The Time After
(or- the one that is kind of about continental breakfasts, Whitney Houston, and The Village, but really about love and intimacy lost and the possibility of its return)
I recently realized the depth of my addiction to refined sugar. In an attempt to quit the stuff, I am now scarfing fistfuls of raisins, a food I otherwise find repulsive in every way- just to get a hit of something sweet.
The only other time I eat raisins is when I am faced with the overwhelming options at a low rated hotel’s continental breakfast bar. Overwhelming because it is so underwhelming to see all of the jazzed up scraps that we Americans have tossed in a box and labeled food even though there isn’t much real food left in it. All it really serves you is a suggestive flavor while making you feel something like the memory of not being hungry.
I eat these raisins on the condition that they are offered to me conceptually as Raisin Bran, a cereal that dares to entice by using top two tried and true American tricks- 1. a smiling cartoon mascot to appeal to all of those market tested kids at heart and 2. Adding sugar to an already sweet thing- dousing its musty raisin wrinkles in white sugar, hoping to override both the banality and the empty promise of processed bran, with something more alluring.
But there are a lot of other things besides raisins that I do (can you do a raisin) only when I am at a hotel. Like walking barefoot on a well shared, low pile, taupe carpet, that countless shoes of strangers have waltzed on before me. I wouldn’t do this in the lobby at the Concord Trailways station, but for some reason, give me a room on the second floor near the loud emergency stairs exit door at a Hotel 8 in Outlandish, Kentucky, and I am sockless and all over it.
Other surprising things I enjoy at hotels and no where else in all the land: giving myself a get out of jail free card on brushing my teeth, wearing socks to bed (why socks in bed and not on gross floors?), cuddling up with a probably not washed every time comforter that most likely has warmed many naked people that I wouldn’t personally be interested in nakedly warming, and watching TV in bed and falling asleep with it on.
The only thing I hated more than raisins as a kid was the metallic blue glow that TVs would cast in an otherwise unlit room at night. Hate isn’t the right word, it made me…sad. Which, I am now wondering if a lot of people actually conflate those two feelings? Either way, as a kid, it made me sad thinking about people, mostly grown up people, falling asleep alone, in empty houses, without real voices in the background of their dreams or without the sound of a loved one eating leftovers while standing in front of an open fridge with a real devil may care attitude about plunging fridge temps and the years old Hellman’s in the door.
I think my kid brain saw the blue glow of the TV as the tell that grownups also get scared and don’t like to feel alone, just like kids. It read to me as a survival tactic, a “beware of the dog” sign, of sorts, a way to cope with fear. TVs make it sound like someone else might be home with you which then dissuades robbers and bad guys from popping out leaded glass accent windows and strolling right in with their spurs-a-spinning.
The sounds of a TV also block out the sounds from outside that might make you say outloud to yourself “what was that” even though you are a grown up and grown ups should always know the answer to what was that, which scares you further.
TVs are very helpful when you are afraid of the whole world in general. They give, “if something happens that I otherwise need to know about, like a late breaking news alert, I am ready.” Maybe some see the all night TV as their duty as vigilant citizens, maybe some do see it as their ‘beware of the dog” sign, for others, it is company.
Growing up, I knew kids that couldn’t fall asleep without the TV on, or at the very least without a radio on. It filled the growing, empty space between the parental unit and the teenage need to pull away. I have many almost memories of sleepless nights at sleepovers where the jingles of local ads would just pepper through the space time continuum like LSD madness during reruns of Kasey Kasem’s top 40 and his request and dedication segments.
My delirious, teenage hormone intoxicated mind would move in and out of restless dreams inspired by the letters of the love twisted Todds and Tinas of the 90s, interwoven with Beatles rip off jingles for Ken Goewey’s Troy, NY based used car sales operation.
The request and dedication line provided a safe place to ruminate in the feelings of preteen love, lust, loss, and heartbreak. These letters were an unspoken invitation into a community of broken hearts, and into the quiet comfort that no matter where we came from or what we stood for, that we all hope desperately for love, even though the journey to find it isn’t always sugar coated raisins for everyone. Sometimes it’s just bran and a lot of hype and a stupid cartoon smiling sun with no personality. Hearts get broken, Todd leaves Tina for Terry because of something his sister said, and regrets it and many haircuts, deeply, later in life.
I think there was also an odd comfort that grown ups mostly also had no idea what they were doing when it came to love and attraction, just like teens. And there was a universal togetherness in this ocean of uncertainty. It all felt less alone, and therefore there was an ability to be fully present with oneself in that feeling of heartache- because we were all buoyed together in the sea of longing.
This sort of made the late night request and dedication hotline the great equalizer between the generations, in the torture of love and missed connections, and in the anthemic songs that ven diagrammed for multiple age groups at once. There wasn’t a chill-less arm in the room when Whitney Houston began “I Will Always Love You” all acapella-like. And there wasn’t a dry eye of any age when she hit that legendary, post sax solo, one drum beat lead in, otherwise silent with conviction, key changed “. AND IIIIIII”
The intoxication of this song in particular is the closest one can get to the feeling of the intoxication of the journey of love itself, condensed into four minutes and thirty one seconds. It conveys the abyssal feeling of knowing that a wave of love won’t always stay and that by willingly entering its wake, you run the risk of most certainly getting pulled out to sea in its undertow and losing a part of yourself forever.
The near death experience of love is one that makes us feel the most alive, because death itself is what makes us feel most alive. And when love ends, is taken, or Terry lures it away from you, it can, very most certainly feel like you are going to die.
