Quinn Grzywinski

Long Shadows

Quinn Grzywinski

I am sometimes gripped by this strange, gut-wrenching anxiety: that what Iam currently

experiencing is not “real life”. This anxiety can reach me anywhere, and can be prompted

by anything. On the train, when a distant building draws my attention. Walking through the

city, where some smell or sound makes me recoil quickly from it. It can happen when I’m

surrounded by people and it can happen when I am all by myself. It can even happen in my

dreams sometimes, even if I can’t remember the source of the panic when I wake up.

The symptoms of this anxiety are always the same, thoughthey can sometimes

differ in their intensity. My head swims as some dark notion presses its face against it. The

ends of my fingers and toes grow colder, and I cross my arms or stuff my hands uselessly

into my pockets. The air in the breaths I take becomes tiny and poison, so I instead hold my

breath, trying not to make a sound. It’ll only last for a minute, but within that minute, I

become completely convinced that somehow, what I see and what I think and what I feel do

not exist in the way that they are supposed to. I am hurtling through somewhere dark and

cold, and my feet lift clean off the surface of the earth and land somewhere I cannot move

from. When this anxiety passes, I take a breath and try to distract myself, but its faint

memory will continue to hang over me like an umbrella. I can see it sometimes, a black

canopy just a few feet above my head. It doesn’t even stop the rain.

I have tried to chase down “real life” at every chance in every way I could. I can see it

just ahead of me, hauntingly beautiful, but always separated by a distance that never seems

to close no matter how much I struggle and scramble. I chased it through my childhood,

where I read books and tried not to cry as much as I wanted. I chased it through high

school, where I tried to know others, and cried more than I needed to. I chase it now, more

desperately as each day goes by. But each time I reach it, it seems nothing more than a

juvenile recreation, that somehow isn’t the right shape, the right color, the right intensity. It

passes through me like mist, and I am overcome by the same thought of disappointment

and anti-climax: that this isn’t life. This is a poorly-made copy, that doesn’t contain within it

any hindsight or wisdom or lesson.

I’ve seen what real life looks like, and this isn’t it. I’ve seen real life in books and in

movies and in the news. I see it every day, even if I can’t get to it, in the faces of people I

know and have known. Their lives stretch over vast chasms and across dark hallways. They

tower over me, so high I can’t see how many stars they touch. Each time I see one I am

overwhelmed, and I retreat in order to get away from the impossibly long shadows they

cast. I should be seeking solace in those shadows, for they give an impression of their

casters,but I am more intimidated than inspired. When I see those shadows, I take another

look at the evaporating mist of the days I have lived, and as I do, I become more and more

certain. No, this isn’t life. What has just happened to me isn’t an “experience”. It’s just a

misunderstanding. The days I have lived have no value when put together or when viewed

separately. There is no secret meaning that can be discovered by examining them, by

counting the indifferent suns and moons, yet I search for meaning all thesame. It makes no

difference. Their shadows are short and barely visible. These days have simply gone by,

and because of them, I haven’t moved one inch from where I stand in the mud, where I have

always stood.

This is when the anxiety will come over me. The anxiety that as long as I live this so

called life, I will never get to take even one step from the starting line. That I will never

really “live” in the way that I’m supposed to. All I will ever live is the thousand false ideas of

life I have told myself, created from misconceptions I taught myself. But none of them are

life; they are simple fading imprints, wrong judgments, and gross oversimplifications. They

are the result of a mind that has never faced anything outside of itself, that cannot even if it

wanted to, because all it can see is the putrid miasma that its pride creates. Everything will

pass, but I will never pass through it.

As a morbid game, I look at the clock of my phone sometimes, and I count the

seconds. Each time a number increases, I can tell, just behind my back but never visible

when I turn, the passing of things that I never lived a second to understand why they were

important. When I spin around, all I can see is the short shadow cast behind me, too little to

contain anything within it. There is no ticking coming from the faint blue screen, but if I

gaze into it long enough I can faintly hear bells. I can see the ever-increasing numbers in

neat digital lettering, and as I do, I feel the decrease of something else, something that I can

put a name to but intentionally try to avoid.

This is how my writing started. As therapy. At first, it was simply a thing to do,

because it was a thing that was different from the anxiety. After years of this mindless

exercise, I noticed something that should have been obvious from the beginning, that

simply the process of writing gave me some inexpressible satisfaction, each word taking off

some minuscule but heavy burden. This discovery interested me, and for the first time in

the years since the anxiety had started, when I was still too young to even realize what it

was, it made my shadow feel longer. I was still stumbling around in the dark, searching for

this “real life”, but the satisfaction that came from it was the feeling that for the first time,

with every line, I was getting closer to something tangible and important. I wrote about

places I had never been, people I have never met, deaths I had never died, all as real as the

life I lived up until bringing them to the page. I wrote about real life, despite never having

experienced it. I covered each aspect of it in abstraction, whether that abstraction was

character or theme or metaphor, but always I sought to get closer to it, to understand it

more, to “live it”. With each story I write, with each line, with each word, the sticky black

mud that keeps my feet in place begins to loosen its grip just a little bit.

When I reach the idea I have been trying to express for so long, the clarity in my

head is remarkable. I am drunk for a few seconds, on the ease of which I exist, on the air

which no longer seems to burn my throat. The ever-present crown of invisible desperation

around my head lifts, as I have no need for it anymore. The anxiety seems silly for these

beautiful moments. I think in myinebriation that real life cannot be so far away, if I can

grasp its coat-tails from my eternal starting line. And sometimes, when I am drunk enough

and clear-headed enough, I look behind myself, and see for a moment in the mud the

footprints of all the steps already left in the chase.