reasons i am going to make it out alive

reads like a diatribe

For a while it was my fondest wish that I be transported back into my body at high school graduation; before I fled to the woods and engraved still-standing initials of a relationship that would end in five months’ time, before my best friends left me and every man I dated turned out to be, as my mother would call it, a piece of work, before I felt like I had screwed my life and future over like I do now. I want to go back and do it differently. I want an alternate universe where I make all the right choices. Unfortunately for me, a science fiction aficionado constrained by real-world technology, the right choices, difficult as it may be to stomach, are the ones you make.

The right choice is calling your high school sweetheart and saying things like, we are never gong to work, it is going to be an indefinite period of miserable distance and we are never going to want to live in the same country again. And we are not married and we never will be. And then you will go and write your first series of midterms and you will ace physics and flunk math, and you’ve never flunked math in your life. And you don’t drop the class—even though you will wish you did—because you have more faith in yourself than that. And one day this will pay off, although it hasn’t come yet and it’s hard to see whether it might, but you will pass the class anyway.

You will sleep with a man you don’t respect who lives down the hall from the girl who you think will be the maid of honour at your wedding and is now a name you spit the vowels from like sunflower seeds. You never rewatch Friends. You think of that man as a series of mirrors of what you really wanted and were too scared to admit. You think of his hands on your throat, and of those nights where he kept the fan running and you kind of wanted to be back at home, and how the water pressure is no good in a university dorm. It’s one of the few things that will make you grateful for living with your parents. The choice you will make is to leave him and come back and leave him and come back until he leaves you. You will be embarrassed and ashamed and unlikely to admit this is what happened. You will be grateful to him, much later, and relieved.

The right choice is calling your best friend every day he doesn’t text you and crying when he finally leaves and telling everyone, in explicit detail, for months on end, how horrible of a thing this was to do. You are never going to get over it otherwise. You are going to be branded the slut of your graduating class and you are going to be discarded by anyone who still bothered with you after you whispered his name between every sentence and you are going to leave dozens of voicemails you regret. You are going to text him the night before you leave to see an eclipse after telling everyone how much better your life is without him and he is going to read it and not reply and it is going to devastate you. You are going to call him from payphones and never say a word. You are going to text him dozens of paragraphs you won’t end up meaning because you’re miserable and you miss him and you have nowhere else to turn. He is never going to say a word back and you are also going to be grateful to him for this and you are never going to stop resenting that he switched his major to math.

You will fail a lot of midterms. You will fail a lot of finals and pass every class, by luck, by curves, by investments. You will cry into a test paper on waves. It will feel like everyone around you is getting better and you are stuck in a high school body that makes the wrong choices. It will feel like it is going to be this way forever, but it will get better, and then it will get worse again. You won’t know a damn thing about electromagnetism. You will post clips déja vu and Wuthering Heights and anyone who was still on your side will be officially off it. You will keep alienating people. You won’t know where to turn.

The right choice will be applying and accepting and showing up for work every day crying into an iced coffee you’re not supposed to drink. You will cry in an open concept office. You will spend every commute watching episodes of Modern Family back to front and trace outlines of histological images and try, very hard, to pretend you are awake at all. You will stand outside your high school sweetheart’s house and stare at their mother through the window; you will write letters in lipstick you assume are never read. Your mother will waste money on the stamps. You will watch the numbers on the stairmaster increase as your chest heaves. Everybody will tell you it is the best summer of your life and you won’t have the heart to contradict them.

There will still be some things you want to keep to yourself, even though you will always be a bleeding heart. Some choices you will contextualize a year later in flippant, evasive sentences, jokes and two-bit disclaimers that don’t reveal how badly you wanted to be loved. You will talk about how embarrassing he was, that third act hero you can’t displace. You won’t say he made you feel, sometimes, like a person. You will never make it to Montreal and this is the right choice and you won’t speak to him for the rest of the summer and this is the right choice and you regret it even though it was the right choice.

Listen to me. What if you did everything right?

What if your backup plans and failures and stop-start-go-stop-again, litanies about how you’re doing it wrong, are leading some place? What if every time you grip the sink and stare at yourself in the bathroom mirror and set goals like, I am not going to hurt myself today, I am going to do my readings, are really worth it? What if you came up with a hundred solutions for every problem in retrospect but had to make that choice to find out how to solve those problems?

Sometimes I feel like a saint and other times I feel like a martyr. Sometimes I explain how the story goes and people understand nothing but other times I talk about the way his hands looked in the light and people understand everything. Once I told someone that the lake looked beautiful in April and I had to hold my breath in case they heard what I hadn’t said.

The right choice will be to quit. And to hold your head high when everybody asks why, to make up a different reason each time, to say the truth in a tone that makes it sound like another fabrication. And the right choice will be to keep the program and lose everything else because you have to believe in yourself, you have to think that you can do this, the only sure way to be wrong is to stop making your own choices. And even those will be the right choices in certain lights. And even the ways you veer off the path will be ways that teach you how to get back on again.

