The other day I was at Lili's house. Sitting out on her porch eating rice and hard-boiled eggs. Carrots in garlic and butter. Sauteed mushrooms. I was talking about my old friends from high school. The ones I still see, the ones I don't.
It reaches me more rarely these days: when the moment goes still, when I reach something quiet in my heart, able to discern something. Microscopically around me life proceeds in motion. Through the air a restless breeze, and above us the shifting foliage, marginally, undeniably, changing the light. The blue of the sky so blue. I watched a bunny appear in the grass, its twin ears barely visible. Words emptying from my mouth, dissipating. "I don’t walk, I fly, I become another, transfigured." Mahmoud Darwish wrote those lines. I think: "I am no I in ascension's presence." Ascension belongs to Lili like a birthright; it's this quiet that lives within her, as natural as a quality of character.
Nostalgia. I wonder if it is the key to living again, shaking off the dust. Something was killed in me recently from the burnout of last semester. For five years I've been carrying something around like a birthright. The drive to succeed, to prove myself. The death of my artistic self and its sublimation into mathematical proof. And now—ironically—at the start of my master's, I see it's possible that I no longer have to live this way, feeling nauseated by work. But I'm not ready yet to face anything. I am healthier than ever. I lay around scrolling on my phone and feel mostly dead. Only deadlifts liven me, allow me to connect to my body, the barbell in my hands, strapless, the push through the legs, the pull which comes out of nowhere from me, allows me to lift 2 plates.
But what was I talking about? Nostalgia. The Little My pin on my green jacket, given to me by an ex. My childhood bedroom full of dusty paintings. The book full of recipes that Lili and I made. The walk home from high school, which at 10 pm I completed recently, pain shooting up my right ankle. My personal font of chronic pain. Still busted from cross country running and a rock-climbing fall last year, mildly responsive to physiotherapy. The bridge is sublime at night, particularly while listening to "Anthems For a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl". We used to cut across the field across from the mostly abandoned factory. I used to stare at its broken windows and wonder why people still parked in its parking lot, still appeared to work there. Now the field is fenced off, which disappoints me, like a rebuke from Central Authorities; the university bought the plot of land to develop. I walk by the house where my best friend used to live, before they moved to Edmonton, before we grew farther apart.
So much is mysterious to me. I think about O. His absence is as consistent as a toothache. I wonder sometimes at how he's changed me, so consistently, more than 4 years of therapy, which I recently stopped needing. I don't skip meals. I don't balk at eating a lot of food anymore. I feel generally good about my looks. I enjoy my new quad definition. No longer the same compulsion to apologize, to say sorry, to tell white lies, to hedge my bets. How easy it is to end the obfuscation and the metaphors if you patiently affirm the truth over and over. Or if someone else does.
One would think that I'd be doing a lot with this newfound freedom. Instead I feel braindead. I sort of can relate this somehow to when I was 14 and stopped having a severe eating disorder. You would think I would be filled with victorious feeling, which I was. But also: I had no hobbies. I had developed this fascinating part-time job of reading about and thinking about and planning and fantasizing about food and diet and exercise. Now that was all gone. I felt like an empty shell of myself. I had no narratives except the narrative of just continuing to live. And that was never satisfying to me: just continuing to live.
The other day I watched I Saw the TV Glow. An homage to David Lynch and, I think, Buffy the Vampire-Slayer? A lot of beautiful purple lighting. The movie is more suspense than horror, a series of snapshots that begins with two teenagers in high school who bond over a TV show called the Pink Opaque. The soundtrack alone is worth listening to. I keep thinking about a speech by one of the main characters, after he was prodded about his sexuality: "When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides. I know there's nothing there, but I'm still too nervous to open myself up to check."
Maybe nostalgia is that shovel. Maybe it’s memory, which allows us to liberate ourselves from ourselves. I keep on driving a car to the gym and remembering I could still be living in Ontario, that I never had to move. I visit my old friend and talk to him with affection, glad for his company. I know I’ll return to living to Montreal and that one day I’ll be nostalgic for all the day-to-day suffering. I always need to escape my life to feel some positive feeling for it. My strategy has always been to outlive the pain.