Songs and smells can sometimes yank you back and sometimes subtly glide and guide you through the thin fog of memory to other places and times… distant shores of past lives. For my father, every time he hears “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan, he mentions Fort Devens and his time in the Army. I suspect anytime I smell sausage and peppers I’ll think of the vendors outside of Fenway Park – a place we visited for many summers. The other day, the song “Final Days” by Michael Kiwanuka came on. It took back to Memphis, Tennessee and my long walks along the Mississippi River with my ear buds in as the world shut down because of the pandemic. I couldn’t tell you how many times I walked through Tom Lee Park listening to the new Kiwanuka album… how many times I watched the sunset over Arkansas. The walks, became a type of meditation, a type of practice. I spent a lot of time thinking about my thinking…. where were my thoughts going, what thoughts were the pervasive intruders? Who were the burglars of my moments, the hijackers of my solitude?
The memory of this experience – my time in Memphis, how I arrived in Memphis, the early days of the pandemic – all feels a little surreal now. It feels compressed and slightly distant. In the span of a year (April 2019 – April 2020), my fiancee left, one of my cats died, I quit my job, sold my house, took a new job in Memphis, lost that job, and the world closed down… in response, I went for a walk, many walks. There was a lot to process.
As I listened to “Final Days” and remembered this time in my life, I was struck by just how much “processing” I was doing on those walks. More than that, I was struck by how much of a blur everything was just before moving to Memphis, and how “sure” I was that I had spent an appropriate amount of time sitting still, mourning, and processing. It wasn’t very much time at all – six months – most of which was spent looking for jobs and how to build a new life. Back then, I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t running, that my decisions were all being made with a sound and clear mind. In hindsight, those long walks in Memphis, the many blog posts, and the three years since all suggest otherwise. I sat with things, but probably not as long or as deeply as I thought I had.
The truth of the matter is, when that relationship ended, I suspect we both wanted to run and hide. She had the wherewithal to do it and moved out of state a month or two later. She was more practiced at picking up and moving. I had a job, family and friends, two cats, a house that needed some work, an adult daughter who was living with me, and almost nothing in the savings account. While all of those things (except the savings account) would have been excellent reasons to stay, I felt like I had lost everything and these were inconveniences holding me back. She and I had planned a life – the where and when of which didn’t matter. Suddenly, there was a rupture and a wide world to explore (something we had promised to do together). I felt like I would be doing myself an injustice by not living out that life. But more than that, I felt like I couldn’t stay – and I didn’t know how to express that need to fly or flee.
I had gone to a couple of therapy sessions. I saw the same counselor that my ex and I had talked to for a few months. She was familiar with the situation. she had seen our closeness, our highs and lows. She, the therapist, recommended (to both of us) sitting still, doing nothing. The therapist and I would talk about the cognitive dissonance created by such an abrupt ending – trying to reconcile the promises made and love professed with how things played out. After the sessions, I would go for walks around the neighborhood… walking many of the streets my ex and I took on our family walks with the dog. Back then, I needed some ownership of our story – those were my streets too. The therapist would tell me not to rush the process… the deeper the feelings the longer the healing. She said it might take years. She would encourage me to learn to live without hope – not in a negative way, but in a Buddhist-like neutral way. This isn’t good. This isn’t bad. This is. She would suggest that I practice making peace with, and being open to, whatever might come next: a reconciliation, closure and finality, or most likely, neither of those things – just whatever came next… She would encourage me to give up control, to give up trying to direct or anticipate what would follow. There are some things you can’t will into the world. Despite not wanting to give me hope, I think she was advising based on her own story. One in which a relationship ended (I think she left) and halfway through a long drive from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, she turned around and went back. I think she genuinely believed in us – a lot of people did. From those conversations, I tried to build a different understanding of time – one in which nothing is certain and everything is possible. At our last session, my therapist said she thought I had a big heart, which was nice to hear. She suggested that if I can, I shouldn’t close it off to this person, or become hardened, or let my feelings get in the way of something else or someone else.
