Nobody said it was easy
a late August reflection, an early September prologue
In what appears to be a cruel and personalized and vaguely karmic effort from above, I’m doing a lot of icebreakers lately. It’s actually perfectly unsurprising, considering my recent placement into a vastly new and unfamiliar environment filled with nervous strangers, and I even consider icebreakers to be an occasional guilty pleasure, but I’m complaining anyway because my house is Slytherin and if I were an ice cream flavor I’d be strawberry, but only the kind with the real pieces of frozen fruit, and my superpower of choice is obviously teleportation as long as I can bring whatever I’m touching with me, and mostly I’m just sick of bad questions. I think this particular brand of define-your-own-persona activity just spells doom for me; I leave the circle lamenting the cooler, more mysterious, more memorable response I could’ve given for my spirit animal or my craziest fun fact, fixated on the appearance and accuracy of the image I scrambled to craft. I like to think that everyone does the same. I’m unconvinced.
A question last week catches me off-guard, though, and strikes me as unexpectedly and frankly inappropriately deep for the casual get-to-know-you mood of the hour: “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” And everyone blinks and gets sheepish, and a few people get funny, and most of the group gets halfhearted, and I say something silly and annoyingly aloof and walk away wishing it had all gone better.
But I don’t think it’s my fault, not this time. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done? Not because it’s supposed to be challenging, not because everyone was sympathetic or awed or shocked or impressed, not because it looks formidable on paper or required jumping through extensive, well-known hoops? What was hard? What wasn’t easy? Have you done anything you thought you couldn’t do?
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Is finding the pulse a hard thing? About a month ago, it’s eighty-eight degrees and humid again and someone says it’s the summer of girls. Okay. They’re referring to the things that we’d all been referring to rather overzealously at that point, the things everyone was tweeting and arguing and giggling at the coffee shop about — girl anthems, girl movies, girl concerts, girl habits, types of girl, girl’s girls, girlhood. It was certainly the summer of doing discourse about girls, but I guess August makes sweaty, hungry moths to a flame of us all and the military horns and battlefield drums always draw a better crowd than the territory dispute. Women and self-infantilization, capitalist Barbie, tomato girls, girl dinner; the pitfalls of aesthetic, the flirty freedom of aesthetic, aesthetic as a winking sendup, aesthetic as a coping mechanism, coping through aesthetic as wrong; no one wants to get older, no one wants to settle down, everyone wants to settle down, no one wants to drop it. It’s the summer of events, I remember telling Megan, not girls. It appears we were all ravenous for collective focus and mass conversation — everyone wanted to partake in something and preferred that it be something popular, whether that meant camping out in front of a computer for elusive, expensive stadium tour tickets or spending six hours in a movie theater or walking a picket line or arguing about the implications of fetishized snack plates on Twitter. Most of the time I want to tie my phone neatly to an El track and watch with a telescope and a grin as it shatters, but that never changes, and I think all of this was really sort of sweet. It had a different flavor than the public-hanging-in-the-square version of unity apparently endemic to our Internet age, something more hopeful and childlike and, yes, girlish — something that recognized our collective exhaustion without any compulsion to name it, and silently permitted almost unseemly silliness in the name of togetherness. Society of the spectacle; spectacle girl summer.
But everything is hard when everything is discussed. Beating a dead horse isn’t hard, but the popularity of the activity makes simplicity a whole lot harder. I’m inclined against thinking anyone is right these days, which might be wrong, which is probably wrong, but it’s gotten rather difficult to parse through the noise, especially when paired with my stubborn insistence on craning my neck to hear what feels like all of it. Cynicism is safe, I guess. Distrust complicates, but it’s easy. Hope is a hard thing.
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I do something bad at a party. It’s incredibly easy. I try to tell myself this is because it’s not a bad act, inherently, ontologically; it’s only bad in that someone could conceivably be hurt by it. If your victim has no right to be offended, no logical ground to claim betrayal, no mathematical justification for being caused pain, are you still culpable? Does knowing make you a perpetrator? Are we obliged to prevent suffering whenever we see it coming, no matter how rational, how earned?
On a sticky night by the river, Claudia and Noah and I get into one of our things. Noah is saying something about terrorism and violence and utilitarianism — if you could be completely sure that your actions would result in the outcome you believe to be morally right and unquestionably optimal, would you be willing to do anything? How far would you go? What means could be justified by your most ideal, most adored, your very dreamiest ends?
Noah says killing a child to make his dream vision of a just, equal, suffering-free world come to fruition would be easy. Claudia gets stuck on the nature of the guarantee — how can you be sure? How sure would you get to be? I start talking about Kant and say I couldn’t do it, and I believe that. I try to say something about objective right and wrong and personal moral code, but that’s a hard thing. I land on the human imperative to try — the idea that our mission on this Earth, our most morally justifiably path, is not to perfectly follow some set of ascribed codes and values but to strive, constantly and wholeheartedly, for one. It is not a faultless or perfectly logical existence that makes one good, I think, that makes one moral and correct and virtuous, but an existence spent in a constant state of aspiration, effort, idealism, and work. It’s trying.
I tell myself about trying all summer long. I write on the floor when my fan breaks and air streams in hot through the open window, wiping sweat from my upper lip and getting distracted by the symphony of car horns and last-gasp dinner parties outside: The only tool in my arsenal is free will. The only power I have is that of deliberate action and concerted effort, that of purpose, that of wherewithal. The only course of action available to me is to try.
I am not sure why that, of all things, so often feels so hard, when on the page it looks so incredibly, sweetly easy. But then I guess that’s everything — forcing oneself to stand up straight. Telling stubborn, distracted brains to roll back shoulders and cock chins to the sky, saying it out loud, over and over and explicitly and angrily and weakly and passionately and again and again and again. It couldn’t be everything if it weren’t at least a little bit hard.
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But it’s not summer anymore, not really, so all of this reminiscing and unpacking feels moot. I think this August was the single longest and shortest month of my life. Time is malleable and strange and indebted entirely to perception, and it seems these past few weeks have set out to make that abundantly clear. Sofia says summer isn’t over until mid-September, and she’s right and it stays hot and muggy as ever and I know it will for at least the next thirty days and good lord it could stretch into October, but I think summer’s been finished for quite a while now. And endings are a hard thing.
It’s 8:17 PM and the sun is fully set, and I’m looking out a new window. A month ago none of this would have been true. I keep talking about the way things were a month ago because that’s when I started writing this piece, and because everything is different now. That’s a hard thing. Untethered is a hard thing. On-the-outside is a hard thing. Lonely is a hard thing, sometimes, but lost, just cut-off and floating and infantile and clueless, is harder, even if you aren’t alone.
I cling to what I understand. I’m lost with wonderful people. We take shots of cheap vodka out of plastic cups; we use Gatorade and Emergen-C as chasers and count the bruises on our legs and stumble back tangled in each other’s arms. We get friendly and then we get tired, and then we laugh and laugh because somehow we’ve ended up in the most ridiculous of all situations, and we’re sure nobody’s felt like this before. I’m not alone, but I’m not sure where to hold on yet. I don’t know the roads. I’m not privy to the big picture. That’s a hard thing; at least it’s not only mine to carry.
We hold each other on the way home.