He posted again, after about a week of not. He's gone that long without posting, longer even, but time seems to bend between New York and San Francisco. Or maybe it's just that life is finally reconfiguring itself into something that sits still long enough to be recognized for such—and this time around, Michael isn't part of the quotidian or even fortnightly mix, causing me some distress.
This time around, there are enough brand new elements that by sheer number and importance they over-illuminate those parts which (thankfully) have remained. Things that have been lost for a little while have returned, but they draw a small enough arc over time to remain effortlessly companionable. For instance, yesterday I managed to leave the office a bit early and Sam and I got our butts to the gym. There I ran into Allen and Mitch, both of whom I hadn't seen in a very long while specifically because I had not been to the gym in a very long while. There, I ran into R., a big army-sergeant of a man who I dated for a few weeks about a thousand years ago. There I ran into a few others who I recognized solely from the gym. Come to think of it, there are a lot of those casual friendships in my life, where Place is relied upon as the guarantor of famliarity.
That's not so much a condemnation of my own laissez-faire approach as it is a simple statement of San Francisco's almost incestuous social reticulum (which, in turn, makes me wonder if the clear crispness limning New York City for me on our visit there was simply taking a break from the "kelp crawl" of our world-class hamlet here).
This time around, we make it out to more parts of San Francisco on a regular basis. This time around, we do things that I've only talked about doing for ages. This time around, I'm happily installed in a house that's not just mine. This time around, there's love like I've never known. This time around, there's far less wishing because there's far more fulfillment.
There are pieces of the life puzzle that no longer build the picture; friends and confidantes and conversation partners who have moved away, or moved on, or walked away. Places I don't get to as much as I used to. Things that must give up their long ensconcements in the home.
I never get it right when it comes to predicting which I'll miss terribly, which I can do without, etc. Typically it is the people, of course, that I miss the most, but not always. Prince wrote in a song, Sometimes It Snows in April that finishes with
All good things they say, never last...
Love isn't love, til it's past.
Ever the optimist, though, I interpret the first line as an opportunity for new good things to come along. Ever the analyst, I posit that the second line admits that history will decide what was valuable and real.
I miss Tucson, to be honest. Or rather, I miss having a not-San-Francisco place that I can go to that is familiar and exotic. Maybe New York City will fill the bill. I don't miss Chicago at all, even though I lived there for a year.
I miss Michael, of course. If you've ever met Michael, there's nothing further I'd have to say. I miss knowing I can just email him and meet him for coffee and conversation that grows a life of its own. There are friends, close and not, who have literally disappeared from me, who I am strangely neutral and dispassionate about.
But each and all of us have our lives that proceed apace—whether or not we're comfortable with that pace—and all these things, thankfully, demand our time only on occasion.
Whether Happy is achieved by thinking, by doing, by loving, by befriending or by sequestration, we all seem to spend more effort in the attempt than in the analysis of failure.
And that's what gives me certainty that there will always be more good things ahead, and that the past is just the past.
