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I’ve had an incredibly comfortable life; yet, on a microscopic level, my life has been immensely anxious. Within the framework of the safe, secure suburban family is something unstable, unusual, unaware — haunting; within the modern paradigm of the family is the tribe. I write this from the porch of my family home, watching fireflies float across the front lawn, under the dusky leaves of an old sycamore tree. It all feels like a dream, like I feel asleep as a little boy and woke up twenty-five years later.
I went to the wedding of an old friend this weekend, saw old friends I hadn’t seen in a decade or more — since high school really, when I was a completely different person, or pretending to be someone I wasn’t, when I was trying to fit in, trying to be a cool American teenager. I could feel different layers of my personality confronting themselves, as if multiple fats were dissolved in a hot liquid, floating in competing globules on the surface. I was a confident adult, an intellectual, a writer (self-styled I guess); I was also a guy who wanted to talk about basketball, rehash who was the hottest girl in the 10th grade, make dumb jokes, dance like an idiot.
Went running at twilight. My left leg hurt, a little tendonitis. I’m getting a bit older — everything works the same, but with hints of pain, hints of breakdown. The twilight was so beautiful: saturated with dying light. I’m dying too; I’m a dying creature; this summer resembles the last, only the dog is dead, my parents look a little older, I live in a new apartment, have a new job, have myriad new experiences…. In flashes, the landscape looks the same — could be a snapshot of any summer in my neighborhood, any gorgeous evening… or — it could be something else: the last bittersweet moments of a fast fading youth.
