when i start celebrating my memory

living in the fullness — not in the grief – getting back into the moments

I keep saying other people are going to forget when in fact, I am the one who has forgotten

*****

We’re standing at the L stop waiting for the train to carry us back into Brooklyn after a night out. It was probably going to just be a run of the mill trek back, where I’d be eventually left with my thoughts on the train. Turns out though, Cass is a new friend I’ve made recently and she’s out tonight too, and she lives near me. I like her but didn’t know much about her really until tonight. She’s from southern California (where I’d lived for 5 years myself) and moved to New York recently and we’d met two months ago at a New Year’s Week bar crawl and I liked her vibe enough. Tonight, she by chance had seen me tweet about going to Chess Club after seeing another friend say she invited a bunch of girls. Which, coincidentally, was at a venue near the “office hours” at McSorley’s in East Village that I regularly attend. We the Twitter folk have been gathering every Tuesday at 6:30pm to chat and shoot the shit over beers (come sometime if you’d like).

I enjoy hosting. I enjoy bringing people together. I enjoy doing it like I’m a marathon runner without a real second thought about what I’ve been building. I enjoy being on autopilot so of course I was down to see friends come together. Upon Cass texting me that night as Chess Club was a 6 minute walk away from McSorley’s that she was going to go, I of course said yes. She hadn’t been to McSorley’s before, and I invited her to sit with the last of our crew as we parted ways for the night, five of us embarking over to Chess Club with her. I don’t play chess, but I like going just in case I’ll one day be able to be the kind of person who can get through a game without having a panic attack. We stood around with some other people for an hour watching the scene of all the different players squinting hunched over their boards. I noticed I didn’t feel much. We decided to leave. My friend Em was new to the friend crew, and she and Cass got along great. I was happy about this.

Em was headed in the other direction, so we said goodbye at the F train stop as we heard the rumble of our own train uptown-bound. Cass and I stood around and talked briefly about our love lives for a few minutes before I made a passing comment about how I —

****

Ugh…. I actually can’t remember anymore how we got on this topic.

All I can tell you is that at some point in the convo, Cass had noted how I am indeed observant and easy to talk to. I know I am the second one. Hearing the first one completely shocked, frankly stunned, me.

The callback that greatly affected me on an uncommon level had come when Em, Cass and I talked about how I pull them out of their shells. I looked over curiously at Cass, and quipped, “are you introverted?”

I answered my own question: “I’m going to guess… yes? Because you look really nervous sometimes when you first enter a room, and I feel like even quieter extroverts don’t have that same look.”

Cass chuckled, and I hoped briefly that I hadn’t offended her, hadn’t said too much. I don’t even know if that’s right! What if she’s not in fact nervous? What if she in fact feels fine?

Something about her response made it come off more like she felt seen, even if I felt far from comfortable presuming that.

I was surprised then when she mentioned later as we stood there waiting for the L that, in fact, “certain comments you made tonight did show me that you pay attention,” and referenced this comment about her looking nervous. She could in fact, see the person I was when I used to be a reporter.

A really, fucking good reporter. One who had landed in cities in Missouri, North Dakota, Indiana, Minnesota, D.C., and California and barreled through.

I had forgotten you need to … notice… to get by when your life is constantly starting over, uprooting.

****

This blew apart some of my head canon that I, mouthy extroverted yapper Crys, don’t notice things, autistically, happening in the room. This in fact is apparently false. This in fact is because I don’t pay attention to how I am paying attention. How all of this information lives in my subconscious constantly.

I used to pay attention but I don’t think about that because that is a property of the past. When I say, “I used to be a journalist,” I don’t transport myself back in time, when sometimes, I should.

I only usually go there if I’m afraid. I don’t go there if I’ve numbed out because I had to forget. Tonight I didn’t forget.

Soon Cass and I were seated on the L as it flew through the stops, and the minutes ticked by, and the train was suddenly taking me not just home to my room in Ridgewood but also down memory lane, as I told her more of my backstory but for the first time felt a coloring of an edge into who I was when I was that person because, lo and behold, I had changed. I had never reminisced enough about the person I was then, feeling it as not first or third person but somewhere in between, and it was crazy to remember the muscles I was exercising then.

I suddenly saw how I had in fact aged. I was not, as I tend to think of myself, “the same as I was then.” I had become more confident, yes, but I had also lost the connection to that part of me that was in fact very comfortable not “making things happen” but in fact noting that they were happening and letting the public see it. I was not a “social commentator” or a “community leader” or a “introspective blogger” back then. I was a reporter, who reported, who wrote, who loved that, and took a backseat so I could learn and see.

I realized how badly I’d forgotten how much I love actually observing, having a chance to share what I’m seeing in real time of how a person actually is, and getting to splatter that structuredly onto a canvas people are going to see — writing.

