And Then There's Reality

What caused this particular facet of reality to be an ending doesn’t matter quite so much as what it means. It means that I am standing on the demolished remains of what used to be; that I’m rebuilding life on the wreckage of the old; that I am doing it alone; and then there’s whatever reality is but I’ll get to that later, or rather it will get to me. For now, though I let out a reality latent sigh. Reality’s nature is such that it always exists and only exists as it does. There’s what is and what isn’t. Period. The fact that us mere mortals are always somewhere in between understanding, which is which, is our own problem and if it ever has been, it is my problem today. The relationship that just ended was over before it started. It was always never going to work. It took me a period of five years, sixteen days and twenty-five minutes to understand that, but not for one moment was it ever going to end up any place but here. The way I see it, with experience and a little grace the goal of the human experience is to shorten that period between knowing what is from what isn’t; to get so comfortable with reality that we can live within it in real time, rather than inevitably accepting its verdict after a long hard fight with varying amounts of dignity lost.

I’m sitting on the bench outside my apartment building next to Gordon, a man capable of sleeping anywhere and having not only a bench but a whole side of the street to himself because of his odor and tendency to begin yelling unprovoked. After the shit storm I’ve just come from though… Gordon smells great and is an incredible improvement in company. My sharp exhale causes a break in his deafening snoring and I, and surprisingly enough, the pigeons, take that as our cue to relocate before Gordon wakes up and realizes we are existing so near to him. I rise from the bench and look up to where I can see my recently exed-boyfriend feverishly packing his things and passing by the window as closely and as often as he can so that the feverishness of it all is clear to me, even six stories below the window of what used to be our and is now my apartment. He knows I can see him and is making a big show of it for my benefit, because that’s the kind of performer he is, generous. It’s part of the pathology of being a pathological liar. If they weren’t performers, they’d just have to tell the truth and then they’d be something else entirely. It’s a performance I’ve seen before and got tired of a long time ago, so I turn from the window and begin walking down the street.

I only make it a block away before I hear Gordon screaming and take pity on the suburban woman that had the misfortune of passing that bench when Gordon woke up and seems to think he’s actually yelling at her and not the world at large and so is trying to reason with him. It sounds a lot like the conversation I was having an hour ago. I think of my mom’s voice telling me, “my biggest fear for you since you were small was that nothing would ever be good enough; that you would never be happy with anything.” At the time I dismissed it thinking, “she’s right. Nothing will ever be good enough, because I don’t want good enough. I want good.” Now the thought is covered in cobwebs and all the shine completely gone from the lacquer of naivete that covered it. At this point maybe good enough is good enough.

I get to a pavilion that’s set to be demoed soon and replaced by a multi-use space that will take up the whole block. I look at the modern, angular mock-ups on the board where there used to be a bus schedule. For now and as long as I’ve lived in the city, it’s been a strictly singular use space for pigeons to crap. Apparently that’s not a good enough use of space. Apparently, “good enough,” runs everything. I sit at a picnic table and pull a little black notebook from my pocket. I bought it at the bookstore in the ground floor of my building. That store is home to me. Even after they had to eliminate its expansive second floor with its nooks and crannies and old lumpy chairs, it still feels the same, but its down-graded space and this pavilion are evidence of a greater theme; I’m not the only one rebuilding.

I bought the notebook because I wanted to write and even though I have somewhere around a baker’s dozen of these black spines lining the bookshelf of my apartment with most having fewer than ten pages used, I wasn’t about to go back for one. I just bought another. I probably would have bought it anyway though. What kind of a monster writes in a journal in which they’ve already written ten pages? Not the kind of monster that I am; that I was. Truth is I’m not a monster, but I should have been. If I had filled up those notebooks like I intent to do with this one I couldn’t have kept the monster inside me at bay. I’d have had to realize how unhappy I was and do something about it, but I was in the thick of a battle against the inevitable reality of today. It was exhausting.

