god made hummingbirds on a good day

time is an illusion

Sometimes, I feel like I could squint, and I’m 22 again. Honestly, I’m probably always going to be 22 in my mind. My memory isn’t great. I rarely forget someone’s name or face, but often I consult Murphy when we — as we like to say — “go through the archive.” “What did I wear to that one party?” I’ll ask her, “What was the name of the lipstick I wore for three months in the spring of 2014?” That’s the thing about having a friend with a photographic memory, she actually remembers everything. I wonder sometimes if that’s part of why I write so much because I’ve always been like this and remember so little.

I really have been going through the metaphorical archive lately. I’m talking to friends so old they are new again, I’ve gone through photos on my phone, noting all the moments that it “felt like my life was really beginning.” I feel that way right now, which is interesting. The tension between past and present is real. Occasionally I remember moments of feeling simultaneously so young and old: age twenty in Paris at 4 am eating a single almost-living oyster on the sidewalk, when they told me I was too old to dance on pointe when I was 14 in ballet, all the late nights in my twenties drinking infinite tequila and beer and pretending like I knew something about both music and the world. I’ve been missing rock and roll lately, and my early twenties, which were entirely focused around DIY music. Sometimes I miss, maybe not the reality of it, but the feeling of being so consumed by a scene, and the team effort, and feeling so cradled by music. I had a lot of insecurity then that no one ever noticed me, though I’ve noted that after my hair became red, people stopped forgetting my name. The fear of not being seen is probably how my fear of death manifests, or maybe it’s not the fear of death, as much as it is the pain of being forgotten.

I sat on the porch tonight and drank half a Corona I didn’t finish yesterday, watched the mountains fade to pink, and noticed hummingbirds buzzing around. I like them most of all when they’re sitting still and you can appreciate how small they are. I never think more about the miracle of life, than when looking at a hummingbird. It’s crazy to think that animals go extinct, that something essential to an ecosystem is just gone. When I look at hummingbirds, I imagine that god was just having fun that day. It’s not that they’re nonessential, but that’s the hummingbird’s energetic presence. They’re just here for a good time.

I don’t know how this relates to the bendiness I feel with my own timeline lately — sometimes I feel as if it’s warping around me — speeding up and slowing down, I am 14, I am 20, I am myself six months ago… so many lives lived within one. I look both younger and older than I thought I would. So many people have passed through my life and come back again. My favorite theory is that you see everyone three times in your lifetime. But of course, some people are forever.

Regarding forever, there’s nothing stranger than realizing that someone or some thing has become a part of your story: the death, the heartbreak, the party that changed everything… everything lives on, even if only in memory, and becomes you and on and on. The word “crucial,” spaghetti carbonara, swallowtail butterflies, boxed pudding, night driving, those green baskets for fresh strawberries — all call to specific people, and the various past selves that engaged with them. All the stories collapse in on each other, kaleidoscoping in and out, the past and present touching each other. And still, I feel the body aging for the first time. I groaned when I laid in bed the other night, indicating that time is, in fact, mostly linear. Someone once told me when I was running late for work, that if I really concentrated I could slow time down. And the crazy thing was, sometimes it worked.

My dad told me about a friend of his who had brain surgery recently. While they performed the surgery, his friend was fully conscious. The nurses asked him questions, had him do math problems, asked him about the phases of the moon. When he realized that he had survived the procedure, he lay there on the operating table and “cried like a baby.” Still the same, but improbably new.

I worry that writing is trite. Lindsey tells me it’s good to dialogue with myself and share the work, so I’ll believe it. I feel like I write the same thing over and over again. The comedian Cat Cohen said on a recent podcast that it’s “all about having a body of work,” which more recently has become my primary objective in life. Half of marriages end in divorce. On accident, I don’t speak to someone for a year and it feels like a week — reconnecting again as if no time passed at all. The reward for working hard is working harder. Dancing is clinically proven to be as effective as SSRIs in treating depression. Anyone can change your life if you let them.

God made hummingbirds on a good day, he was just playing around.

We are become what we once pretended to be. — Anne Truitt

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