Goal
Here's what I haven't told anyone:
That day, March 21st, I went out to take pictures by the water. I needed to take pictures because pictures had nothing to do with me and nothing to do with time: the night before everything I'd spent years dreaming of, everything that made up my future, had been whisked away from me. So I didn't exist in time, only moment by moment -- and I didn't want to exist at all. So I became just a camera to capture snapshots of the world outside of me.
Well: I lied. Because as I walked along the wooden sidewalk just above the sand, squinting against the hazy sun that hung like an anime background over the mountains, as I flexed my knees after standing up from the crouch I'd assumed in order to capture a lone pine cone dotting the center of the path, as giggles from a couple of my students out collecting rocks on the beach floated over to me, I made a new future for myself. I decided. A goal. No matter that it was impossible. No matter that I'd spent the past year listing all the reasons it wasn't a good idea to myself over and over. No matter what. I would make this happen. This will happen.
I never told anyone this because it didn't matter. It was just a moment, that one moment on that beach, when I desperately needed a future to latch onto. And when, for the first time, I had the freedom to want what I wanted without contradiction. It didn't matter because I was powerless. I had no concrete way to make this happen. The moment passed and I cycled through other ways of dealing with loss: intense denial, sneaking into the bathroom to cry, whining to friends constantly. I never reformulated my goal as a goal; it fell back into place as a tantalizing and impossible fantasy.
But when she told me that I set out, deliberately, maliciously, to rip her life apart, I flashed back to that surge of conviction. And I couldn't feel sure she was wrong.
So this is my confession. Yet that moment, its simplicity, was beautiful. Twelve hours before I had sprinted in the dark beside the waves, trying to drown out the whole universe. But this feeling was so freeing, so solid. As the conviction settled in me I laughed, actually laughed, mixing with the giggles of the girls by the water.
That day, March 21st, I went out to take pictures by the water. I needed to take pictures because pictures had nothing to do with me and nothing to do with time: the night before everything I'd spent years dreaming of, everything that made up my future, had been whisked away from me. So I didn't exist in time, only moment by moment -- and I didn't want to exist at all. So I became just a camera to capture snapshots of the world outside of me.
Well: I lied. Because as I walked along the wooden sidewalk just above the sand, squinting against the hazy sun that hung like an anime background over the mountains, as I flexed my knees after standing up from the crouch I'd assumed in order to capture a lone pine cone dotting the center of the path, as giggles from a couple of my students out collecting rocks on the beach floated over to me, I made a new future for myself. I decided. A goal. No matter that it was impossible. No matter that I'd spent the past year listing all the reasons it wasn't a good idea to myself over and over. No matter what. I would make this happen. This will happen.
I never told anyone this because it didn't matter. It was just a moment, that one moment on that beach, when I desperately needed a future to latch onto. And when, for the first time, I had the freedom to want what I wanted without contradiction. It didn't matter because I was powerless. I had no concrete way to make this happen. The moment passed and I cycled through other ways of dealing with loss: intense denial, sneaking into the bathroom to cry, whining to friends constantly. I never reformulated my goal as a goal; it fell back into place as a tantalizing and impossible fantasy.
But when she told me that I set out, deliberately, maliciously, to rip her life apart, I flashed back to that surge of conviction. And I couldn't feel sure she was wrong.
So this is my confession. Yet that moment, its simplicity, was beautiful. Twelve hours before I had sprinted in the dark beside the waves, trying to drown out the whole universe. But this feeling was so freeing, so solid. As the conviction settled in me I laughed, actually laughed, mixing with the giggles of the girls by the water.
posted by Ashila at 11:27 PM
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