Time

The leaves come swirling towards me as I shield my face from the wind. It is cold. The trees are almost bare. The sky is gray and I can smell fires burning in the big houses on the hill. “Winter is coming quickly,” I think to myself, “it is much colder this week than last.” Snow has already started to fall in the mountains, but I live in the valley, I have not seen it.
As I walk along, I think about how much I have changed. My feelings, my attitude, even my face seems different somehow. I feel like a butterfly who yesterday was just a lowly caterpillar. I have found my wings, my voice. The trees sway in the wind as I think of the season past, and the season to begin. I suddenly get a chill and wrap my scarf tighter around my neck. After a shortcut through the woods, I arrive at my destination, a cozy cottage on the outskirts of town.
I knock, and the door opens immediately. Inside, a fire is going and everyone is chattering merrily to each other. They turn to me and smile; it’s been a long time. They remember me, but they know it is not the me they knew. I wonder why I even came. “I knew this would never work,” I think to myself sadly. I nestle on the couch with a mug of hot cocoa.
How could I possibly imagine that all of the history I have with these people would be enough to allow us to pick up where we left off? And why would I want to? These people never liked me, really. Some sympathized with the plight of an unordinary girl, but most of them just laughed or pretended not to see. Who could blame them? Those were definitely my awkward years; but aren’t they tough for everyone? But now, after so many years, I have found myself in all the words of my peers, and it seems I am nothing like what they said I was or would be.
Someone sits down next to me. I look up from my thoughts. He smiles. I can’t remember how I know him, but he seems familiar. I think back, many years before, and remember. This was a friend, someone that I had shared a lot with. He helped me, he saved me. I was floating off into oblivion and he grabbed me and pulled me back to solid ground. I want to thank him for that. I open my mouth to speak, but he turns away.
How simply, then, I remembered why we had been driven apart. Time. That simple word had somehow been my enemy that day. How much time I had spent separating myself from the others, trying to be independent. I let myself realize, for the first time, that it was them I needed, not solitude. What I had always thought I feared, despised, now I realize that that was not it at all. The fact was, I needed them, all of them.
When I return home later that night, my thoughts are still centered around what had transpired. I had wanted to talk to him for years, today was my chance and I blew it. No, not me, I didn’t blow it. Time did. It had been too long, yes, that was my excuse. The smile we shared was just a smile between friendly faces, a reminder of a time so far in the past, it seemed like a dream. It’s funny how life changes. Everything seems perfect, then the world turns upside-down.
My friends had told me time and again that I needed to make peace with my enemies, so that I could make peace for myself. I didn’t care. I was not going to open myself up to them once more, just to be hurt again, like so many times before. I thought my heart was battered and bruised from years of deep-seated unrest. Now I realized that I was truly stronger for it, and wiser.
This experience seems to have sparked some nostalgia in me. Over the next few days I spend many long hours sifting through items and memories from my distant past. How, I wonder as I sift through old favorites, had I let this past fall away like sand in a powerful tide? Again, the answer was time. Too much time spent trying to change myself to fit the new environments I had been shoved into, willingly or not, and all the while no one noticing the efforts that engulfed my life like a flame. The pressures to mature in time, make good use of time, to mold my life around that invisible measure of worth.
Why I had tried to change so much is beyond my comprehension. I was always the one to encourage others to stand up for what they believed in, to be themselves. I was the one who needed my advice the most, but I was the one not paying any attention to it. Maybe I thought that if I changed, then people would change. If I had just been myself, my true self, not just a glimmer of my soul passing through, then maybe life would have been different. I wanted everyone to like me, really I did, but I was so blind-sighted by my own ideas of how the good life should be, that I didn’t see that I had no need to change. The people who liked me liked me for who I was, not who I was trying to become, and those were the only people who ever mattered in the first place.
Things aren’t always what they seem, and as I look back on my teenage years, I realize that more than ever.
Many people wish they could go back, start again somehow. I am one of those people. If I had known then what I know now, life could have been different. We only get one shot at life. Whether it turns out how we want it to or it is totally different from what we expected, most people still are not satisfied. Sometimes I am, of course, just not always.
What would have been better? That’s what I’d like to know. Sometimes I wish I could see what I would be like if not for that tiniest detail. Sometimes, however, I think it is better not to see. What if I like how my life would have been better than I like the way it is? I guess there are no re-deals in real life; you just play the cards you’ve got.
