Memory

This very bizarre thing started happening to me recently/I started doing recently. Many bad memories I had have been washed over with good ones. The times in college when I felt most despondent, most alone or depressed have been scrubbed over, and now I remember the moments that were good, funny, comforting, happy. I do have a tendancy to be a little black or white, but I wonder if instead I'm just beginning the fleshing out period - seeing the other side so I can come to grips with the reality - which is never so cleanly good or bad.

I told Jon about that this morning, and as I was standing in the kitchen cutting onions (and, haphazardly, my own thumb); I said, perhaps I'm going to realize a more nuanced life for myself, perhaps I'll allow myself to be full and not 2-dimensional.

A good friend of mine is getting married on Saturday. She is a kind of free-spirited, mama-earth figure. I remember her sitting on her flat cushion bed in college, wearing her kimono and lighting the first cigarette of the morning. When I read over our correspondence from the past 10 years, I realized that not only was she a friend during hard times (and now, I can say, good) in my life, she was really a guide. She left college after a year and a half (not attending classes), but she wrote and called me through the next 2.5 years. One of my favorite memories of college is when she came to visit my junior year. I have a photo of her, my friends Tom and Katie and me all sitting on my bed, laughing. Laughing like little kids laugh, unselfconscious, unheeded by worries. Could I really be my truest self with my friends - with myself now?

If this life is supposed to connect you with certain people for certain reasons - if in every life you connect with people to learn certain lessons from them - or maybe because you were meant to travel with them throughout all your lives - then she is one. I've been thinking about love and loving and the people in your life that define you - that you help define.

The other weekend, I was up 2000' in the air, above the Long Island sound, and I smiled a smile that heretofore needed to be induced by something synthetic or fermented. I could not believe how I felt. Proud and excited and ecstatic. Flying has been like falling in love for me - all those same chemicals slapping my neurotransmitters with happiness. And, closer to 30, I've been re-living/re-evaluating my life. What is it? What should it be? I've been looking back on it with a certain kindness, with a certain allowance. I won't say I excuse myself, but it's like I've begun to care for myself.

The thing about flying is that I get this little feeling of fear - of claustrophobia - when we're ascending. I love the first lift-off, but about 1000' up, I start thinking, I don't know if I want to do this, I don't know if I can do this, maybe we should just turn around. But then, I'm flying the plane, I'm steering it like when I used to ride horses when I was younger. I'm guiding it and listening to it. Everytime I fly, I am proving something to myself. Perhaps that will dissipate, but for now, I'm forced to concentrate my every energy on the very moment in front of me. All anxieties, all fears, all worries just fall away, like gravity gets really heavy for them, they just tumble away from me, and I am there, my most present, my most real, my most purposeful.

Perhaps it's coincidence that at the time I'm staring to realize my life, I'm learning to fly which makes me focus on the present. Regardless, this peering into my past - maybe it's more like revealing my past - has made me both profoundly happy and sad with nostalgia. If I knew then that I would be looking so calmly and supportively at myself then, I might have enjoyed things more. But then, I have always said I'd never live with regrets for things I've done. Perhaps what's really happening is that I've lived the life I wanted to live, I just didn't realize it until now.