6 minute read
Quinn Grzywinski
Long Shadows
Quinn Grzywinski
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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.