This time in my life is apparently a time for soul searching. I need to get away. Leave all the stress of my life in my dust and just go. Maybe then I will find myself, my true self, so that life will not be such a waste.
I sit in the quiet of my parents’ house, the walls of which had seen my rollercoaster teenage years, just thinking. Many events of my life so far come to mind as I reflect. Scenes of trial, triumph, and the learning of lessons you can’t learn in school. One of those lessons, oddly enough, was that you can’t live in the past. Man, am I doing a good job of putting that lesson to work!
Here I am again, wasting time. Precious minutes are passing and all I can do is think of things that happened long ago.
What started me on this period of reflection anyways, I wonder. The party. That party I never should have gone to. And him. One of those faces from my past that seems to bring out the strangest moods in me. I reach for the phone and stop. Who would I call? My friends don’t know him…and I don’t know his number. I suddenly feel alone. What has happened to me? I haven’t slept in days. All I can think about is…
No, I won’t let that happen…I won’t be sucked into these thoughts like a dust bunny to a vacuum cleaner. I can’t…not now, not ever. I forced these same feelings down so many years ago…they should be gone by now…
My phone rings. An operator asks me if I’d like to accept the charges. I agree. When the caller gets through, a strangely familiar male voice asks me to meet him at the center of town tomorrow, then hangs up. I slowly put down the phone and smile. It was him.
I arrive on the town green while the morning mist is still lingering in the chill winter air. I sit on the bench by the fountain to wait, but I don’t have to wait long. Out of the mist he walks, solemn with purpose. He steps up beside me as I stand. We exchange glances and start walking, not a word said between us. It had been so long, you would think we would need to catch up, but there was no need to speak. The silence spoke louder than words ever could. We regretted that we had let ourselves drift this far apart. We longed for things to be as they once were, only, they never could be.
All I can think about is who is walking beside me. I hadn’t said a word to him…not at the party, not yet that day. I must have been crazy to think things could ever be like they used to be. He suddenly stops and turns to me. I face him and he embraces me. Those arms I had not felt in years engulf me in a warm sign of lingering affection.
It was then that I knew why it had to be the way it was. We can’t live in the past, but we first have to acknowledge it so we can move on. He releases me and turns away. His head down, he starts to walk back in the direction he had come. It takes every bit of my strength to keep me from running after him. It had to be like this. We had to be together so we could be apart. I know it, but not even the smallest part of my being wants to believe it. I sigh and turn as a tear rolls down my cheek and I walk reluctantly into the lingering mist.
This whole blast from the past was crazy. Yes… that’s it, crazy. I was crazy to think it would ever work out in the first place, crazy to hold on so long, crazy for meeting him on the green, and crazy for feeling this way. I endured this silent encounter with the past to get closure, but now, in a way, I wanted him more.
Did he want me too? Is that why he called? Is it something else? Is there something hidden behind his silent façade?
Again I retreat to the large box of memories stowed in my closet. As I dig carefully through it, my hand closes on a thin object near the bottom. I fish it out and see that it is a delicately folded index card. I slowly open it and reveal the message inside. Tears flood my eyes as I read the words so faded by time. This simple note is now a reminder of how much of a role time plays in our lives. Without realizing it, when I received this note, I was running out of time with a very special person: the one whose handwriting was now barely legible.
That friend of mine was there one day and the next, I found out he was leaving, for good. I had expected to nurture the fragile friendship we shared until graduation, so it would be strong enough to then defeat the test of time that it had failed so miserably the summer before. But, without warning, I was told by another classmate that it was my friend’s last day on campus, and that he would be leaving at four that afternoon and never coming back. I tried to say goodbye, but, while I choked out these last words to the one whom I cared so much about, he changed the tone of the conversation and left me with nothing but a brief, friendly description of the next stage in his life; not even a goodbye. At that moment, although his life was changing, it seemed like part of mine, in a way, was over.
Again the issue of time tearing friends apart rings in my head. If only I hadn’t wasted time being angry at him for no reason, not saying what I needed to and saying what I didn’t have to say. In my mind, I had thrown away the precious year and a half that I knew him, and the feeble attempt at closure that I endured that day only left me wanting more.
This situation possibly held the opposite meaning than that of the most recent events of my present. While in that respect, I had to be with the one I cared for so we could be apart, maybe in this respect, I had to be away from this friend so that we could one day be together.
