looked then, how the world around you looked: these were your friends and this was a room someone lived in and how people were wearing their hair. Even a year ago, you think, ‘I looked better.’ Or else you think, ‘I look better now.’ Or else you think, ‘That isn’t really me.’ But the image is something, an entrance into what is secretly known, or repressed, or misremembered, stored in some cerebral cave, a feeling forgotten until this optical encounter. Or it may also be another picture that fills in missing time, the middle-aged face, for example, of this person you were crazy about when they were twenty, a mania that ended very badly; you confront the fate of faces and the shallow depths of your former emotions when you try to imagine feeling the same things again. You couldn’t love that face in its current state, it’s like a tire with no more tread. And what does that tell you about how much you loved it in the first place? It was just a face. And here it still is, wised up and cruelly weathered by decades of disappointment. Like your own face in the mirror.
We all live at least one or two lives that we subtract from our biographies. Areas of un-revisited, unhealed pain or such monumental nothingness that they’re not worth remembering. Then, infrequently, some evidence turns up, often photographic evidence. You are seized, suddenly, by a grisly species of curiosity. Oh, yes, you were alive then, and had wishes or plans casting shadows on the path ahead, what appeared then as the path ahead, an ambition or two, and back then, when the way things are today could hardly be imagined, you used to do that with your face. Those days. Those plangently hopeless, barren days that felt like sludge. And these people: that one’s dead, this one never managed anything, that one is still trying, despite everything. This ended in divorce. That ended in murder-suicide. Most of this just ended, undramatically. How sad any piece of collective evidence really is.
It happens that validation can never be satisfied. With solidity comes decrepitude. The more we become what we intended to be, the less real the earlier versions of ourselves appear to us, and yet there we were, who we were, forever for all time a monad on its travels. Through the dark times, the insoluble passage. An era can be just what it looks like, finally, with everybody’s footnotes crammed into the bottom of the frame. Everything begins to feel like an epilogue, or a summing-up, when in fact all you want is, right now, to live in this minute, this world, not ever to go back, never to take up residence in the house of memory, or at the very least to leave some doors and windows open to whatever new breeze might be felt, because there is still time, time left over from time, every minute that you didn’t die is time and a half, so to speak. You even have time to learn to bake bread or repair a motorcycle. After time runs out you will persist in someone’s memory somewhere, the way alcoholics say, ‘It’s five o’clock somewhere.’
Photograph © Nan Goldin, Clemens lighting Jens’ cigarette, Paris, 2001
