I believe in re-heating coffee, women’s rights, “A Room” by Jane Hirschfield, breakfast for dinner, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, and doing the right thing. I think the apocalypse is approaching faster than we can anticipate and that a few good friends are better than a lot of not-so-good friends. Everyday I call my mom, listen to NPR’s hourly news summary, think about love, and misplace the keys to my apartment. And in a perfect world, everybody would read the book before they saw the movie, I would write a best seller and David Foster Wallis would be alive to have delivered This Is Water at my commencement ceremony (had I attended it). Admittedly, I’ve made the same mistake twice, used dictionary.com to look up a word I should already know, cried because “It hurts,” and discovered the solution to many a problem only after the calamitous flames have set fire to the already unfortunate disaster I call my life.
That’s what I’ve managed to come up with. For now.
As of recent, the end of my undergraduate career has become a harsh reality, and I imagine it won’t be long before I have to rely on the aforementioned to keep my head above water in the pool soon-to-be-called “Living with my parents.” Or wherever else I end up temporarily. I figure this much: that I’ll want to be able to recall a few definite things about myself in anticipated times of disillusionment. Because when my apartment becomes empty except for a few labeled boxes and I’ve no place to call home, no salary to define my worth, I’ll have to settle with just being me—and I imagine it might be helpful to know exactly who that woman is.
It’s that time. Conditions are calling for the “What now?” inquiry, the questions I’ve been anticipating for some time now, which I’ve chosen to answer like a mischievous child—shrugged shoulders, palms to the heavens, head down, but eyes up and twinkling (maybe I throw in a wink): “I don’t know,” I say, “I just don’t know.” They want answers—old friends, my dentist, people I’m meeting for the first time, the man I’m allowed to call Uncle Marco—but this is not just a matter of resume-making, job-searching, and post-collegiate-plan-making. This is about re-establishment. Starting over. The big Z-E-R-O. And newsflash: having a degree doesn’t make this any easier.
Unfortunately, it never really occurs to any of us that what we’re really entering into is not just the so-called “real world” but instead a new world. Inevitably, we’re subjected to a lifestyle change, whether or not we’ve asked for it. So how do we cope? How do we answer the questions when we’re still in pursuit of the answers—the answers that are ultimately meant to fashion our sanity (or however much of it we’re left with). Naturally unemployed, I’ve had time to give this some thought, and so it is my opinion that only one thing will be able to get us through this temporary but inevitable time of transitional discomfort—and that it is generally referred to as “self-preservation.” Joan Didion calls it “keeping a notebook.”
Sometimes, I imagine myself dressed up as a traveling circus monkey with cymbals, watching her other circus friends from behind the curtains: Azlan—respectably the reincarnation of my family’s second golden retriever—jumping through a ring of fire, some Johnny Depp-looking character walking the tight-rope with the same confidence he once had dashing though Liverpool Station, and the identical twins I once knew from high school—their calculus homework done to perfection—dangling beautifully beneath the skyline in their trapeze artist unitards. I’m the last to close the show, and I can hear the crowd cheering loudly as I step out from behind the curtains after Johnny and the twins. I’m on my platform: chin raised, emitting the confidence of an Olympian. ‘Alas!’ says the voice in my little monkey head as I pull my arms farthest away from each other, stomping my feet in expectation of the crashing cymbals. I bring them together with force, but the only sound I can hear is that of a gasping audience, astonished amidst the silence of my instrumental failure.
This can’t be (The self-reflection sets in). This has never happened before!
I’ve panicked, clapping my cymbals together nervously—over and over and over—but nothing is happening. My arms are moving; I can feel them. And I can see my cymbals crashing into one another. But the sound! There is no sound.
Silence.
That was my chance—the silly monkey’s metaphorical opportunity—and I blew it. I watch the crowd leave their seats, mumbling about wanting their money back, while the twins shake their heads in disapproval from behind the curtains. My cymbals fall to the ground like Drew Barrymore’s microphone in the last scene of “Never Been Kissed,” and I want to wave my arms and say, “Wait! Come back! I swear I can do it!” But instead, I just stand there: sad and embarrassed, thinking this couldn’t possibly get any worse. And then I remember… I’m dressed like a monkey.
I made this all up right? Put this pathetic little story together for entertainment purposes only? I wish I could say that I had, but the monkey dream is recurring. I remember having it for the first time when I was visiting friends in Chicago, and since then it seems to have taken the place of my apocalyptic dreams, which I’d argue is, well… bittersweet. It’s possible this dream is entirely arbitrary, but it’s seemingly uncanny the way its emotional climax aligns with the feelings I’ve been living with lately.
I used to think that—and when I say, “used to,” I mean only a few weeks ago—certain things were necessary to ensure self-preservation, things like a foreseeable future, a good job, skinny legs, and a boyfriend. But then I did the math and realized that out of the four things on my list, I am only in possession of 0.5 of them. And it would seem, according to my calculations, that I ought to be either unsuccessful or terribly unhappy, and I generally don’t feel like either of those things.
Joan Didion writes in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…”
And so to remember, she writes these things down. She keeps a notebook.
Likewise, the remembering seems difficult for us—what certain things meant, still mean—so instead we begin to watch the slow replacement of these intangibles with a list of items we’d much rather be checking off because it feels good. And because it’s easier. Knowing things about ourselves becomes two things at once: always the lesser of the pair (whatever the other may be) and the sanctity which will find us the home no money could ever buy. I ask then, what exactly is the worth of the monkey who cannot make use of her cymbals? Well—if she recognizes that the problem at hand has little to do with her ability and entirely to do with a pair of broken cymbals, then the answer is: something. But if she recognizes this is all just a silly little dream—that the monkey suit is in fact removable—well, then… then she is worth everything.
I don’t know who I’ll be in the next five years, five weeks, or if I’ll be wearing a monkey suit—if I’ll wake up someday and feel differently about politics and public transportation or decide that it’s time to start opening my mail and register for online banking. But in the meantime, what I do know quite certainly are the things that I believe in, which are the very same things I ought to let inspire what is already destined to happen to me. Didion writes and I believe that, “My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” It is precisely what will get us through discovering who we are about to become amidst all else that one may deem unfavorable.
—Sarah Gonsiorowski
