“You know I’ll never disappear
Now get me out of here
Just trust in me, my dear
No cure is coming near.”
One of my favorite things to do, helped by the glorious age of the smartphone and my acquisition of a new camera (wait have I had it two years already?), is to take candid pictures of my friends. Some beat me to it, and pose or smile before I get the kind of picture I’m really after. Some (most) hate me for it, and hide from it. Which I get. It’s a bit of an annoying habit. I love doing it is because it’s nice to have that kind of natural memory of the people I love, usually in a moment of genuine joy or just pleasant existence.
I say just, but that latter bit is an uncommonly powerful bit of living. To find joy in the day to day is, I find, remarkable. I don’t know if that’s because of the places I’ve been in my life, or even the moments I know my friends have lived or even are currently living. But to see it, captured forever on their faces, just a kind of general happiness, is a magical piece of frozen time that I’m forever happy to have the chance to look back on.
Now it’s happened to me.
My response, after the friend I was dining with sent the photo to me was: “I look happy. Weird, lol.”
“Happy is not weird!” she insisted.
I still look at that photo and think it’s a little weird. One of my new coworkers said it only took him two whole shifts (probably less) to realize that I’m “a little anxious.” I live for the romance and melodrama of life, enriching as they may be, but it’s not like I haven’t struggled. It’s not exactly and easy thing to discuss, and discussing it publicly is harder still. Maybe there’s something others gain in hearing about it, though. The friends who say it looks like all I do is wander the country, drinking wine and dining fine while being more productive than they think they are.
“You make me feel like I’m not doing anything with my life,” a regular at work said of my Instagram once.
Branding’s nice like that, social media even better for it. Honesty is nice, too, even if it’s painful. I didn’t realize just how far I’d come in terms of those struggles until I saw that photo of me looking… happy.
Relaxed.
Plenty of it had to do with being in my element. My day-to-day expenditures are low, but when I go to celebrate or meet friends (as my Chinese zodiac will tell you) generosity is my greatest enemy. To host and entertain and enrich the lives of others is one of my greatest joys (it’s why I love both my industries). So going out to dinner with one of my best of friends, drinking cool wine and eating flaming desserts at a restaurant in DC, talking the night away in only that way intimate friends can, is a magical, romantic experience. (A couple of my friends, by the by, have taken, separately, to joking that I’m a Gatsby). That photo was taken in between bites of aforementioned flaming dessert and sips of vin santo. I’m probably feeling, alongside happy and relaxed, a bit of pride in ordering well (she trusted me), relief in knowing I had another morning of vacation (that hangover though…), and perhaps a little inebriated (drink responsibly).
It’s not that I’ve never felt these things before (I went to college after all). But they’re getting more common and, even if that photo made me stop and think about it, they’re surprising me less and less. The moment captured in that photo did force a bit of reflection, though. It’s good, that growth. I can’t help but think of its inverse- of standing beside the cold, black waters of the sea with your best friend on the phone, wondering numbly why they seem so insistent that you just go back home. You’re only talking about how cold you think the water might be, and how near you are to it. Only later do you realize what they were after, and that realization is colder than anything else that night.
It’s been a full year now since I’ve moved into my own apartment, two years since starting my job up here, and half a year since that phone call and the release of my first full book. Those events weren’t as far apart as I’d like them to be, and maybe some of that’s the point. Neither were even that long ago, and maybe that’s a little scary, too.
Now I have that photo. I can see myself, smiling like that, waking up the next day, and doing it again. It’s not that everything dark has been banished, I’m not sure it ever will. But now I am at least focusing on the light. Smiling, relaxing, and laughing.
And there was a time in my life where I thought I’d never have that contrast.
Weird.