And for a while, I thought that’s what I was doing. I thought I was sitting still, being open, and giving myself up to whichever way the wind blew. I was, on some levels, dishonest with myself – I didn’t sit very still. Yes, I was in the same place with the same job, but instead of processing, I filled those months by poking at the seams of my life looking for holes through which I might escape. I think I had applied to over sixty jobs. I wanted to be in a city (I had really come to love our city life in Philly). I wanted to be somewhere warmer. I wanted to be away from the frantic pace of the northeast. Most of my applications were in California and North Carolina – looking for slower, looking for warmer. I avoided the city where the ex had moved – though I resented that it had to be off the list just because she had dibs (a sort of insistence on self-determination sprinkled with a coating of spite). A mentality that says, “you gave up the right to any say in my future when you left.” I had plenty of interviews: St. Louis, Winston-Salem, Asheville, Houston, Jackson, TN, Memphis, San Diego, Oakland, etc. I had gotten far enough along in the process in St. Louis, that I spent a day with a realtor driving around and looking at neighborhoods and houses. I took a week-long road trip to North Carolina (four or five interviews in just as many days). I flew down to Tennessee to interview in Jackson and Memphis. I started fixing the house to prep it for sale. I listed it without knowing my next move – even if I was staying, I was going to move into Philly. All of this activity… was anything but sitting still. Yet, I found ways to justify “my stillness” by saying/thinking, the ex was rash in moving so quickly. To me, that became the definition of running away, and therefore what I was doing wasn’t running away. It allowed me to build a narrative that said she won’t find happiness, because she’s unwilling to sit… unlike me, who was being much more rational and responsible by staying put (this is sarcasm). Of course, that wasn’t the case – it was a smug and arrogant way to use whatever actions she had taken to justify my own (perhaps not so different) course.
I had a lot of arguments on those walks in Memphis. Cognitive dissonance can really set one’s wheels spinning. No one won those arguments, and they never really got me anywhere. They did, in some respects, train me to be more aware of my internal voice, to recognize when I was arguing or ruminating, or that I was running over the same old ground. Listening to a song like “Final Days” on walks through an empty park while death and fear gripped the world might have added some perspective… if these were my final days, would I want to spend them figuring out how things got so turned upside-down? Wasn’t it enough to say, I think I could have loved this person forever (and tried accordingly), but that’s not how it turned out. The final days will almost certainly look different than the scripted movie version of life. Once I moved away, I gave up a sense of permanence… though even Memphis I expected to last longer than it did.
I’m in a different state now, surrounded by a different cast of characters. I’ve gotten more comfortable with the idea that these are all just stops along the way. I tell and re-tell different parts of the same story (and sometimes different versions of the same parts) because the past is often prologue – and with growth and perspective sometimes comes revision. The hope is that with each revision… perhaps, if I’m lucky, a little more honesty, a little more wisdom. I spent a lot of time in Memphis trying to get the story right – which would always be just one-half of a story. I spent a lot of time on walks trying to think my way through a feeling world and feel my way through my thinking. This slight recollection spurred on by a song brings a few moments of possible clarity to what was a blurry time in my life – perhaps it brings me an inch closer to wisdom and an ounce closer to kindness – which are so often about acceptance. I say “possible clarity” because I can’t rule out that anytime I think I have things figured out, any time I think I’m flying, I might be mistaken. Perhaps, instead of clarity or flight, what I’m experiencing is that mid-air pause before my Wile E. Coyote ego plummets to the ground below (followed by an anvil and the cloud of desert dust).
The broader point, if there is one, is that we’re pretty good at self-deception. We’re pretty good at conjuring our own delusions… The only counter to which, as Adrienne Rich suggests, seems to be love – that “process of refining the truths they [two people] can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.” At least, it seems that with patience and understanding, that’s what love could be: a look in the mirror, acceptance of what we see, and the desire to walk a little further… taking a few more steps closer to home.