Rebel Forgot Her Cause

With a sound like breaking promises, the air conditioner shuts off in the blackness, and just for a moment, this little room, lost to the ages, feels like the safest place I can remember. All at once, the sleepless sounds from the stoop step aside to let the soft music from my speakers take the floor, and the bright city lights, so harsh and evasive at times, take on a temporary muted glow, filling the room with an emotion I never expected to feel.

Beside me in the blackness lies the presence that attracts my every thought, absorbing my emotions before I can feel them myself, taking from me everything he can steal. But just for tonight, I don’t mind; I’m just happy to be feeling something, something I didn’t expect to find 3000 miles from home, in a tiny dorm room in the darkness. And if he agrees, he doesn’t say, but that’s okay too, because I’m half in love with the mystery.

In the heat of the moment, we get down to what matters, or at least what matters to him. And in a flurry of words never meant to be spoken at a time like this, I tell him my vision of paradise. My usual charm and wit abandon me in the blackness, and I lie beside him, wishing I could lie to him, telling him tonight is all I want. And what hurts the most, is I know he wants me to.

And just as suddenly as it came, the velvet safety leaves my room, filling it once more with the harsh noise and fear of the outside world. Voices from the street collide against the windows, and the music that fueled our emotions only moments before, exists now only in place of them, hiding something too ugly to be revealed. The closeness we felt in the last moment now eludes us, leaving us naked and shaking beneath our own crumbling self-resolve. And as we lie here in shivering silence, skin bare and trembling, pressed together as if the closeness of our bodies could make up for the distance of our hearts, we become truly naked for the first time. The darkness presses down on us, smothering every attempt I make to save the moment, and by the time I finally raise my head to face him, his eyes are closed to me, and I know we just became lovers for the last time.

The endlessness of the last moment is comparable only to the shortness of this one. And as I fall through the blackness, wishing the stranger beside me would abandon good appearances and just leave, I know that all the Happily Ever Afters in the world can’t save us now. 

The air conditioner comes to life once more, and the warmth of our combined bodies disintegrates instantaneously, making us cold to more than just touch. And in that moment, the moment after the moment in which something powerful happened, I feel the desolation setting in, and I realize that loneliness is only recognized in the wake of loss. And this boy beside me, the one who could have made me not alone, is now condemning me to it, because I will now forever feel his absence. Even with all the answers in the world, through this murky dorm room glow, nothing is recognizable, and as I fight back my shame, I know that this is the last night life will be keeping secrets from me.

Because the ones who claim to love you will only try to leave you, and destiny only calls your number once. If you knew who you were meant for there would never exist a doubt, and if love really conquered all, then stars would never cross, and there’d be no such thing as tragedy. And in the moments of fleeing forever, I see eternity as temporarily as a one night stand, and I wonder if the world’s greatest loneliness is self-inflicted.

If we have learned one thing throughout the great expanse of history, it is that beauty is often only apparent in the face of destruction, whether it be through artistic creation or emotional loss. It is, perhaps, humanity’s biggest setback and greatest flaw; ultimately, our downfall. As a society, we seem to be incapable of recognizing what we have until we’ve lost it: unable to love, until we’re losing. We refuse to embrace something until we have nothing but its memory to hold on to, clinging to its coattails as it’s walking out the door. But our finest talent, if it could be called such a thing, is our ability to isolate those around us, even in the greatest city in the world.

I’d like to say that I came to New York City looking for answers, but the truth of this place has found me before I even formed the question, let alone began the search. Mostly, I just wanted to feel unabashedly passionate about something without having to explain myself, but it never occurred to me that in my search for something amazing, I would risk losing something real. I understood what it was to lose myself in a dream I never knew I had, and in spite of the consequences, I decided long ago that being broken-hearted is better than feeling nothing at all. Because passion, even through tragedy, can teach us more than a thousand happy endings, and I would rather be changed by the beauty of pain than remain unchanged by happiness. By now, I suppose all things both hated and feared have nearly come to pass, but instead of feeling safe, I feel jaded, like nothing will ever mean so much again. Even now, as I dwell in my isolation, six weeks from when it all started, six floors above and beyond the point where anyone cared, the sound of closing doors echo through my imagination, and I rue the day I ever thought that loneliness in a city of eight million is impossible.

Most people ask nothing more of this world than what they are already given. They say that I am far too demanding to want a better place than this. But as a writer, this is my nature. My thoughts don’t form feelings as much as they do words. I may be hardened and fierce, but I have great dreams and great imagination. And even when faced with the heartless and impossible, I can’t help but hope for something more. Even as my dreams of perfection shatter around me, I will continue to fight long after there’s nothing left to fight for. Because the future is only as perfect as we can imagine it, and I have always intended on paradise, even though I know my quest may tear me apart.