Death is how we stay alive. Death is how we keep moving, keep eating, keep trying, keep savoring. Death inspires us to be courageous in ways we didn’t know we were capable of. And sometimes that means writing to a stranger with a letter for them to read to millions of people about how we messed up and it cost us our love and our shared life with someone, and we are sorry, so could they please, with all their power as a radio dj, read said letter, in the hopes that the person it was written for somehow hears it? Like a spell, like an incantation, like magic, like a prayer, this ask is lifted up by all the hearts listening, longing for the same.
As the world in some ways feels colder, hell hotter, and scarier than I even remember it feeling back then as a girl teen child, I am starting to become nostalgic for things I would have never believed I would long for from that time period. Like cable TV with regular commercials. And having to go to a physical store to rent a movie. And sitting in the middle of the possibility of everything and the possibility of nothing in silence with a friend or a stranger on a day where I wasn’t sure of anything else happening in the whole world except for that moment, there, with them.
There was a branch of intimacy on the tree of love and life back then that is so hard to access now, because there is no true intimacy now, when the world can storm in through your door at any given moment through your phone.
Last night, I watched The Village and there was the part where Ivy and Noah raced to the hill, and she tricked him so she could get a head start and they just ran laughing toward their joy and nothing else. Watching them run, I thought, how nice it would be to do that and to just be in it, the “in it” being a smart phone free world (yes, it is a fictional modern movie written about an older time but is actually set in modern time- which could nullify my example but I think actually that the complexity might add to my point?)
This current, late breaking news all the time era gives us a false sense of safety, a false sense of fear, a false sense of civilian duty, a false sense of doing, a false sense of togetherness, a false sense of self, a false sense of identity, false sense of comfort, a false sense of alone, a false sense of together, a false sense of reality, a false sense of presence.
I long for when we weren’t afraid of being in the stripped down moment together. I long for time spent saying and doing nothing more than being in it with whoever was around. I am nostalgic for sitting in silence when it found us.
Remember when we just stayed there, we stayed with it, we stayed together, there in the silence, because there was nowhere else to go? Staying with it was also like a pledge to stay with our own humanity, a pledge to stay in the exploration of the moment, to listen to the static of our messy, imperfect hearts, of the messy imperfection of each other, like a pact, like a poem, like a riddle. We were in time in those moments, in those days, in those years. We were never actually alone. Relative to where we find ourselves now, life was intimacy.
We had the gift of our undivided attention. Like air it was there. The gift of wondering, the gift of trying to find something to do and having that be the thing to do. Going out into the world was an act of love and faith- that you would run into someone or something interesting. Or nothing, and that gave you tomorrow to hope for.
Everything was clearer and warmer when the lights glowed incandescent and warm. Everything was lit with electricity like our hearts, like our bodies, like our passion. We saw ourselves in the light, we saw our lives in the light, we saw each other in the light.
We didn’t know there would be no going back to that warmly lit room, we didn’t know that way of life was going to end. We didn’t know that the blue glow of screens and LED lights would cast us a plastic spell of a cool haze. That the blue of the cold of pre-dead would shadow us, our time, and our interactions. That the blue screens predated empty face moments and black holes of vapid time vacuumed away from each other. We did not know.
What would I have done if we knew that the warm light would go out on us, that a way of life that I was completely in love with was about to end? I mean, I guess I didn’t even know that there was a way of life I was in love with- it was just life, water warm and clear. But I think I would have fought for it. I would have held on with all my might. I would have written to Kasey Kasem with a request and dedication, hoping, praying that all the listeners would lift their hearts to my words, like a prayer, like a spell, and it would somehow make a difference in the what would happen next for all of us. And even if it didn’t, I would have at least had the chance to say goodbye to what was. I would have said, I love you. I would have said, please, please don’t go. I would have said I am sorry. I would have said I will do anything, just stay with me. I would have asked for forgiveness for not knowing what I had.
But I didn’t know it was ending, none of us did. We couldn’t have. We rarely ever do. And maybe that’s the point of it.
Because there is nothing to be done now, but grieve. And like with all grief, to learn about what the feelings of loss are telling us about what we love- what we love about being alive, about loving each other, about loving ourselves, about what it means to be in and love a regular moment.
Maybe this post is my request and dedication to something that has died, the words I never got to say, the tears I never knew I could cry, about a time that was cut too short before I was old enough to truly understand what it was that I had. If that is it, then I think I would dedicate the ever classy, It Must Have Been Love by Roxette, and I would put on silky black gloves that go up to my elbows as I listen to it.
But maybe this is just my request to all of us to remember to look for ourselves and each other’s warm spark in the density of the cool blue darkness, reclaiming the light of the moment by offering the ember of our noticing and yearning to connect. That we “kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being” (Jung)
We are all for better or for worse, of this time, and in this time, all of us looking for ways to feel love in what sometimes feels like a loveless world. We need to work a little harder to remember ourselves into the moment, to remember each other into the moment, to buoy to each other in the presence of the moment, whether it is shared silence or awkwardness or sadness or laughter or just a warm moment of eye contact, or we risk getting swept out to sea.
We can be each other’s reminder to savor the possibility of love, it washes up more frequently than we know upon our shores, in simple ways, every day, as long as we pledge to lift our eyes into the rooms we share with each other and see it, really really see it. The blue glow of our screens is the false Polaris- we are all the light we need to guide the way for one another and ourselves, we are all the light we need to illuminate each moment as it rises. And for that, the intergalactically inspired, presence seeded, wispy analog lacework of Cindy Lauper’s “Time After Time” is my request and dedication.
