these are the days

the thing about tom

Lately, I’ve been nostalgic for the present. We’re getting older, my friends and I. Many of us are parents now. For years, I’d claimed that most of my friends were still childless. Recently, I looked around and that ratio is closer to 50:50. When did this happen? How did this happen?

Now, quietly, even the stragglers, the late bloomers, the non-believers are beginning to get married, or begrudgingly consider commitment, or at least acknowledge the specter of one looming milestone or another. Our grandparents are passing onward. Our parents are beginning to get sick.

We’re learning to become more than who we are — diverting the journey to ourselves to become “mother” and “father.” We’re learning a different kind of love, and that any love, in practice, isn’t exactly what was sold to us. We’re learning to grieve, to brave the currents of our deepest fears — of loneliness, of loss, of life slipping through our days.

The mark of much of my life has been longing for some shapeless future life and future self. It began as escapism from a childhood spent feeling misunderstood and isolated while my parents worked long days to get us off of public assistance (aka welfare). When I was in a long-distance relationship in university, I remember telling a friend that it felt like I spent all the moments in between seeing him waiting to see him. “That doesn’t sound like a very fun way to live,” she replied. And yet, that longing has been the wellspring from where my daydreaming and my writing comes from. The first time I workshopped my poetry as an adult, the central theme that the writers identified was yearning — who am I without it?

I want to understand what a casserole is. I want to be able to gush over Christmas presents. Or just to smile without complication. But who am I without the fire and ice, both running through my veins, equalizing into primordial rivers of regrets and “sorry’s” dating back to the first moment I thought I was in love. I try to believe in happiness. I try to hear the word, home. But there is something inside me that wants to kill me, and the only time I feel like I can breathe, I am alone, and there are stars.

Lately, though, I’ve searched for that feeling — the feeling that a great and grand adventure still awaits — and it eludes me. I’m already on a moving train. This is the great and grand adventure. The pieces of my life have, more or less, fallen into place. Despite my resistance, I can see the imperfect plan — one that surprises and moves me — if I squint steadfastly at the horizon.

Every night, before bed, we take Wally out for a walk around the neighborhood. The three of us meander down the alleyway perpendicular to our house, Wally off-leash, the ocean murmuring across the way. Every night, Tom suddenly starts sprinting down the street and Wally chases him. Watching them recede down the road, I think of the day, years from now, when Wally or Tom or the both of them won’t be able to sprint like that anymore; of Wally or Tom or the both of them reminiscing in their own languages about these evenings in Venice. Lately, I’ve been feeling like these moments are memories being lived.

I never dreamed of a wedding or a family of my own, but I hear them at my window, waiting patiently beneath my terrace, their willow-fingers tapping at the glass between us. For as long as I can remember, my imagination extended to finding the love of my life, and then, like the happily ever after in films, the frame fades to nothingness. I suppose I’m living through the nothingness now.

a fun photo i took of tom and jarred, one of the people we owe a lot of our love to.

Years ago, I was broken-hearted and living in a Victorian in the Haight-Ashbury — the same house that Tom lived in during a previous summer, thanks to serendipity and our dear, mutual friend, Jarred. My best friend, Nancy, suggested that I put together a list of the qualities I wanted in my person. It didn’t take long and its simplicity feels laughable today:

this is real.

What I really wanted was to feel home and to be seen — intangibles that I didn’t know how to capture, and still don’t really. In an unfinished and unpublished poem, I tried to describe this feeling:

i’d rather be unloved than unseen
my eyes have never opened
all i have is out-believing the minute hand
all i have is searching

i’ve been searching for centuries
finding myself desperate to submerge in the salt water of your womb
life here has never felt the weight of living
i feel like i could blow away
when the wind storms or 
when i hold my breath

That’s the thing about Tom — he’s become my home. When we’re apart, I feel unmoored. When I talk about love, I’m thinking about Tom; the two have become embarrassingly entangled, interchangeable, a re-wiring as entrenched as the evolution of tastebuds. He’s known me in the mundane moments, the beautiful, the fragile, in the wail of grief, in the tender aftermath, in every defeat and every triumph of existence. Most of all, he has been a mirror of myself, to myself — because of him, I’ve known myself in all of the ordinary and all of the sublime. I’ve seen myself and the vastness of my truth. Last week, my friend, Karina, shared an email with me that took me down a rabbit hole, to emerge at this passage from the great Adrienne Rich:

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

I realize, now, that my yearning was for myself, more than for anything or anyone else. I once felt diffuse, immaterial, on the boundary of imaginary. Now, there is a weight to living. There is a mainstay that keeps in mind mortality, mine and yours. There is a divine drama that creates stories and art out of life. There is the wild and solemn voluptuousness of this world, larger and more good and more bad than we can imagine. There is dreaming new dreams between now and then. My eyes are open. My searching is over. I’m breathing — most days, anyway.