apex/nadir
maybe it was because she had been thinking of youth so much lately, what it meant, or maybe it was the french jazz she was playing in her bedroom that night, but her mind suddenly swelled with a feeling of possibility. she wanted to wear sexy things that no one would get to see her in. she wanted to marvel at her own body, uninhibited, the temporal quality of it, of beauty at all. she felt like she needed to go out and do things all the time so people could witness the apex of her life unfolding, right there in front of them. but what follows an apex? a nadir, of course. when would that happen? thirtytwo, when she had it all on paper but went home and ate dinner by herself? forty-six, when her lungs eventually said, “you’ve done too much for us to stay and still retain our dignity”? when the husband followed suit? thinking about this depressed her. she looked in the mirror again, and thought of the people she loved and their youth, their bare shoulders taut, gleaming with promise. she had started looking into people’s eyes more often for she felt it was important to be sincere. when people feigned sincerity she could tell the difference. interactions with others became all that mattered. she wondered why anyone ever worked at all, why jobs were necessary, when the most important aspect of life seemed clearer than ever. it was love, it was understanding, it was seeing that bit of God in other people. she was aware of how frivolous that sounded but she didn’t care.
bad things were okay to do as long as you didn’t make a habit out of them, she thought. she applied this philosophy to different parts of her life and figured it was okay because most people didn’t know what they were doing in life and she, at least, had some idea. intermittent sin—that’s the way to do
it. balance was very important, and once the scale tipped everyone would see you fall. or if you did too many good things without enough bad things in between, that would mean you’d lost your edge. it wouldn’t have any fundamental effect on your character but people would look at you with a certain sadness after that. she wondered if she could quantify this theory, make it concrete, send it out to the world—get it published, even—cash in her winnings, and spend them all on things she was ambivalent about, like pears or science fiction novels, just to see if she had changed her mind.
lately this feeling kept coming up. she was anticipating something in the near future, and for a moment it would feel concrete, whole and fully there, something she could mention offhandedly and another person would understand. but then she would realize she didn’t have any plans for the near future, she was just sitting there. she wondered if this meant she should have a plan, or if there always needed to be a plan. she paused to consider and decided there was a certain grace in being aimless, its hushed truancy, the incessance of it. right there as she sat, motionless, she felt like that moment was what forever felt like. the questioning of what your next move was, the eventual decision to stop caring and let life drag you through the years. the comical limpness your body would take on, like a child refusing to do something outside of the realm of things children want to do. maybe that was it: there was the childhood stage, earnest and aware of what it wanted; there was that awkward in-between period, where the world thrusted you forward onto itself and you were expected to thank all the creepy people who gave you jobs just so you could pay rent and go to brunch sometimes; and then there was the exquisite giving up, when you realized one day that your back hurt all the time but it wasn’t your fault, it was just because you
did what you were asked to do. and the day your resentment reaches its peak, and you commit to wholeheartedly giving up, that day becomes your new birthday and everyone throws a party for you and some of them are crying, saying, “i’m so happy you made it.”