I only wear black nail polish on my toes. It is a sharp, clear, bold color, a way of showing myself how much time has passed. We can’t use our hands as evidence. No, we use those resources too much. So I look down. I let my toes tell me what I sometimes forget to notice: that time has been moving, even when I haven’t known what to do with it.
You know, being sad and in love is the only time I feel entirely alive. It’s like I can never take a full, deep breath when I can’t feel my interior self, my soul. I have spent so much of my life trying to find the words for what I feel, when sometimes the body responds to what the mind doesn’t have language for yet. So I wait. And I chase.
I just watched this movie, Eternity. In the movie, people return to the afterlife at their happiest time. I keep thinking about it. If I died right now, where would I go? Would I return to that morning I left 407 Misty Wood Way, when I saw the dandelion in the grass and walked to my car, the sun slapping me in the face after spending the previous night (day) with someone I loved? I was smiling for no reason, like it was my first time. My shitty roommate, the outside noise, everything that had been taking up space in my life suddenly didn’t matter. I was so happy. So, would I go there?
I’ve been trying so frickin hard to remember the happiest times of my life. I want to scratch at them, get underneath them, replay them a million times, like I’m in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I want to remember them the way I remember the best days of my childhood, when a moment could be a moment without my knowing I would one day miss it. How strange it is to live through something and only later understand that you were happy. How strange to want to return to a life you know you cannot have again
I love smiling. I love that it stretches across our faces. I truly do.
My mom always tells me, “Maia, attract, don’t chase,” whenever I’m waiting for something impatiently. I smile because I know myself. No, I chase. I chase every goddamn thing on earth until I can barely hold on. I chase the feeling, the answer, the person, the memory. I chase until I forget that I, too, am someone worth returning to.
I tell myself every day that I am the love I give, not the love I receive. I’m trying to understand what it means to fully believe that. To recognize that the love I have given is still mine, when the person I gave it to is no longer beside me. To stop treating my capacity to love as evidence of what someone else owes me. To understand that I can be the girl who chases and the woman who is learning to stay with herself.
Maybe that’s why I’m trying so hard to remember. Not because I want to become that girl again, or because I want to live inside a memory, but because she was me, too. I want to make room for every version of myself without asking any of them to disappear. I want to be present for the life I’m living now, even when part of me still looks backward. I want to be able to tell the truth about what I loved, what I lost, what I learned, and what I am still learning. And I think I’m finally ready to let someone see it.
When too much time has passed, when I get stuck, the black nail polish is all gone.
Baby girl needs a pedicure.