“What is good enough?” I write on the first page of this fresh, still stiff-spined notebook. I stop and stare at it for a moment. Is it good enough for a partner to be a low eight (mostly body), funny, and that your family loves him even though he kinda sucks? Yeah, it probably is. It’s also good enough to eat a bag of potato chips for dinner and spend an entire relationship contorting yourself to fit inside the fear of being alone, but is it desirable? Not to me. Not anymore. I want a kale salad with roasted garlic dressing for dinner and to not be afraid of what is or isn’t good enough for me even if it does mean that life may never meet my standards. I want to be able to put what’s inside of me onto a page without the fear of it destroying my perfect lie, and so relegating it to a bookshelf where it can become a perfect lie of its own.

I stare at the question on the page and begin to feel itchy so I get up, startle a few pigeons and walk to the convenience store. “Am I asking the right question?” I think as I walk. Having acted at the behest of an itch, I don’t really know what I’m doing at the store when I walk in, so I decide to get a candy bar and see what happens next. At the counter when I’m paying I see the scratch off lottery tickets beneath the glass counter and realize they were the itch I came here to scratch. Lottery tickets have always been intriguing to me. They either are or are not a winner the entire time. That’s the reality part, but between the buying and the scratching there is hope; hope that the ticket will be something it isn’t or what it is. That’s the human part and the hope doesn’t make it any more or less what it is or what it isn’t, but the hope is still real. Its like a fun house mirror reflection of the perfect lie I lived for the past fiveish years. I could pretend it was what it wasn’t but eventually reality caught up and it did what it did. What does that mean about the time in between though? It was real and the feelings were real… so could it have possibly all been a waste? “I’ll take one of those,” I say pointing at one of the giant rolls of scratch tickets. “Just one?” the cashier asks and I nod. But it’s not, “just one,” it’s everything that’s ever existed. It’s the human experience. This lotto ticket is reality at its simplest and that seems like a pretty good way to start accepting it; simply.

I resolve not to scratch it until I fill every page of the notebook with the less simple realities that I have been avoiding, so I walk back to pigeon poop pavilion, startle a few more pigeons and take up my seat at the picnic table once more. I eat my candy and begin to write. It’s slow going at first but as I thaw, the words begin to pour out of the secret places where I kept what I thought I couldn’t have or shouldn’t want and onto the page. I don’t assess I just write. By the time I finish the book’s black spine is flexible and creased and the orange sunset it reflecting off of hundreds of window panes down onto me sitting alone in the park in the pink haze of an ending day. I left the apartment with the intention of returning as soon as he was gone, but me and the pigeons have been here all day, them pooping and me writing and letting go. I close the little black book with the finality that only one that has filled its pages can. Is what I’ve written good? Maybe. Was it good enough? Almost certainly, and maybe that’s the place for good enough; in the pages of a journal you’ve just finished that prompts you, compels you to start a new one.

I search around me and find the grossest penny I’ve ever seen, and pick it up. Only five percent convinced I’ve contracted an incurable disease by touching it I begin to scratch it against the ticket revealing to me what has been since the moment it was printed, but that I’m only now getting to. I read the tiny rules on the corner of the ticket about fifteen times before accepting what I can hardly believe. If reality was always this clear, it wouldn’t be as hard to believe as it sometime is. Reality is at times complex and elusive and many times too scary to face right now or head on, and today it quite simply won me $20,000. I sat at the table of a crappy relationship for five years and in the end when I scratched off the veneer it wasn’t what I thought it was, but I am who I am today, owing in part, to it. I sat all day today at the crappy table of a pigeon-poop-covered pavilion and at the beginning of my new life I scratched off a winning lotto ticket. In short, you win some and you lose some and either way, now is always a good time to begin again. What caused this particular facet of reality to be a beginning doesn’t matter quite so much as what it means. It means that I am standing; that I’m rebuilding; that I am doing it; and then there’s whatever reality is but I’ll get to that later, or rather it will get to me. For now, though I let out a reality latent sigh.