Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-01-19- 1:49 p.m.

Learning To Breath Through Breaking

The toughest thing to keep in mind is that there are a million of these studio apartments in New York, all of them with the same white walls and ceilings and the same mismatched furniture. And all of them are a tad too full, from boys and girls just like me who came from somewhere where they were bigger and the world smaller.
And these overstuffed apartments with their white walls and hand me down furniture are not without their grace, their own aplomb. We all have a little unique style, a touch of our own class. I have this charcoal drawing of Pablo Picasso that my great-grandfather did, and some framed handbills for a Dali exhibit that I brought home with me from Italy when I was a kid. I’ve got a watercolor of a canal in Venice, and a vintage poster for The Maltese Falcon. And any number of others have any number of similar things, just tiny treasures of the importance of self, of sentiment, that none of us can make fun of because there really is a bit of art there.
Chuck Palanhiuk is wrong; each of us is a unique snowflake. None of us are the same person, even if I know in my heart of hearts that I’m a cliché. But there we are, alike and yet a form of complexity all our own. We each care a little differently; all of us love and hate and share and hoard after our own fashion.
But none of us are special. Think about all those single and unique flakes of snow. What is their destiny? To be shoveled off the walk. To be salted and plowed, and eventually to melt. Every once in a long while, a single flake of snow may be in the foreground of a photograph, or be the one that lands with its brethren to snap a twig under their collective weight. Snowflakes may be molded together to form a snowman on a chilly afternoon, or to form a playful snowball for a cheery evening among friends. But for each unique snowflake, the odds are just as good that their destiny is no greater than to be a place for someone’s dog to piss. Such is the life of a snowflake. So it goes. The unrelenting march of time sooner or later grinds all that is in its path into submission.
But the most difficult thing to know is that even that, even your extra bit of distinction, even that if the world should endure a million years there will never be anyone quite like you, isn’t enough to make you special. The hardest thing that I have found about being an adult isn’t that it isn’t at all like I imagined it would be or how tough it is. The hardest thing is to realize how downright pedestrian you and your problems really are. There are a million studio apartments filled with unfulfilled dreams; a hundred million hearts that have been broken yet still beat; a billion voices crying out in the wilderness begging to be heard. We don’t think in stereotypes sometimes because we’re bad people. We think in stereotypes because we must. We think in stereotypes because that is what we are; we are all nothing more than repetitions on a theme.
We’re all out there talking about the same things. Perhaps I can say it better than you; more likely, you’re out there saying it better than me. I don’t know the answer, much less have a means to judge. But it isn’t really what matters. This is in a way my story, as different and as unique as any other. But it is the same as your own, nonetheless. For as different as you and I are, there is only one thing that we can ever seem to talk or write about. It is our humanity, our essential snowflakeyness, that is our own obsession.
Some days I think about how I spent the bulk of my adolescence trying to prove to everyone how special I was, and how it seems that the grand realization of my adulthood is that, all that time, I was just trying to hoodwink everybody. Sorry, folks. I didn’t mean to rip you off.

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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