soopastryheart

Yes, I have realized that “Friday Afternoon Pick Me Up” has become a misnomer, since I’ve picked pieces that aren’t necessarily the most uplifting. This week’s pick is no exception. I should probably change the name of this series. Oh well.

But anyway, it’s graduation season (Congratulations, graduates! Don’t fuck up!) and I’ve read/watched my fair share of speeches that have gone viral. Most graduation speeches aren’t terribly memorable, but filled with enough sappy motivation and nostalgia to get the job done. There’s really only one requirement of graduation speeches, which is that they should be well written and eloquent. The following was written by Marina Keegan, a recent Yale graduate who died in a car accident just days after her own commencement.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.

This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.

But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves…” “if I’d…” “wish I’d…”

Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my High School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.

But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

When we came to Yale, there was this sense of possibility. This immense and indefinable potential energy – and it’s easy to feel like that’s slipped away. We never had to choose and suddenly we’ve had to. Some of us have focused ourselves. Some of us know exactly what we want and are on the path to get it; already going to med school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both congratulations and you suck.

For most of us, however, we’re somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite sure what road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in biology…if only I’d gotten involved in journalism as a freshman…if only I’d thought to apply for this or for that…

What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.

In the heart of a winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a call from my friends to meet them at EST EST EST. Dazedly and confusedly, I began trudging to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn’t until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends were partying in Yale’s administrative building. Of course, they weren’t. But it was cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.

We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.

Written by one of my favorite authors in one of my favorite books, this particular entry was my favorite among his essays. This is an example of perfect writing to me: beautifully composed, with unpretentious language and extreme vulnerability, and able to provoke a universal heartbreak in any reader.

Our Selves Between Us

It’s my opinion that my heart is rather broken. But that implies that I have a heart. I guess I do, but it’s a totally flawed heart. It doesn’t work for shit. I don’t know how to love. I’m forty years old. I’m bald. I think my penis has stopped working. My fingernails are all ridged and dying. A sun-blemish on my shoulder ripped open the other day and was bleeding. That can’t be good. I probably have skin cancer on my shoulder and it’s eating its way through me as I type. 

I’ve been crying for the last hour and not because of skin cancer, but because I was listening to the mixed tape that my love made for me. It takes devotion to make a mixed tape, and it’s a dying art. Sneaking off with someone’s iPod and downloading songs on the sly is not quite the same thing, but I imagine that it’s the wave of the future.

So the tape really made me cry. I figured that all the songs were like her singing to me. For part of the tape, I sat at the kitchen table where we used to sit. I sat in her chair. I’ve almost never sat in that chair and I’ve lived in this apartment for five years. The floor is at a weird angle by that chair. But for two years she sat there. I also gave her the bad side of the bed. She made those sacrifices. She wanted to be in my bed and she liked for us to eat together. I often felt rushed, though, when we had meals. I didn’t want to take the time to sit down and eat properly. But I would. And a lot of times, I would try to correct her posture. She told me I could. She has had bad posture and she wanted me to remind her to straighten up. She’s beautiful, but when she sits to eat, she slumps terribly, curves her spine. I never should have tried to get her to sit right. It was wrong of me.

So sitting there now, listening to the tape, missing her, I was starting to lose it, and then I heard this lyric – “We sat here with our selves between us.” It’s from a John Cale song, “Anda Lucia,” and when I heard that line I really started weeping. It made me think of the two of us sitting there, trapped, our selves blocking us from being able to love, the way all selves block all love. How do you get past the self?

Then I was back in the moment and the kitchen was empty – it’s a mess now that she’s gone. The sink dirty, the floor dirty. Everything barren and stained. I’m forty and I can’t take care of myself. Or, rather, I’m too lazy to take care of myself. 

So she moved out two months ago. It was a hard decision we came to. I moved in with my parents to give her time, and then I paid for her move. Big deal. When I came back to the apartment, the first thing I saw was her empty closet. It had been filled with her pretty clothes for two years. That empty closet was like a grave. A death. An end. I started crying bad. I took one look at it and ran to the bed and cried facedown in the pillow. I’m halfway through life and have no idea how to live.

There’s this scene in Richard Yates’s book, Revolutionary Road which is the most painful thing I’ve ever read. This neglectful husband has lost his wife to suicide. He goes into her closet and smells her clothes and for a moment he has her back, he can smell her, she’s there, not dead, and he feels all the love he had for her, the love which had been lost, and then this horrible intrusive neighbor is banging on the door, and the husband hides in the closet until the neighbor leaves, but the spell has been broken, he can’t get his wife back, he tries, but he can’t conjure her and he’s lost her for good now, and this second death is worse than the first. 

So when I got off the bed, done crying, I waved my hand in that empty closet to see if it was real. To see if I had really lost something so precious, and my hand sliced through the air and I knew I had lost her and I went back to the bed and cried some more. Just recently I put some of my raggedy clothes in there and they look ugly. They look like me.

– excerpt from I Love You More Than You Know, by Jonathan Ames