Dear Tara,
I found e2 today while digging around old internet haunts. This is the only one still alive. We knew each other back then, back when we were both in love with each other and our respective SOs and how they both used denial to ignore the way we couldn't help looking at each other. That longing was unnatural. It belongs to fourteen year bodies touching each other for the first time.
We were also in love with our own limitless potential.
Old e2 posts explode memory. It's like the smell of tapioca sliding up olfactory pathways to my limbic system. Tapioca only eaten at my grandmother's. Tapioca the magic treat that was magic because it only existed there, grandma's home the only place I ever ate it, back when the world was still a folded piece of paper, close, tight, warm, small, the walls known, the barriers comforting. Smelling it now in my son's school lunch room and I called her Granny and slept on that futon with the itchy wool cover that faced that enormous wood-paneled color TV with the bunny ears sucking invisible concentric signals completely alien to space. I went thirty years without remembering that. Then tapioca.
I have a son now.
He looks like my SO and he's beautiful. I know you know this because I remember how badly you wanted to have sex with my SO, and me, and her and me, and how when that didn't work out and only you and I had our moment she understood and we all continued with our lives together for another few years until you faded into that terrible hole that time keeps digging in all our souls, the one that makes aging so unbearable and beautiful and sometimes smells like tapioca.
I'm middle aged now.
I take prescription drugs.
I have a card for medical marijuana.
I've read every book I told you I wanted to read, and many many more.
I teach literature just like I said I would even though it's nothing like I said it would be.
I think about death almost every day.
Death pulls everything inward like a rubber band that has been stretched too far, then snaps back with unbelievable force. I feel that snapback every morning when I wake up. It pulls everything inward at the speed of insanity.
This is not a midlife crisis. I don't look at nineteen year old girls and think screaming anal sex. I don't masturbate in college parking lots in my hot red sports car. I am not bored. I don't regret most decisions in my life. On the surface I've done quite well for myself, considering the starting line. Below the surface though?
I hate everything about myself. I try not to. I meditate. I remind myself what good I've done and what good I am and how lucky I am to be surrounded by so much love and relative comfort. The thing is, I have to will myself to remember those things.
Something is not quite right.
I've pushed myself to my limits like they always told us we should do, but found those limits wanting.
Part of me wants to die almost as much as part of me wants to live.
Part of me wants to return to that night when you begged me to paint you with your eyes wide and tongue extended and then after how I held you and how I noted that the holding part was the thing that made you uncomfortable and how that wasn't good and how you agreed and wished some other man would have told you that long before I did, and I said ok but please don't stop begging me to paint you, and you laughed and held me back warm and eternal in that stolen moment from our separate trajectories.
Like tapioca.