Enough impermanence

Flourish Vol. 52

Where did I leave you? Back in Texas, I suppose, in the yawning, cicada-soundtracked early days of July. There was two-stepping and the best tacos of your life, hot springs and hikes on the green belt, humidity that felt like the most comforting warm embrace. There were easy friendships and instant connections, plans to stay into the fall, patio drinks and pedal steel guitars and a life in which I wore cowboy boots without irony.

But then there was 7/7, already always a banner day in my brain. The call I’d been waiting for, months in the making: a dream job in New York, a whole-body sigh of relief. And in the early morning hours, exactly as my grandfather had joked, my brother’s daughter is born a few days early. And so they come to share a birthday, the oldest and youngest people I know and love endlessly, on this strange, synchronistic Wednesday brimming with tears of joy.

And just like that, a half-imagined life in Texas dissolve away into the blue-green of the Colorado River, and you ask the people you might have loved there had things been different not to forget you, and you book a vacation from this vacation-like state of existence you’ve been dwelling in for thousands of miles already.

You take the 10 (how much of your life have you spent on this freeway?) through Houston and Baton Rouge, and then there is New Orleans in August, again. Psychics and oysters shucked right in front of you and the Garden District dripping with rain, four years of your life bookended by Louisiana, this place you have always felt tethered to somehow. Time looping and folding back in on itself, as if everything hasn’t changed in ways you always sensed but could never articulate. You drive up through Alabama, past a million boulevards and statues honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, into the verdant green valleys of Tennessee, your best friend beside you, and the world makes sense again for a little while. You take photo booth film strips and make small talk with strangers, you watch the Olympics in crowded bars and the sun set over the honky tonks on Broadway, feeling warm from the Tennessee whiskey and your heart tug just a little when you remember that soon she’ll head back to California, that things won’t ever really be the way they were again. 

Then there is Memphis, Mississippi, all of these forgotten and left-behind places baking beneath the southern sun. But there is hope because there is Nora. She has your family’s eyes and the smallest hands, and your brother is such a natural at fatherhood that it offers hope in a way little else does these days. And you realize, after a year of sleeping in other people’s homes, after months on the road, you want something to call your own. You are hungry for permanence; for a place to lay your head at night, for someone whose hands feel like home. You have a heart-to-heart with your twin, and he tells you what you need to hear, that you are scared and you are running back to Texas to put off starting the rest of your life. Even though, had you scripted it out, this is exactly how your story would have gone. And you know it’s true, because when you see your future you see New York, and so you flip your plans on their head, as you are wont to do, as rain and thunder crack the dark southern sky. And the next day you drive to St. Louis, and then Kansas City, where you watch a country band play during the football game, people you’ll never meet drinking and laughing in the midwestern twilight, and you wonder whether anyone can see you here.

In Nebraska you take a detour off the interstate to the home where your mother grew up, in a town as small as the one you spent so many years trying to escape. There’s a for sale sign in the yard, and heavy curtains conceal its insides, but you remember the stories of how your mother and her sisters would play basketball in the attic of this massive Victorian. You close your eyes and you try to picture her as a child, on these very same sidewalks, beneath this infinite sky. You drive past towering corn stalks as tall as men to the manufacturing plant where your grandfather worked, at the same company where your first boyfriend would work someday, too. Time feels as flat as the prairies, and you wonder about all the synchronicities. Whether you’re the only one who notices them. 

In Cheyenne the moon is a crescent and you drink beer beside the train tracks and you feel your body buzzing across the horizon of this wide open state. You laugh to yourself about how, from Texas to Tennessee to this sparsely-populated place whose slogan is forever west, there is a yearning to claim the tassels and two-step, the cowboys and boots, in a way that has little to do with geography. How maybe the west has always been a state of mind, or something like that. That night you get a text from a man you haven’t talked to in years— four years to be exact — and you wonder about the synchronicities again. The last time he appeared out of the blue you were on your way to New York for the very first time, about to fall in love with a city you had already convinced yourself you’d hate. He tells you he’s moving to New York, too, and you laugh at this grand cosmic joke, and you cautiously add a point in the column for fate.

You drive across the rest of Wyoming, and summer turns to winter turns to pouring rain somewhere near Shoshani, a mostly-abandoned town with a theater that reads “Haunted!” and the brightest lightning you’ve ever seen cracks the plains and neon bar signs illuminate the night. In Jackson, you watch the sun set over the valley, over the green slopes that are snow-covered come winter, and the bartender buys you a beer but you wish there were someone to share this golden hour with, to watch the world turn lilac and blue. At night the woods are almost too cold to sleep in, but you wake to the sun over the Grand Tetons, and you drive to Yellowstone and you feel the mountain air expand in your lungs. You have no cell service and haven’t decided where you’re sleeping that night, and so you drive to the Montana border, and in an act of spontaneity or defiance or both, you just keep pushing west. 

It takes just minutes to decide that Montana is maybe the most beautiful place you’ve ever been; those mist-shrouded mountains take your breath away and in a corner of your mind you start to daydream about a life up here, the way you did in Texas, the way you leave a little piece of your heart in every place you love. You fall in love too easily, it’s true, and you move on from each new love perhaps a bit too easily, too, drafting a thousand lives that never come to fruition. And it occurs to you somewhere in Nebraska, or maybe Iowa, that you cannot be everywhere at once and wonder why there is not enough of you to go around. You cannot be nowhere and wonder why no one remembers your name.

In the tranquility, the nowhere-ness, it grows ever-louder, ever-impatient: my real life, the life that is waiting for the person I’ve become while traversing down all these roads and back again. And so I wake to a blue morning in Montana where the air is the purest thing I’ve ever breathed, to deer and a grizzly cub loping around a rushing creek. I have lunch in Idaho, coffee in Washington, dinner in the high desert of Oregon, and then I’m home again. Or back again, two months since I left, with nearly 10,000 miles and 17 states in the rearview now. I cling to my pets, I meet my friends for farewell drinks, I have a final session with my therapist of four years. I tape up boxes and tie things up in neat little bows—and I say little prayers that they’ll hold. When there’s nothing left to do, I book a one-way flight.

All around me life is moving forward, daily reminder that, ultimately, permanence is an illusion. Gone are the days of decades-long careers, and maybe lifelong marriages, too. The neighborhoods you could afford to call home forever. The people you thought you knew, the things you thought you’d always want. There are wildfires torching the wilderness you camped in weeks before, red skies in autumn again. New Orleans is disappearing into the sea, and all the loss, the thought of all the things we’ll lose, hollows you out. Forever wars, fights over vaccines, family you don’t talk to anymore, and you wish things could be simple again. Or maybe it was just that you knew so much less back then.

If impermanence is the only guarantee, then perhaps this pendulum will swing the other way soon, because things can’t stay wrong forever. There is hope on another coast, a new home, brownstones and A-frames, fall plans, 28, things all coming full circle and falling into place. The next level, a new chapter, fiction turned reality and a life finally brought to fruition. Maybe nothing gold can stay, but it’ll be back again someday.

If there was evеr such a feckless thing as night in the aftеrnoon
Still I might stretch out the saltwater taffied ends of every hour with you

(Throwing in a bonus track as an ode to my beloved steel pedal guitar/love letter to some simpler time. Come for the sublime music, stay for the equally-lovely comments.)

-Liv