Life is a funny thing. I used to think for a long time that it was a collection of endings and beginnings. That doors were always closing to allow others to open, that sometimes the unforseen opening of a window would create enough through breeze to slam a door closed. But I don’t think about it that way, now.
I have lived in Paris for two years. Two years ago today I got on a train and moved here with a suitcase and a backpack with no friends, no plan, and no idea what was going to happen. A beginning? Not really. I was just about patched back together, then. Freshly 26, with no real idea about what the hell was going to happen. I planned to stay for 9 months. A pandemic later and here I still am – albeit packing my bags, and watching each of my friends sail out of my life into their new chapters.
It’s strange, that. I keep seeing tiktoks talking about the new seasons of our lives. Like: a new setting, new characters, new story lines. But I don’t know if I think about my life that way, no matter how much similarity I can see in it there. Instead, I think life is simply a funny collection of middles. Even our beginnings and ends make up the part of other peoples’ middles. I don’t know if I even think that there are beginnings and endings at all. I think we come in at the middle and we leave in the middle and that’s all there is to it. Paris was here before I arrived and will be here after I’ve left. My friends are still my friends at home, and will be for a long old time. My friends here will always be my friends, no matter where I find myself next. Middles. We’re all an amalgamation of each other’s middles.
After raising a last glass to a friend yesterday, I walked home through the city. The air smelled like the night before the first day of school (itself an ending and a beginning and a middle, every year) and the buildings shivered a little with the suggestion of september. Is September a beginning or an end? The end of summer. The beginning of autumn. Neither – it’s all middle: all transition.
this isn’t really anything more than a few thoughts I’ve been trying to collect about why we feel like things come to an end. I’ve spent so much time trying to explain to myself that time itself isn’t really real at all. All of everything happens all at once, and we just sort of experience it linearly (except when we don’t). My uncle texted me pictures of my 13th birthday, and my granny’s 80th in 2006. a fixed point that feels like it could have been yesterday and the 15 years ago it actually is. It could have been never, it could have been now. It doesn’t really matter either way, though. In his text he talked about how my gran said time wasn’t real a lot. I’d have liked to have talked to her about that a bit more, I think, but I was only 13, and I don’t think I’d really spent enough time thinking about how time doesn’t exist. He said he thought that time itself was relatively linear, but that our experience of it is strange. Everything ends up in this vast pile of “stuff that happened” which arrives back into the “stuff that is happening” without any acknowledgement of chronological order. That too, I suppose.
I suppose I’ve just always felt like I don’t have enough of it. Time, I mean. I used to feel like I’d gotten to everything too late, or not done enough stuff in time, or that I didn’t have enough time left to achieve things I thought I ought to have.
Anyway – I think that’s all bullshit, now. Life is long. The road is marked by those who walk before us. Except I think that no one walks ahead, we’re all walking on it, all at the same time, always in the middle of going somewhere. The destination is never reached, but always aspired to. I think that’s quite lovely, in its own way.
If you’re worried that things are ending, or beginning to fast – think about them as a part of the middle. When you start telling a story, there’s always something that happened before. There has to be, or the story wouldn’t make sense. When you tell people what you’ve done, you’ll always be starting in the middle.
I think this is probably getting muddy and confusing, so I’ll leave you right in the…
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