I found myself suddenly reminiscing back in time through the last decade of my life that I’d spent observing, and painting, back when it was my job to land in the middle of a room and figure out immediately what was going on enough to tell a really, fucking, good story. And back when I would tell it by highlighting small details that show people what’s going on , from the dog that greets the customers of the soon-to-be-closing shop who is the only being that doesn’t know of its fate, to the divided town fighting over whose ideas reign supreme but who are united in turning to greet its council respectfully

Cass drew out of me subtly the things I never speak of anymore. The eras that were lost. The eras I never bothered recalling. The days I never speak of anymore because I don’t let myself fully relive the person I was when I was there, in that diner, in that courthouse, in that basement, in that newsroom, in that car driving down the Midwest highway —

****

Eventually, the L reached my stop. At Myrtle-Wyckoff, I got up and turned to hug Cass. It hit me that I had never been the one that said goodbye first to a friend who was still staying on the train. It was quite an odd feeling to not be the one left.

I walked home from the station with the song “Hopeless Wanderer” by Mumford and Sons blasting through my ears, before I took off running down the wet, rain-soaked streets. The banjo took me back to 2015, when this song had been on repeat as I’d done my first internship in Grand Forks, driving around the town and seeing buffalo roam and listening to people tell their stories and share their simpler way of living. Back then, I was not a “person that everyone knew,” or a “socialite,” I was an Asian girl sent from the Herald to explain why it’s necessary for this town to not lose its charter. Back then, my audience was bigger than just me and my own satisfaction. There were people opening the newspaper to look at my 700 word articles, the things I was showing them.

Now I tweet and people care about the things I have to say. At some point I did want to be a columnist, so I enjoy that I have learned to hold nuanced opinions that inspire and thought provoke. However, this is not a complete way of living for me. I hunger for the days that I was inspired at some point, to gift friends in college profiles I’d written of them, where I told a story of experiencing their essence, how being around them had changed my life for the better, but also how it had affected me, period, to see them walk toward me, to hear them speak to me, to cry with them, to love them…

****

And from all of this, I suddenly came to a key realization:

I define myself more by the things I’ve lost and am grieving, the facts of the happenings, the inverse of what is actually happening in its fullness. The “eras” that my superhero main character person is in, are just memories that I passively mention the existence of, instead of FEELING the experience fully.

To explain in the context of this example — journalism is something I’ve never stopped grieving that I had to leave behind. This industry doesn’t have a place in my desires anymore, only my memories. And sometimes, it’s easier to recite the details of what literally happened in a stenographed, detached way, instead of trying to taste the flavor of what it was like to live that way, and how it affected me wholly as a person. Sometimes it’s easier to passively grieve it, feel the ache in my heart, than to truly remember — 

because remembering is fucking TASTY. It’s delicious! I get to say that I lived in 8 cities before I turned 24, I got to talk to thousands of people in my life, write billions of words and understand the structure and pace of writing itself, power through and hurdle through worlds and universes and entire legacies and sagas — I am too busy focusing on the fact that I lost it, the fact that it’s gone, than to savor that I ever had it, and truly love the way it defined me by fully letting myself feel that essence trickling through my bones, lighting me up so I’m fucking alive!! So I can feel it penetrating me!! The fact that it’s gone holds no candle to the fact that I had it. This experience is inside me forever.

And I can re-access it if I just go back to being the person who observes. If I let myself write the things that matter, paint the scenes that are still dear to me, the countless amazing moments I’ve had in with my new best friends in New York all over the city. So instead of remembering selectively a few key details that add to some philosophical debacle I want to crack, I can also go back to fully living in the moment.

****

I think about all the friends I’ve lost, the men who’ve broken my heart, and I am always embittered when I think of the fact that they are gone. There’s a parallel to the way I don’t let myself experience the celebration of my journalistic legacy.

When I think only of what my exes left when they locked the door — continuous love, continuous affection, actualization into something more beautiful — I believe dwelling on this furthermore after it happens is so ungrateful! This is letting grief poison me from fully feeling into what they gave me, the gift that I shoudl not refuse. For where is the celebration? Where is tasting the laughter, the joy, the wonder, the connection that was there? Why should I deny that those things existed by defining something by how it ended, or defining it even by the fact that it ended?

I never let myself remember the words they told me that conveyed their heartfeltedness, and maybe that is why I cannot bring myself to realize how their hearts had also broken at the same time as mine, because I am not living with them together in their moments, I am not seeing them, for if I saw them, I’d see how I also am seen.

****

I’ve been wondering to myself, as it catches on my mind — do men ever ponder what it’d be like to love me, only by defining it by what you’d lose if you did? Rather than what you’d gain?

Do you think about the risk of loving again, instead of what the reward would be if you let me give you everything I want to? If you let me see you, and trusted me to not change my mind?

Do you retreat from the idea because you are still grieving the past, instead of celebrating the present and the potential, looking toward the future that I see we could have?

I think I didn’t understand it before because the one area I don’t think I define by grief is when it comes to loving again. I taste the vision, the excitement, the breath catching in my throat, the fact that it’s always been better each and every time, and I know it’s worth feeling into that possibility. But maybe there’s not so much mystery anymore when there’s a part of me to parallel.

I think if I understand, I can forgive, and I can accept, and I can even celebrate when people make their choices and still hold the love in my heart not as a scar or a trailhead into grief, but into celebration and even hope.