tuckova

There were dozens of things I was going to do, crazy things and
sensible things. I was going to be a mover, driving people across the
country to start new lives, meeting people and bonding and then moving
on like a 70s television hero. Or I was going to own a small home near
the woods where I could touch the opposite walls with my fingertips and
be a mad hermit poet. Or I was going to be a ballet dancer, since what
else can you really do with perfect turnout.

Everything seemed probable. And everything still sort of
does; I could pick up at any minute and we would be sleeping in the
back of our moving van, or we more simply could move and live at the
cottage. The ballet dream is pretty much done. But I still could mostly do
what I had wanted to, except I think I don’t want it anymore.

The difference is that the life I have is also a life I
wanted, one of the possible trajectories from who I was then. I don’t
feel in any way like I betrayed my truck driving self by becoming an
editor, because I had an equal number of feature fantasies in which I
had a green visor and sleeve protectors. The costume changed, but the
dream I wanted was the same.

To
me, there is a web of lines emerging from every choice, and each choice
makes others possible. I don’t see it as having a choice, and that
choosing one thing is endlessly cutting off the other, because lines
can loop back; I don’t see Billy Pilgrim’s centipedes exactly either,
where everything past is linked to an inevitable now, but I also don’t
see a series of captured moments, unlinked. To me, you get to where you
are from where you were, and the lines can be traced no matter how
entangled, no matter if some snapped as you ran across.

And so I have trouble sometimes reconciling the person you’ve
become with the person I thought you were. I can’t see how you got to where you are from where you were back then. Perhaps my choice to stop
willfully charming people makes me as different from who I once was as
you seem now different to me. Or perhaps I’ve made smaller choices
slowly along the way, not even noticeable individually but cumulatively
changing me and it’s me who’s different and you’re moving on a consistent path.
I don’t know. I do know that it’s strange to look across a table and
see the eyes I once knew looking at things I don’t really understand;
the mouth I once knew forming words I never thought I’d hear, not while
sitting with you.