There's an irony I am giving a wry smile this morning. Today is my birthday, and it is the beginning of a year that is a prime number, which is funny to me because it feels as if I've never had a prime of life. Last year, I was grappling with jokes about 42 being the answer to everything, as we learned in "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", but that turned out to be a joke on me more than anything. This past year did not answer anything, or at least not in a way I wanted to listen to. If anything was made clear to me, it was that effort does not equal results, at least when it comes to relationships with people.
On this day last year, I posted a piece talking about The Wallflower's song "Witness", because it had slipped past me all these years that it contained the lyric, "Happy birthday, no one cares."
That isn't literally true, but the feeling echoed as if it was, to the point where this essay is the only mention I am making of the event this year. As I was listening to my favorite album of all time, Jimmy Eat World's "Futures", at some point, I started thinking about how the closing song "23" could swap numbers with my new age and yet still feel as if it is saying everything that needs to be said. That's a rather sad thing to admit, but where have these pages ever been a source of optimism?
"No one else will know these lonely dreams/No one else will know that part of me"
As I have attempted to understand myself on a more fundamental level, what has become clear to me is that if I struggled with this up until now, no one else has ever truly understood me either. The people who asked me for help only to disappear when they didn't need it any longer, the people who chose to leave things unfinished when I had explicitly told them about my sensitivities regarding that, the people who tell me the very way I see and experience the world are wrong...
I have been accused of being too self-deprecating and too hard on myself, but I tend to think there is a difference between being negative and being realistic. When I realized how tone deaf I am, it wasn't being negative to abandon my dreams of being a musician. That was never going to happen, so torturing myself with more music I was never going to be happy with, and basically no one else would ever give a fuck about, was the more negative option to me. When I noticed that ideas stopped coming to me, and pulling them out of my mind required months of agonizing, trying to keep writing in the face of my creative abyss was the more negative option. Let's not even speak about people here.
No one will ever know my dreams again, because I don't have them.
"I won't always love what I'll never have/I won't always live in my regrets"
Rare is the ability to regret every decision you've ever made, while at the same time knowing you would have regretted doing anything differently. That is the ability I am 'blessed' with, and it has given me reason to question the idea of fate on more than one occasion. Ideas, a voice, love; I have spent too many years trying to delude myself into believing I can have those things. The truth has been made apparent, which sends me back into regretting all the time and energy I could have spent shifting the focus to things that were not dreams, but could have at least been attainable.
And to make matters worse, I am aware enough to have 'second order' regrets, which mean I not only regret the steps that I have taken along this path, but I regret the very fact that I have those regrets, because I know I would have ended up in the same place anyway. Things would not have been different had I made other choices, so there isn't anything to actually regret, and yet the feeling persists.
"You'll sit alone forever/If you wait for the right time.... Don't give away the end/The one thing that stays mine"
Would it have been better to make the mistakes I avoided over the years? It's hard to say if the pain of terrible experiences would have hurt in a more endurable way than the pain of waiting for them. It would be a different pain, but in the end we're talking about the vibrancy of different shades of grey. Those dreams I used to have are not dreams anymore, per se, but they are not erased from my mind. I still think about what they would be like if they could come true, and to be honest, the answer is that they would terrify me. I haven't been joking all along when I say the cruelest thing anyone can do is say "yes" to me.
As the guitars in the song swell into the final chorus, and the strings cut through the empty night air, there's a sense of optimism in the pain of the song that perhaps all we have to do is act and the tesseract of life will unfold along a less worn out crease. Jim Adkins delivers the final vocals with an almost boyish naivety, because when you're twenty-three, everything still seems possible. Two decades later, that is no longer the case, but hearing the reminder that you once believed it so is... both discomforting and reassuring."Futures" is an album about how to get through one chapter of life and into the next without feeling as if you had to be torn down to the studs and rebuilt, although some of us might need that kind of reconstruction. "Futures" echoes the darkness of doubt, but ends with a resolve to try remembering how and why we had the belief that turned into it. Sometimes I forget.
And so I wait to see if those things will ever happen, feeling alone and awful that they haven't, knowing I'll feel awful in a different way if they do. At a certain point, I stopped trying to bring them into being, because at least if I wasn't being ignored by the world, I was the one in charge of why they hadn't worked out. The ending, so to speak, was of my own doing. That was more comforting to me than knowing other people had closed the book before I could finish writing my chapter.
Today is the end of this latest chapter, and the beginning of the next. For most people, it is a day they look forward to as a reminder of the impact they have made on the people around them. For me, it is a day where I realize how ephemeral I am.
I wonder what depressing song I'll find to mark the occasion next year.
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