Being slightly depressed, I jump in my car and just start driving. Rain begins to pelt my windshield as tears run down my cheeks. It seemed that every time there was something in my life worth all the trouble, it was taken away. I drive farther and faster as the afternoon turns to night and the rain keeps beating down on my car. The world seems to blur into a watery mist as the rain-soaked windshield and my tears come between my eyes and the road.
At dawn, I realize that I have no idea where I am. My driving had led me to the same place that my thoughts had; nowhere. I see a glimmer of water to my left and decide to pull off the highway. I drive through the winding roads of a quaint town, hidden from the outside world by mountains and rock faces. Still upset, I stumble bleary-eyed out of my car and up a winding wooded path which leads, as I soon found out, to a cluster of waterfalls. Here I sit with my feet in the swirling pools of clean, fresh water and I contemplate my plans for the day. I can try to find my way home now, or I can find a place in this small town to just rest for a while. Maybe I can find a little Bed and Breakfast and wait out my reflective period in solitude.
I indeed find a place to spend the night, once I had fled my mountain spring retreat. I feebly ask the kindly old woman at the desk if she could tell me where I was. She smiles, a certain amount of pity in her eyes when she noticed my tear-streaked face, and tells me that I am in a town about three hours from the ocean, and twice as many from my home. Sighing, I take my skeleton key in hand and slump up the stairs to my room. I collapse on the white and blue bedspread and fall asleep with much effort, as my mind is still winding its way around my past.
I sleep most of that day and when I awake I feel no more rested than I had when I lay down. I walk across the street to the little burger joint there and slowly eat the daily dinner special, watching in disgust as a couple, just a few years younger than me, ignored their food to stare lovingly into each other’s eyes. I pay my bill and walk back across the street to the Bed & Breakfast. I go upstairs and crawl back into bed muttering to myself about how unfair it was that people younger than me had found love when I had yet to find the one for me.
I wake up early the next morning and as I check out I ask the sweet, wrinkled lady at the desk for directions to the nearest beach.
I figure I have already gone this far from home, and I really do need a break, so I get into my car and head back to the highway. The sun is shining and the sky is a crystal blue; “Marseille blue” I call it. It reminds me of the color that the sky always seemed to be in that beautiful seaside city. France is one of my favorite places in the world, and the city of Marseille is, I believe, France’s crowning jewel.
With the sky this beautiful hue and the memories of my time spent in Marseille, I can’t help but smile. It makes me laugh then, too, because I was so sad and reflective that it seems too silly to be happy! But who can be sad when they are looking back on time spent on the Mediterranean Sea? Or time spent with some of your favorite people, and a new acquaintance who would lead me to someone I was destined to meet?
I arrive at the beach that the kind old woman had suggested and am not disappointed. Although this beach pales greatly in comparison to the striking rock formations and sparkling clear water of the Mediterranean island beaches, its outcroppings of steel-gray rocks and stretch of cornmeal sand was what was to be expected, and even admired, on the North East American coast.
After flinging open my car door, I kick my shoes off and go running towards the blue-green water. I splash in nearly to my knees, the hem of my jean Capri pants darkened in the salt water. Wading back towards the beach until the water sat just above my ankles I begin to walk in the water parallel to the strip of sand. When I sense that I am away from the parking lot enough to not solicit any interruptions, I leave the water for the sun-warmed dry sand and stretch out on my back, staring into the sparse clouds floating high above.
Looking at the sky reminded me of Marseille again, but this time my thoughts turned more towards the odd connection that that trip had left me with. I had met a young man when I was in France, and it came out in conversation that he had a friend from long ago that, by a strange twist of fate, I was about to join as a fellow student at a university. He told me to meet this friend of his and say hello for him. I figured that I would meet this person, give him the friendly message from his boyhood chum, and we would wave to each other when we passed in the hallways but that that would pretty much be the extent of our friendship. How wrong I truly was!
This strange friendship that was sparked by a common bond was continually fed by common bonds as well. It seemed as though every now and then we discovered a new way we were connected through people that we knew. Unfortunately, these connections were not enough to bind us to each other with a friendship that would outlive time itself. The friendship was whirlwind, a hurricane of feelings and moments and words, until the day the words, the looks, the smiles ceased. What happened to cause the ending of this strange friendship is still a mystery to this day. Even if we had left the tatters of our friendship and moved on while still on speaking terms, there would have been no way that we could return to the glory days, the first few months. The calm before the storm. The storm of feelings just not returned, no matter how strong they were. But all things happen for a reason, or in this case, don’t happen, and the outcome I got the first and only time around is what I am blessed or cursed to keep.