Staring through the window of the concrete room I now call my home, six stories above the lonely asphalt below, I feel a wind uncharacteristic of the sleepless city around me, and for a split second I feel like the last person alive in the world. The air outside is cool for September, but still warmer than what I projected, and as I stare into the disquieting blackness, I breathe in the night, and recall past times when life was far simpler than this. 

Beyond the false security of my dorm room, even through all this glass and concrete, I can still hear the city breathing. And even though I know there’s a thousand other people out there making this city sleepless, from my life, within my world, wrapped up in my own problems, I can’t see a single one of them. And that is the loneliest feeling of all.

My mindset tonight remains one of suspended hope and resolution; an experience of massive proportion, wrapping itself in homemade nostalgia, waiting on its one last chance to become a memory. Looking back, I don’t think I could have ever realized my loneliness until I had something to compare it to, but those feelings of safety are now lost to me, and I refuse to chase after that which I cannot change by sunrise. From outside my thoughts, the night mocks me with its silence and the stars remind me of past times so similar, and I wonder if the human condition of stubborn pride and invulnerability might make each one of us our very own worst enemy. And in a way, I’m as fearful of dawn as I am of the answers, because even at the crest of midnight, I can tell tomorrow’s not ready for me.

Twisted times often call for twisted words, but the thoughts traversing my mind tonight have never been so clear. Once careless and indelible, my confidence falls with the dark anymore, and as much as I argue the dawn, daylight chases down my every night. For weeks I’ve fought the inevitable realizations that come with the sun, the loneliness that even the light can’t cure, but tonight I stare tomorrow in the eye for all it’s worth in pleasure or misery. For once, I refuse to close my eyes to the onset of time, and I force myself to stay vigilant, and attempt to shape the outcome of my actions at least one last time. I let my mind stray back to the object of my disquiet and confusion, and slowly I come to realize that the cure to my loneliness will only come once I abandon this placid behavior which is so uncharacteristic of me, and start hunting down the dawn for all it’s worth.

It’s as Robert Frost explains so artfully in the poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Sometimes, the most marvelous things in life are those that are fleeting, those that can never last. In a way, that’s what makes the beautiful amazing, their temporary attainment of pure majesty. As the poem says, our beginnings are often gold, ephemeral and spectacular, and all the more lovely because of it. But always in the end, “leaf subsides to leaf, so Eden sank to grief. So dawn subsides to day; Nothing gold can stay.”  And in realizing this, I must ask myself, if loss and loneliness are not in fact required in order for us to appreciate our gains and truest happiness.

The city answers in satirical silence, its wordless reply just as ambiguous as it’s ever been. And in the end, I suppose these sleepless nights were never meant to know such things. My battle with the future subsists equally as a battle with the past. And without the knowledge to change what I cannot see, I remain forever at the mercy of time. A part of me knows it’s better this way. These nights spent making memories remind us that just as those who forget the past are destined to repeat it, those who knew the future would surely destroy it. And even in the face of destiny, I know that in spite of my heartache, my paradise is still out there.

And so, I live another day, still lonesome, still angry, and still strangely thankful for the fire these past nights have given me to burn from. As the weather turns cold with my disaffection, the moon begins to remind me of nights which were mine, and even in parting, I feel the need to believe there’s still hope out there for me, even if I was overlooked by the ages. 

In the ways of the days, time staggers on, and with or without the words to frame it, my story keeps running; with or away from me, I’ll never know. And with the resonance of parting, my ending claims no innocence. It’s like every conversation I’ve had, but never finished. I’ve been told if I loved something to let it go. If it comes back to me, it’s mine, but if it doesn’t, it never was. I wish I could say I’m capable of moving on, but you can’t let go of something you never had to begin with. In a way, this city eludes me like my fading memories. Its energy pulls me in, but in the end it pulls me down, and by nightfall I find myself walking sunburned streets, questioning whether or not I was ever in love with something real. I’ve become intimate with the loneliness of this place, just as I’ve become intimate with my loneliness. And it’s by no surprise that in an endless city, forty-eight states from home, I’ve learned the most important lesson on my own: sometimes being alone can be the most beautiful thing of all. 

In the wake of the tide, all we are left with is the memories of what we’ve lost, and the means by which to paint our pasts. In spite of everything, I will always have the ability, as a writer, to tell my story. And in the end, I really couldn’t ask for more. Through my words, perhaps this world will become the place I always hoped it would be.