Seconds Uninformed
APRIL 15, 2023I have picked myself up and flung myself across the United States. I have friends in New York, great friends. I have some family here, I have property here, I am here, but I am not native. I have been forced to forget that.
My home is filled with mementos of childhood, childhood has a more explicit meaning than home. Home has been too many places. My great New York friends come over and they look for the meaning in my things. They point to trinkets on the nightstand and ask, “What is that?”
A prayer from Catholic school. A love letter from my fifth-grade boyfriend, Milo. A painting my little brother made in Palm Springs, California. A promise I made to myself when I was fifteen.
I am with them now, we are all here, but they weren’t with me before. When they ask, “What is that?” I will communicate something incommunicable and insignificant to them. I will waste my breath on meanings they’ll never care to grasp.
The ones who were there still understand me when I speak. I use names that are foreign to my fellow New Yorkers. My childhood friends point to nothing and start with, “Remember when?” And I do. I remember Simon’s trampoline, Gatorade bottles made into water pipes, and every first shared between small bodies. I remember gaining it and losing it and doing it all together. I remember what they remember because we are all the same.
I have shared experiences with my friends here, but it’s no firsts. It’s seconds, uninformed by their predecessors. I’m left with resentment for my New Yorkers, for never caring enough and never trying to decode a sacral meaning out of my words. For never asking about the things I want so badly to recall. I kept it for a reason. Coat check tags, festival wristbands, a strand of my baby blonde hair, every letter and menial sentiment on a scrap of paper. Keychains, pins, photos, and every flower I have ever received. I kept it all in hopes someone new would love who I am, enough to ask who I was.
They take me to their places; the diners they went to as children, the corner on which they smoked their first cigarette, the street they were born on. We go to nightclubs and they remark that they’ve been drinking champagne here since they were fourteen. I care for their firsts, and I have their seconds with them, while they remain completely unsure of how to return the favor. They are too far from my places.
Too far from my past, too wrapped up in our future. I don’t think anyone cares about my life as much as I do. I think I saved it all for my own nostalgia, to pity my present and loathe the sweet past. To have and to hold. To remember that I am still every age that I have ever been. Because Simon’s trampoline will never mean anything to someone who hasn’t sat beneath it or bounced above it. Articles and stories can’t do a life justice.
“Seattle” will remain only a word when new faces ask out of decency, “Where are you from?” A place they have never been and will never know. A place that is not their present and won’t be their future. We are all here, the same for now.
I have friends in New York, great friends. Friends with firsts and seconds, informing the thirds and the fourths that I hope we will have together. But I regret the absence of my firsts that are too far away to count.