You are going to say you will never fail another midterm and then fail ten more. You are going to say you will never love another man and then love two more. You will have to get more comfortable making the right choices.

The thing you have wanted to do for all your conscious life is going to go very badly. You are going to feel like you have done a lot of people a great personal wrong and you are going to tell everybody that this is it, this is the day you quit. It has been six months since that day now and I am telling you you have not quit yet so you cannot quit for six months. At least. I am going to give you another six. You, on the other hand, are going to have a panic attack during a Julien Baker concert and this is going to feel oddly fitting.

I’m telling you again, the only wrong choice is the one you did not learn from. The only wrong choice is the one that you haven’t examined and analyzed picked out why you did it and what was wrong about it and figured out how to make different wrong choices in the future. I am granting you the liberty of saying these choices are wrong although you will accept that making these choices is the only way you get to be right.

You are going to do very badly and very well all over again. You are going to think the losses outweigh the wins and you are going to be right. It will still be the right choice to continue. It is still the right choice to wake up, take the class, try as hard as you can some days and not quite that much other days, and keep going. It is okay whatever you do as long as you do not quit, no matter how close you are to quitting. I told you we have until today, at least, so you have to hold up your end of the bargain. If you were me and I were you I would do all the same things all the wrong ways so I could learn what the right ones were. If different choices even existed. They certainly don’t now. If we were at graduation again I would cut the lights and tell you that there are only so many variables you can control.

There is a Chinese restaurant you’re going to go to a thousand times and you’re always going to believe the fortune cookies like they’re commandments. It is not going to mean anything but it won’t matter because you make your own meaning.

You are going to care very deeply about a man and he is going to make you walk away from him because he will not have the strength to walk away from you. It is going to be the right choice to walk away every time no matter how many times you tell yourself you are a fundamentally evil person for doing this. You are not going to be evil and he is not going to be right. You are going to be in love with him many times, in many incarnations, but only date each one once because you learned your lesson about second chances. The right choice is not to avoid this but to do it even though you know it is going to go badly. The right choice is not to give up but to keep going even though you are doing badly. You are going to be a lot more resilient than people give you credit for, and it’s okay, you are going to develop a sense of self that isn’t predicated on what other people have to say about it. See? You learned your lessons. You apologized in the coffee shop. You dispelled a lot of ghosts.

Life is never going to obey a narrative structure. That’s okay, you’re going to make your own meaning. And you’re going to make it again and again. You’re going to be comforted and disappointed and ecstatic and devastated and every moment of that is going to be worth it, and I promise you if you could do it again you would still make the right choices, in different ways, and they would still feel like the wrong choices, in different ways. And different things would go badly. And maybe some of those things going well were necessary for what happened the first time, the only time, you’re limited by the technology of your time and even if you weren’t you’d only ever be able to change tomorrow. You are not as doomed as you think.

I’m not going to say it’s easy because it isn’t. I’m not going to say you’re wrong because you aren’t. I’m just going to keep saying what I have always said to you, which is, keep going.

Betrayal is not the end of the world and failure is not the end of the world and ineptitude is not the end of the world. You are going to study for weeks on end and still do badly. You are going to drop the class and still come out bruised. You are going to fall for a man who make you feel like the world isn’t ending when all of those things happen and he is still going to hurt you in new and interesting ways and you are going to be okay. You are going to think about all the moments where you told yourself you could get over your discomfort and curse the fact that you didn’t bolt right then and there. You are not going to go back but it was not wrong to give him a chance. You are still going to learn. You have a lot of time in this world. You are going to bet against yourself and you are going to be wrong about that and it is going to be okay, because you learned you’ve got to bet on yourself.

Your sister is going to say something like focus on small positives and you are going to wonder where she got that from. Eventually you remember to hear it in your voice.

The days get hot and bleed into each other. The results are released and come out all wrong. The boys shed their masks and we don’t like what we see. We are all alone in the big house and the dog sleeps across our feet. We don’t move. We are afraid of waking him. We are worried that in the explanation we missed some critical juncture, some explanation, something which matters more than the right choices.

The choices are all we have to make.

I am going to tell you again. All the times you thought you were wrong taught you to be right next time. All the ways you were wrong the first time were wrong in a different way the second time. The only thing that mattered was that you kept going. Every time you said you were going to give up you didn’t, even if you only got a millimeter closer to the finish line. So I am going to reward you for that perseverance and I am going to keep going. We are going to carry on like this. We are going to make all the right choices.

I am going to say all the same things I have said before. I am never going to fail a test again. I am never going to fall in love again. I am never going to have the kind of depression sticky at the sides, the one boring holes into the bedroom ceiling and making the days bleed into each other. I am going to be right about some of these things and wrong about others; it’s the way it goes. I am going to make all the right choices. I’ll tell you one more thing: I am never going to go back.

If I could: it would be different, not better, but different. I would pass the buck down the line to screw up the past again. That universe is not one I have obligations to, but this one is. I’ll tell you right now.

I am going to keep going.