My realistic side keeps reminding me that I should stop wishing for time to pass or stop at my will. I guess I've been pretty rude to it due to the way I've been ignoring that sound advice. The present is a very complicated moment to live in, it's this tedious sort of balancing act caught in between comparisons to the past and often impractical notions of the future where the flow of time shows you your mistakes right after you've already made them.
For some reason we humans never seem to learn from these mistakes and no matter how things have resulted in the past we keep making our foolish plans and doing the same things expecting different results. That's the definition of insanity you know. It's not at all reassuring to think of where you thought you'd be in the present when you go back a few years. I was going to get emancipated or run away from home when I was 15. I was going to go to Ithacha in New York and raise hell like the kids who watched Mario Savio's speech and run for office after I got older. My major was going to be Political Science, and I was going to be an RA to help pay for school. I was going to be a comic book artist too, and maybe even write them as well, I wanted to translate stories from thoughts to images and words about a universe where everything was connected.
I was going to marry the boy I was in love with, he even picked out rings, they had celtic knots on them. He was going to be an actor. That was my last actual relationship. I think I was 20 when we broke up, I don't remember who actually ended it. It might have been me. I was going to be a radical story of success in the face of opposition. I was going to be in those history books where I learned about the Jacobins, Lenin and Che. I was going to lead the revolution. I still haven't quite gotten over that one yet. I am not the person I thought I'd be at 22 years old. No matter how many plans I make I have the perspective of one who's always ended up doing something unplanned, rejecting the perfect equations I'd drawn for myself to come up with results that simply appeared before me. I didn't get into Itacha, not even UCR for fuck's sake. My job couldn't have supported independence, I got a 2 in AP studio art and the first love became the old friend. Instead I chose a school I'd only applied to due to a suggestion from my guidance counselor, had a year of therapy to learn to coexist with my family, fell in love with history, did drugs, got tattoos and began to approach affection from an outside perspective rather then participating. Despite a relatively random sequence of events that led me to this point I am occupying in space and time I still find myself attempting to organize my future in ways that make sense following the intentions and desires I currently feel. Silly, huh? By definition I'm insane. I've started to think that it's not our mistakes that we ultimately learn from, it's our dreams, or at least the instants where we realize that they didn't come true because there never really was a chance in hell. And I think what we learn from that is that it didn't matter anyways. No amount of regret can alter the conditions of the here and now, the only way that would ever work is if you could regret a decision before you made it.
No comments:
Post a Comment