Because this year I decided to do “my” version of Hua Hsu’s Stay True, it meant that I was revisiting all my college memories. Not that I actually had a friend die unexpectedly per se. But rather my experience of Berkeley was complicated in the way that I am. I spent most of trying to figure out who I was, often through a cycle of friendships that came changing as I tried on new identities (although the identity wasn’t quite far apart from one another). I wanted to be really me—with all the values and principles. And in doing so, I kept shedding one identity one after another. On the surface, this was mostly shedding friends. It was painful all at once, but sometimes I think at the moment, I found it so freeing and so glorious.
It’s about twenty years later since I graduated. Did I learn anything? You could say that I have matured some and also not. I have gone a bit more inward. The past self might look at this and declare well!
At some point, I thought that it would be hiliarious to name this untitled memoir—so this is how I met your father. But that would literally imply that there would be someone to receive it.
As I type this, I am sitting in that small office of that same apartment on Valencia Street that I have lived in since 2006. It’s the day after Thanksgiving. It’s pretty much two weeks after a second miscarriage and I haven’t figured out the feelings that I have. Is it numbness? Is it grief? Or is it this cold acceptance that I didn’t want to change my life anyway?
Chris and I had taken a walk earlier to experience “Black Friday” on Valencia Street. But partway through, I became annoyed at him looking at the phone which was playing Pokemon Go. Swiping, catching, and all the things. Okay, you get a pass for awhile for using it as a way to escape the world. But what is it then? What is the experience that you and I are supposed to have when we take a walk? What are we supposed to be having? A walk to enjoy the scenery, even if it’s the people on Mission Street (the Latinos just trying to make a living) or on Valencia Street (the bourgeois enjoying a post Thanksgiving day afternoon)? I know that we’re elite and all, but what does it mean when your face is staring down at your phone and your attention is not really there?
I guess it’s all irritation at what our lives could have been and I am back in a place where it’s just full of stuff and it feels impossible to extract ourselves from it. Whether it’s the stuff in the kitchen—too much pots/pans, too much pantry items, too much plants, too much. I am exhausted sometimes when I return when I bump into the things on the stairs, the things in the hallway, the dvds/bluerays/cds stacks and the board games that aren’t ever played. And the ceramics…sure it’s great that he has found an enjoyable pastime, but what now? Are they meant to be used? Sold? Shared? I guess that i am looking for value in them and ultimately the space for all of it.
Maybe I feel squeezed and there are random moments when I think, what would be a life if I didn’t have him? I guess that I would empty, rudderless, less than. And that’s where I draw the line again—am I willing to have that over a life when I need to be tolerated with stuff? The stuff is the thing I guess I have to accept and somehow not suffocate from it. After all, it’s not about the money, it’s not about our differing values.
And that brings me back to my college years, I often was willing to part with someone on the basis of differing values. And maybe that’s what it is here. The values that we differ on are almost at some perspective shallow, the things that we literally carry and hoard. I am willing to let go, mostly because materialism isn’t bogging me as much. But my intensity in trying to prove that I am right is just me and sometimes I feel embarassed by it while he isn’t as pulled by it.
So there it is, I guess. Me in all in one. Me finding me again. And I think again of what I want to be: I want to have my novel, my creative work in the world, to spend time having others see me. What does it matter if the other lives that I have are filled with stuff if it I can be seen? Mostly extra money I guess.