After laying there a bit, I sigh and pull myself to my feet, brushing the sand off the back of my jeans. The sun is setting and I still have to walk back to the parking lot and find my car. I walk along in silence, and there is an inward silence to match. Seems all my deep reflection in the serene locations I had found had done me well. I no longer felt cheated by time, but I feel as though the time I had felt was wasted was more of a crash course for life than a pointless side-trip. As I now feel ready to face my present and my future without regretting my past, I decide that I would at last drive home.
After a long drive, I arrive back in my hometown with a new sense of self, accessorized with a smile. I feel it truly is time to be heading to where I now belonged, my home, not the home of my past.
I pack up my suitcase and load it into the car I had been using on my little sabbatical from my own life. The friends I was staying with drive me to the airport and wish me well as I go to the desk to inquire about getting a flight home.
Lucky for me, there was an empty seat on the next flight to the place I call home. I go through all the usual airport routines and settle in aboard the plane and smile at the fact that this time I truly was home-ward bound.
As the plane climbs up through the cloud cover, I am absolutely amazed at what I see. The clouds are like giant piles of softest cotton laid out beneath our little plane. The sun shines in through my window, glancing off the silver wing, somewhat painfully straight into my eye, and yet I am not upset. The sun seems more beautiful, more bright from up here, high above the smog and the bustle of people down below. Staring out the window, I am amazed by the power the clouds seemed to hold. I would like to appear that powerful, I muse, and yet still look that soft. I feel as though I had become more powerful through all the painful revelations of the last week. I realize now that some of the lessons I thought I had learned really weren’t the lesson at all. Yes, it is true that you shouldn’t live in the past, but that doesn’t mean you can’t visit it every now and then in your dreams, whether waking or sleeping. And it wasn’t that I had to be away from that boy in high school in order to be with him some day, I had to be away from him because that was the only way I was ever going to find my own independence, my own self. I realize now that I wouldn’t change a thing. My life is right, just the way it is. If I wasn’t how I am, I wouldn’t be me, and that is one of the most important things after all, just being yourself.
Why I couldn’t have realized who I was before it was too late is beyond me. As I continue to stare out the window of the airplane my mind drifts back once again to the man to whom I was so connected, the man who is now just a memory of a friendship. I did that. I made things the way they were, I remember. It wasn’t a mystery, it was me! Me and my disease, the disease of my sanity. Where I lost myself I really don’t know, and now that I’ve found myself things are bound to get better, but I cant help thinking of that night, that horrible night, when I realized it was all me. Everything was. Every person that had gone away did not leave me on their terms, as I had so assumed. They left me because I pushed them away. I pushed hard. I didn’t even realize I was doing it! And now after years of therapy and a period of reflection I have truly found myself and I wish I could go back again and change things. Make things the way they should have been. But here I go again, with the same self-doubts and longings from years past, and I still haven’t forgiven myself for what I’ve done. It has been years! Plenty of years! And plenty of therapy has spanned the time. Forgiveness for myself is past due, but the time that has passed has not eased the pain. Time. Everything centers around time. Now, I don’t care as much about how time measures us, or how it is wasted, I only care about going back in time. I guess it’s for a better reason now, as I reflect I remember that I was in love. I still am! And with a man who never loved me in return. Again I wonder what would have been different if not for the slightest detail, or in this case, a big event that changed the course of what seemed like my world. That one night, the night that was planned for me, that I was forced into. That night when my feelings were revealed, at least in part. What would have been different if things were not forced into the open, if we never had to worry about him making me upset with the little things he did.
I was convinced that he was the final destination on my journey to love. He didn’t even entertain the idea of being a stop on the path. It broke my heart to hear his words, telling me that everything I had secretly hoped for would never come true. The sad part is, he never knew just how much he hurt me because he never knew how much I cared. Sure, he knew I liked him, but it was so much more than that. It still is! I just can’t let go of his memory, the little moments we shared, the way his eyes sparkled in the Wednesday night sunset. The way seeing him walk by would make my heart leap, and still would if I saw him today. I tried so hard to let go, to leave my feelings for him far behind, but it didn’t work. Nothing I tried could loosen my grasp from this man.
When I arrive back home I am in a funk once again. I thought I had just learned the lessons I needed to learn! I had been so confident in myself the way I was, until I remembered that who I was is what caused me to lose what I truly believe was the best person that ever came into my life.