Something Out of Nothing

twenty-two is all about telling stories

Café-Concert (A la Gaîté Rochechouart), Georges Pierre Seurat

Like all twenty-two year olds visiting New York for the first time, I resist the urge to credit some invisible essence of the city itself for the fount of adoration for life bubbling within me—and fail miserably. Like all twenty-two year olds visiting New York for the first time, I want more than anything to believe I am part of a long canon of dreamers, that there is a red thread of fate strung between me and every other young adult who has ever landed at JFK wanting something they cannot entirely articulate, but fervently believes the city will offer to them—in small, overwarm bars, in surprising pockets of green, in smoke breaks out on the fire escape. Like all twenty-two year olds visiting New York for the first time, I want desperately to believe that I am like all twenty-two year olds visiting New York for the first time.

In an argument with a high school friend about whether there are types of people, I say, maybe pedantically, that I don’t find it particularly useful to categorize others. That people only show portions of themselves at any given time; that someone you understand as a particular, narrowly-defined type is probably behaving that way because of their social context; and that the more you call someone something, the more they become that thing. In what unfolds as the age-old nature v.s. nurture debate, she volleys back that surely there is something internal underlying what we do and who we are and who we surround ourselves with. Even accounting for the social aspect, you choose your friends, she says, so you determine who you become.

Sometimes I like to pretend that I am wholly rational, that I analyze life entirely in terms of material impact. That I believe that people are merely what they actually think, feel, say, do. That there isn’t some pre-existing soul orchestrating and producing our internal and external instances of personhood—that we are collections of individual moments that may be actively made into sensible patterns, but which don’t carry any inherent meaning.

But other times, most times, I cannot resist the seduction of composing something out of nothing, and believing this new narrative to be reality. Life takes on such a delightful tint when I make myself out to be the kind of person who goes to New York for three weeks; the kind of person who knows that they’re always doing construction on the G, and so north-south travel through Brooklyn is a nightmare; the kind of person who sleeps on an air mattress in a college ex-roommate’s living room and stays out daily from 9 AM to 1AM. Being this kind of person suggests other, even more beautiful truths about me. When I return to California, Ada affectionately terms me bohemian. What a lavish, indulgent belief—that a sequence of a few weeks, barely a wink amidst the quiet mundanity of my daily life, might transform me into that fantasy of the worldly, secure, ambitious young adult I have always wanted to be.

I know that a few weeks is just that: a few weeks, twenty-something days spent as a twenty-something tracing streets that are just streets, moving in and out of subway cars that are just subway cars. The light filtering through the autumn-lush trees in Central Park: just light. The days I spend with those at the Recurse Center are just days, as the hours in Turing sitting beside Michael are just hours.

And at the same time, I can’t bring myself to believe this at all. Everything reads beautiful to me all the time, transformed into something lovable in the late-October light of the American northeast, almost blue in its crystalline purity. The sunrise dappling itself across the living room in Yosef’s apartment, gifting that gentle kiss of awakening at 8 each morning. The orange-soft glow of the lamps on the fourth floor of the Recurse Center, cradling the face of people I have (too-)quickly come to love, limning them all in gold with a generous tenderness that nearly brings me to tears.

Twenty-two is all about telling stories. The pedant in me says that even the subtitle of this essay is disingenuous: twenty-two is not all about anything, in the same way that any conglomerate of 365 days cannot be all about any singular, focalizing force. At the same time, though, I cannot help but feel as though every cell in my body is constantly straining towards stringing each isolated moment into a grander narrative. Everything is so serious to me all the time—newly in my twenties and having very little material with which to tell this story I am aching for, everything feels overlarge and heavy in my heart. Walking, delightfully tipsy, through Bed-Stuy after drinks with Miriam and her wife: is this the kind of person I am? Talking about digital humanities with complete strangers sitting next to Brittney and me at a kolache cafe: is this the kind of person I am? Arguing with that high school friend about the finer points of social psychology at 1 AM after crashing a very bad frat party at Stanford: is this the kind of person I am?

Most of the time, sitting alone in my apartment just thinking and cooking and cleaning: is this the kind of person I am? Always seeking reconciliation between the notions of self I’ve extrapolated infinitely outwards from handfuls of daisy-chained moments. Sitting in front of Water Lilies at the MoMA for what feels like hours—so surely seeing something, and then understanding nothing at all, merely whispers of sensation and light and color. Lifetimes of blue.

At some point I decided I would go crazy if I didn’t accept that I am going to do things that contradict each other, forever. I critique internet sayings that flatten the complexities of queer/femme/POC existence into tweetable blurbs, and at the same time I participate in reproducing them because they are funny and catchy. I mostly stop thinking about people that are no longer in my life, preaching healing and focus on the self, and at the same time I go back and obsessively stalk their social media. I talk about the importance of being open and communicative in relationships, and at the same time want to run and hide when my loved ones ask me to explicate my feelings. I am both this and that; I am vast and weird and complicated and hypocritical and unpredictable.

You’re sweet, Miriam says, but you’re not just sweet. Like, if I was describing you, I wouldn’t stop there. You’re complex; I like it.

Most of the art I made in college was bad: ill-motivated, the shiniest artifact I could come up with under the tightest time constraints, my artist’s statements invariably composed of overwrought philosophizing upon the human condition to smooth over the cracks in the work itself. I made the artistic choice to reclaim hallmarks of “incomplete” work to critique the illusion of closure… the scaffolding still visible in the work suggests an ongoing narrative in which the viewer finds themselves eternally enmeshed… When in reality, I made the “artistic choice” to not finish the piece because it was 3 AM and I had a computer systems midterm that I did not want to fail. Much of the writing I did about my work was speciously reasoned about post-hoc.

So often did this happen that I have come to understand that, most of the time, you do something, and then you understand what it means. Most of the time, you become by being. Or, two things are true at once: people are merely a collection of moments, and people can be a kind of person. The trick is that at the end of the day, nobody can tell you what kind of person you are, except for yourself. And the kind of person you are can change, day to day, moment to moment.

That one scene in Before Sunrise where she’s looking at the Seurat painting. The strokes so spare the figures nearly disappear into the environment, exposed for the illusion they are. Every boundary revealed to be false and porous. So how do I still see you looking back at me? You, so fragile you might disappear when glanced at from a strange angle: at the same time so certain and glorious in my mind. So dear, so coveted.

Most of life is very stupid and banal, and I recognize this at the same time I ache for everything to be very important and serious. The sun tucking itself in the rolling folds of the linen curtains. Cleaning the stainless steel pan for the fourth time that week. The sunset strangely purple while bugs nip our gooseflesh. Clutching onto you so tightly, waiting for you to let go first so I can feel like this goodbye is something that is happening to me and not something I am enacting upon myself. Crying in an elevator as you go. Don’t go. Goodbyes so common you’d think it might be easier at this point; still just as hard as it’s ever been. Can we all stop pretending that this is OK? Don’t go. JFK again, tucked against the window. Close my eyes. There are weeks where decades happen. Don’t go. Will I become the kind of person who is OK with this? I will; maybe I already am. Moments which compose a life entirely.