Stream of Consciousness
I write about high school the way I used to write about the object of my infatuation through grades ten to twelve. Passionately and everywhere. I carried so many memories of high school that there was no room for anything new. The shadows under certain people’s smiles, a crooked tooth, a broken wrist, bathroom stall, a drama teacher’s warm laugh. These are things that still come back to me in waves, at times where I don’t ask for them.
I’m writing this while listening to Frank O’Hara’s ‘Having a Coke with You.’ It’s easier for me to write with someone talking behind me. He isn’t trying to interrupt me, he’s simply keeping me company. His voice has a very light tone, like a muffled comedy radio show. When I think of a recording like so and so poet reads his poems or her poems or their poems, I think of the clothes they are wearing or what they are doing on stage reading this, how they’re recording, what kind of mic they’re using. Whatever tangibility I can dissect is dissected. This is way I remember. Nostalgia pulls on our tangible senses.
*
The exact words passed between me and the object of my infatuation have left me, but I remember how my hands felt on his slender, sweaty shoulder.
*
I made a Spotify playlist of Frank O’Hara’s poetry after watching American Graffiti. I didn’t analyze the 1960s cultural connection until I google searched photos of jovial 1950s America and onward while O’Hara’s ‘Ode to Joy’ selflessly recited itself to me. Teen rebellion in those days seemed so colourful and new, with pinks and whites and milkshakes. More individual and less political. The heaviness of this year, 2019, weighs on every societal group. 2000 to 2019. Things touch you at every age. I think about everything I’ve done in my life that I can remember, and I feel discouraged because nothing seems like it can be better than the last.
*
His sweaty shoulder was a commodity I could not put a price on. If I did, I would pay a ridiculous cost and get only a smelly hand in return. That might have happened anyway. There will be better shoulders, I must believe that.
*
I wonder what it would be like to enter into the 50s and experience a weird vertigo of freedom and then bounce into an even deeper dizziness of the 60s. I would picture myself there if I was not afraid of racism in Canada in those times. On another hand, I think there must be more nuance than that and I must’ve at least got some good memories, if only on occasion. A small part of my mind tells me I might have been more special, if only an exotic novelty to Catholic Torontonians. But then that could have been what I was anyway. In middle school, at least, where nobody understood who I was and where I was from, where people though Guyana was Ghana.
*
My high school drama teacher grew up in the 1950s, but she never really had much to say about it, besides leaving home and becoming a professional clown. I have only some memories of her, Flo we called her; and most are of the time she recounted dropping her iPhone into the sink. There was distinctly sweet but frustrating chuckle she would use when she was providing us with what she thought were engaging metaphors. Her stories, like her name, did what water does, they permeated, and sometimes they drowned us.
She was old but she was fresh and new each time she spoke. I am young but I am worn out, or I believe I am. I’ve stopped thinking of myself as a self and more of a channel, a thing, a character. To characters you can give the things you love about yourself, and the things you want to love about yourself. You can be lovable without being loved and remove the guilt from yourself as a person in the breathing world. It builds the ego and destroys it at the same time, because all the while you’re thinking, this is not real, this is not real, this is not real. But it has to be somehow because it appeals to the senses. Maybe all characters are products of creating nostalgia. We are vessels for them, and they become vessels for us. Boredom is one the most exhausting feelings I can think of. To be only a person is not only boring, it is unartistic.
I’m speaking generally of course, because this is how I feel and I can’t pretend to feel differently. Because everyone I know has become a vessel for my faltering personality. Maybe that’s my anxiety speaking. As the old notion goes, the more you love something the more you are capable of destroying it. That’s what I’ve done to my memories—I’ve made them weak and sentimental and I’ve remembered them incorrectly. Most of our lives are made of false memories, so maybe the sweaty shoulder wasn’t as sweaty as I remember it. Maybe it wasn’t as slender, or it could’ve been skinny. This uncertainty stops short of saddening me because I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything. There was nothing to lose. I only lose when I lie and write about feeling like I’ve lost it. People like to hear when you’ve lost things. Nobody writes well about happiness, at least not now.
The closest I’ve seen to ‘happy’ writing are blogs about recipes, or makeup, or something physical that makes you feel like you’re some use to the world. I can cook for you, I can make myself beautiful for you, and so on. Unlike death and boredom, happiness is not pervasive. It shows itself through almost nothing besides physical consumption and self-initiative. The narrators of these stories are always reliable, because they give you a final product, and if it doesn’t turn out well it’s likely the readers fault. The self-blame is a “learning experience.” It isn’t like that with personal stories, or fiction, which only have a very thin line separating them which is called (for me), the writer’s intention. People take your ‘personal essay’ as a story, and they will as long the stories continue to be vessels. I don’t see how that can stop. If the reader reaches the end of the story and they’re disappointed, then it’s the writer’s fault for not having a life that pleases their audience. You, the reader, can satisfyingly blame someone, the end. You can distrust, mistrust that the events depicted did or did not happen. Lines are blurred and knotted. Eyes are restlessly combing the page to separate them.
*
I’ve started to tell myself stories so that nothing can be better than anything else. They are all living and true. I could as easily be drinking Coca Cola from a vending machine at a 1960s arcade in Baltimore as I could be sitting here and typing on a 2017 model MacBook. There isn’t an important difference besides the way I tell the story. What I said before about middle school exoticism was a mistake. I can’t say that anyone knows more of me than they did back then, and I can’t say I hate it that way. It’s just the way things are; silk sheets so thin you can’t tell the difference between the cloth and the wall you’re comparing it to.
The past is the future.
*
I like to write about high school because it was comforting, but who’s to say something else can’t be just as comfortable? It won’t be the same, but it’ll be something different. I like to ride the bus at sunset and watch any skyline I can see. I like the view of the airport from highway 427.
*
It has been a day. In between the first and final paragraphs, I have eaten, watched a few films, slept, and eaten again. I return now to my Spotify playlist to find a nostalgia that I wasn’t a part of, but since I was not a part of any other nostalgia, I could have just as easily been there at one of those O’Hara readings. Yes, Iwas. I remember it now. I stared at his wrists beneath his tweed jacket, which shook slightly. He was standing, not sitting like everyone else and when he started to read, “Ave Maria” his eyes landed on me and I gave a half-smile. I was hesitant to give the whole thing, it seemed like too much for a Monday evening at the crowded public library. Plus, I hadn’t slept well the night before. I’d had a bad but not terrible dream, and my mouth was dragged down by its memories, and unsurprising tiredness.