35 Things (The Most Important Thing)

I cut off all of my hair.  Ok, not all of it, but more than half.  I don't know what got into me.  I went in for a trim, and as I climbed into the chair and Mallory wrapped a black bib around my neck, I decided to cut it all off.   That's not exactly right.  I didn't contemplate it, but the words came out of my mouth.  She asked, how short, and I said I didn't care.  I just wanted something different.  I crave something different.

Why do we do that?  Do we think changing something physically will change something else?  Change our lives?  I have done it before, and I bet you have, too.  I have cut my hair short, colored it red, gotten a tattoo, pierced my belly button (the only one of the four that I regret).  I have lost weight and gained weight and lifted weights.  But it hasn't changed me.   Although I suppose it reflects something else, something already changing and moving inside, something that wants to stretch and get out, or hide.

Mallory's hair is neon pink, sometimes blue - the unnatural blue of children's food.  You might have some trepidation about letting someone with spiky pink hair cut or color yours, but I like talking to her.  She makes no judgment (after all, she has spiky pink hair!).  Like my therapist, but cheaper.  Friday night we got caught up on our love lives -- mine, still a daily process in healing; hers, sadly foundering.  Mallory asked me if it's still the first thing I think about when I wake up each morning.

I thought perhaps she was looking for comfort in what may be her own story soon, and I was reluctant to answer.  I was also caught off guard.  People who know you well don't ask those questions, probably because they hesitate to encourage you to think of the thing they most want you to forget, maybe naively hope you already have.  Strangers don't ask such questions because they wouldn't dare.  But shampoo and a warm bath towel create parameters that don't apply elsewhere.

I told her I don't wake every day immediately devastated by the loss, the way I once did.  But each morning, somewhere between the bed, the dog food bowl, the coffee pot and the shower, I have a thought of him, or of us.  It resides under the skin of my consciousness.

That's probably not what she wanted to hear and, frankly, not what I'd want to hear, either.  But it's there, and I carry it with me.  And perhaps the things I'm doing now -- working 14 hours a day, hang-gliding, cutting my hair, joining a gym for the first time in a decade, getting my scuba-diving certification -- are just a transparent attempt to build a new consciousness, one without him in it.  Or perhaps it's just me living my life, grasping it with a new awareness of how abruptly and painfully it could change, of how inconspicuously time can pass without my having done anything I should have done.

(After all, I did waste two years of my life unemployed, when I should have been writing, volunteering, learning, doing things.  I didn't know it was wasted, at the time.  I thought I was recovering from a hellish job, loving my family of four, then trying to patch it back together.  But I didn't know what was in store, and now I know that I can never know.  And so I feel compelled to move, to do things that scare me, to excite myself, to go for it, and I get restless when I don't have to be at the office by seven a.m. on a Saturday.)

Probably, it's some of both -- pushing myself away from what was, and racing into the night to find the next adventure because I've already lost too many opportunities through my own complacency.

I once wrote the Professor a letter in which I told him that I wanted to mark the moment, mark the seconds and days we shared in early love, in finding new adventures in making fried egg sandwiches and giggling in bed at night, because I knew that the moment would pass, that one day we would have hard times, we would struggle, and I didn't want us to look back on that moment and say, if only we had known how good it was.    I wrote that I wanted us to say we are so lucky that we knew.

Apparently we both forgot that letter, that moment, and what we knew then.  We blinked, and five years passed.  I resented him for the fact that I hated my job, and later because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, and so I did nothing.  He resented me for being anxious and unhappy with work, and then for still being unhappy without it.  He lost respect for me and, to be honest, I think I lost respect for myself, as well.  And, in all that time, I did nothing to change it.  Or I did, but I was too late.  (I won't get into what the Professor did or didn't do, because this isn't really about him and was never meant to be.)

And so, this is the single most important thing I learned in the 35th year of my life:  If we let life happen to us, it will, and we will sit and watch, helpless and nothing more.

So, here's to impulsive hair cuts, new jobs, hang-gliding, scuba-diving, planting spring bulbs in September, working 14 hours a day and meeting friends for dinner when the day is done, drafting your own divorce papers, joining a gym and using it, dusting off your bike, getting a new passport, joining a book club, using a power saw, serving dinner at a soup kitchen, being an attorney again, and doing whatever else scares you most.