"One day you wake up and realize that your life hasn't been a lie, really, so much as a broken promise."
I liked that so much, I thought I'd quote me.
I've been whining. Nobody likes a whiner, so I will stop. . . soon. Really soon. But the rain continues and everything is sullen and blue-gray and I can't get off the mark. And I don't know why I am complaining, really. I took ten of these photos and they all came out great. It excites me somewhere, and I am ready to do a series called "Swim Club." Everything, though, takes so long.
OK. I'm done. Let's move on, shan't we?
On Sunday, everyone was going home. Graduation weekend was over, and now, we were adults. That is how it seemed, at least, and many of us were seeing one another for the last time. We had just been freed from the greatest structure of our lives.
Abby had gone home, too, to what was now her home, an apartment she shared with another girl, and she had given me her number. "Call me," she said. "Come see me."
It was known that I had spent the night with Abby, and people gave me that look of greedy carnality, but nothing like that had happened. How do you explain that to people, I wondered? And, of course, I didn't really wish to. Abby and I had talked and talked and talked, telling each other of what we thought of as ourselves, things you could not see by looking, things we hoped were true.
I stayed all day watching as people pack their cars, saw John and his crew left bedraggled by their hallucinatory experience. Their was a sadness to the way they looked, but there was a general sadness all around, I thought. No, not a sadness, exactly, but an enervated melancholy that felt like the slow pull of an ocean surf, the dreamlike rising and falling of big waves before they break upon the shore.
I stayed all day and watched until I was certain that everyone was gone. It was strange to me, a silliness, I knew, for I had not enjoyed high school, had not really taken part, but here I waited like some maudlin overseer watching the last lonely moments of a fading era disappear.
At sunset, I went to my car. It was Sunday. Everything was waiting.
I know this is going to make me sound silly but I got goosebumps when I read your entry today. That expectant feeling touched my soul for some reason. It's what we all want right? Everything waiting, the possibilities, the opportunities? So many wasted but always hopeful? Beautiful writing...and for the record, I'm very excited about your swim club series.
ReplyDeleteYes, we look forward to the future at the same time that we create the past, rework it, regret it, reshape it. But we all think to outlive it somehow, to make a break and a new beginning. But Faulkner taught us much about the follies of that.
ReplyDelete"Swim Club." I hope so.