The Lost Years

The lost years are the detour within a trajectory; maybe the route that you take in order to recover from injury. These are the years that you can't seem to account for; the years, or months that don't make sense. It's not that they're a blur, it's not that you don't remember them. You remember them perfectly, but you find yourself reflecting on them and thinking, "What exactly was I doing in that city/at that job/with that person?" It's a period where you were maybe deeply disconnected from the most authentic parts of yourself.

My lost years were the two years after college. I was recovering from heartbreak; or I should say, I had already gone through Elisabeth Kubler Ross' five stages of grief, and I wasn't sure yet what followed. Because really, what do you do with acceptance, that poor man's consolation prize that comes in the mail a year too late? Some sort of certificate that you've made it through the tough part of having your leg amputated, now you just have to manage the rest of your life without said leg.

And acceptance is like a playground with no swings or jungle gyms. It's a vast park where you have to make up your own games and supposedly have your own fun. So I threw up my arms and said, "what the hell?" I hosted parties. Big parties, small parties, cocktail parties, dinner parties. I took belly dancing lessons. I became really serious about meditation. I stopped drinking caffeine and alcohol. I became a vegetarian. I dropped ten pounds. My weight was in the double digits. I was asked out on dates that I didn't go on. I said I was seeing someone even though I wasn't. I said I was coming down with the flu even though I wasn't. I didn't want to meet anyone new. I had met the right person and I had too much pride to admit just how right it had been because I felt foolish. And so it all fell apart, right in front of my eyes. Like watching something you've built with your blood and your guts get thrown into a shredder. So what was the point of going and getting sushi with some person who I didn't really know, who I didn't feel any sort of connection with, and talking to them about the news and my job and my childhood and what foods we liked when I already knew that this exercise would just leave me feeling more alone in the world?

It wasn't that I harbored a fear of having that particular experience again. Truthfully, I would have welcomed the intensity of it, because the rest of life just felt so mundane, so inconsequential compared to that tortured period. It was peaceful, but like waiting in a hospital waiting room peaceful, after the surgery, I mean. The surgery's over and she's fine, she's in the clear. So now it's about waiting.

Sometimes on friday nights, I would walk across the street to the museum and wander by myself through the glass rooms. I was alone, in an unfamiliar city. But I wasn't scared or even sad, really. There was a vacuum in my life and it hadn't yet been filled, by myself or by someone else. And there was nothing to fix, really, and even the shock of that had passed. I wouldn't pick up the phone and laugh with him again. I had started to forget what his voice sounded like. He probably didn't even know I was here. He probably didn't even think about me. And that was that. And I tried not to think about it too much. One some days, I couldn't even access those feelings anymore; either the love or the grieving - the euphoria or the torture. And I wasn't even really sure how to feel about this.And I was surprised because a couple of days would go by and I wouldn't think about it and then, on the subway one morning, I would smell his cologne, and turn, expecting to see him there, for a moment. But then I remembered that this was my life and that my life came with a script that didn't involve grand gestures.

But what of now? What was there to do with now, aside from host cocktail parties and go to yoga classes and ride the subway to work and learn to cook Thai food? This was fine, but this couldn't really be life, could it? There was nothing grand about it; my life was a tiny island with a small emotional range. One end of the island, I felt happy enough, and on another, I felt mild discomfort and displacement, but there wasn't room for much else anymore. If I wanted more, I would have to take a leap off the island, and swim my way back to shore. But I wasn't quite sure how to do that. I wasn't quite sure if I would ever get quite there, where I needed to be, wherever that was. I was 23. And I didn't really know anything much about anything really. Just that this couldn't be it.