Jay Elias | You can take it with you

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

2002-01-01- 4:56 a.m.

Welcome To 2002

Something troubles me every time I hear Auld Lang Syne. As much as I would like to, I can’t seem to forget my old acquaintances.
I want to let it all go. I want to begin 2002 with a clean slate. I want it all to be an endless highway, blank to the horizon of possible destinations with a limitless number of scenic detours to be taken along the way. I want to hop into 2002 and realize that I have a full tank of gas and enough coffee and cigarettes to keep me going until I get there, and I want there to be wherever I choose it to be.
I’m maudlin I suppose. I know I’m too nostalgic. I’ve filled many of these pages not with thoughts about what is happening to me now, but things that happened to me long ago, in places far from here. I live often wrapped up in my own past, focused not on what I’m thinking or feeling in this moment but on thoughts and feelings I had long ago.
A common aphorism is that time heals all wounds. I wonder if it really does. All of my deepest wounds are in the past. This is by my own design; I have intentionally fashioned a life for myself where I have the smallest possible risk of pain. I don’t make new friends. I don’t date the girls I really want to; hell, I don’t even talk to them. It is easier if you care less. Caring hurts. Caring is hard. Caring about people means that they could betray you, or be killed in a car crash, or wake up one morning and realize it is too hard to care about you, and walk out the door.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care; like all things, its difficulty means that you should. But it takes courage to put yourself out there, and risk things in order to be happy. And that sort of courage is something I haven’t had in tremendous supply lately. The irony is that this is what I am best at. I am (if I may toot my own horn a little) a great friend, a fabulous boyfriend. I remember birthdays and anniversaries. I buy thoughtful gifts. To quote one of the films in my collection (50 points if you can name it), “I’m loyal and true and not too hard to look at.”
But there’s a problem. I seem to be genetically unable to “Get over it”. I sit here and I think about conversations with friends long gone, stolen moments with girls whose phone numbers I no longer know. It is all still too real to me. And I can’t kill it; I can’t get my recollections of all this past out of my head. I can’t pretend that 2002 is a new beginning for me, or that I enter it unencumbered with all of the skeletons stuffed away in my closet.
New Year’s Eve is a holiday that pushes it all into focus. I know that the people I most want to spend it with aren’t going to revel in it all with me. Some of them have left this life, and others have simply left mine, and still more are in faraway places. I joke to my friends about how what I really want is for all of us to gather here in New York to make our lives, and they laugh in that friendly way to indicate that they don’t think I mean it, but I do. Their absence pains me. I want everything to be as I often remember it, as an amalgam of all of our happiest times and finest moments.
But that isn’t the way it is going to be, and of course it wasn’t really the way it was either. The past was no less awkward and frightening and exhilarating as the present is. Its only difference is that it is now a known quantity, and what the future holds is uncertain. And uncertainty is hard for people like me.
The parties are over now. The champagne has been drunk, the ball has dropped, we have sung our songs and kissed our boys and girls. It is now 2002, and for those of us who fell for the magic of Stanley Kubrick we have now lived further into the future that we may have ever imagined as children. My cab brings me back uptown along the FDR, and the lights of Manhattan and the Queensboro shine back at me, and I’m struck once again by the terrible beauty of my home. The lights could be shimmering jewels, refracting the light across sharp facets, or they could simply be shards of broken glass lining the pavement of an alley back in Mt. Pleasant on an evening after I used a phony ID to scam my way into a concert in my youth. I’m not sure I know the difference anymore, or that I care to.
But right now, I’m ok with all of it. Perhaps it is the lingering effects of the champagne, or the party or the goodwill of the season, but it doesn’t bother me. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, things happen. Life happens. Another year goes by, and I care and I love and I mourn and I rejoice. I’m not ok yet with everything that I think and feel about that, but I’m getting better. At midnight, a girl at my party whom I’d never met before kissed me, and it was nice, but I didn’t need it. I would have been ok.
Welcome to 2002. I’ve seen the future, William, and this all turns out reasonably well.
Reasonably?

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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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