Baby I’m a lost cause
Let me tell you a story.
In eighth grade, when I was still young, impressionable, and highly awkward, I sat next to a boy named Rob in art class. He was, and I suppose even now is, the portrait of the boy I desire and wish to date. A brilliant artist, incredibly talented, with an undernurtured sense of motivation. Self aware, intelligent, witty, passionate, and deep, and with a bite of danger. Rob, you see, was a skater boy and not just any skater boy, but a stoner skater boy. He’d talk to me while we worked, explaining how if he’d just try he could do anything, but he didn’t care enough, how he knew if he wouldn’t do drugs he’d be so much more talented. I would swoon. I would imagine that maybe I could change him. Back then, though, I wasn’t my forward and outgoing self and I certainly wasn’t willing to ask him on a date, and as such my swoonings never amounted to anything.
But what if they had?
I’d probably be an entirely different person, and most likely would have been pulled into the wrong group of friends, done drugs, became an unmotivated little soul as well. I’d probably be relaxed and easy going, less socially awkward, but I wouldn’t be going to college across the country, I bet. I wouldn’t have a full ride scholarship. I might not have met Tony, or Zack, I might not have become my little emotionally distraught self. Not in the same way, at least. Maybe I’d still be an artist, and I never would have focused on my writing. Maybe my little sister would have learned from my mistakes. Maybe she would have followed in my footsteps.
Sometimes I let these hugely important moments of self definition pass me by and I don’t recognize them until years later, sometimes I don’t recognize them at all. It’s 3 AM where I am right now, and I’m thinking that what you know of me would not exist if I would have known then to smile and act flirtatiously.
Would it have been a big loss?
I think so.
I like who I am… and I’m going to start acting like it.
August 6th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Every moment a cross-roads. Some seem, years later, like a major turning-point. And you regret turning left instead of right. Or, if not regret, you think, as you are here, “What if…”
What if I had said, “Yes,” to this or that invitation? What if I had gone to a different school? What if I hadn’t studied as hard, or studied harder or taken this job or that one? What if we had met sooner or later or not at all. What if… if… if.
No regrets, C. It is all grist for the pen. And if you ever have a child of your own… the instant he/she is born, that is the moment, the second, where you aren’t allowed, in a sane internal universe, to go back past in your head-trip of wondering. Because to go back further would erase the child. And to murder in one’s mind… well, that’s still murder, eh?
And when you realize that, you know that regret or even wondering is, frankly, useless anyways. Even without babies involved. Except as grist for the pen. Because if you can’t go back and kill your son in your head, how is it any better, as you have articulated here, to go back and kill the “you” that has come forward to this place?
What would I change? Nothing. Maybe some harsh words silenced instead of spoken to the one I love. Maybe I’d empty the dishwasher without being reminded a few more times.
We are the sum of our parts; our beautiful, fucked up parts. I can’t kill myself, or my real or imagined children, in whole or in any of those parts.
Good post.