I can not walk in this place without my neck craning or my mouth falling open at some new beauty. It amazes me that I grew up here and somehow – like some tragic impossibility – I had forgotten how spectacular this nook could be.
While there is beauty here that boggles the ability to articulate – so too exists as strange social eco-structure of small town life in an environment that requires cooperation. I remember from my years here – a strong sense of community that existed side by side with a leviathan-like gossip mongering that bordered on becoming a gladiator sport.
I’ll be the first to admit that in my time here, I not only learned to love the sport – but I was proficient at it. I could dish dirt with the best of them. However, I seem to have lost my taste for it. Either I outgrew it, or spending time in the lower 48 has dulled my dependency.
Anyway, it’s not simply gossip – which is a small town staple no matter where you live – it’s also the time warp factor. This factor exists when you leave a place that has impacted your growth phase and triggered a string of evolutionary events that irrevocably alters you. Then you return – and nothing is really any different where you come from. While this can be an enormous comfort, it’s also a little like trying to run up the down escalator.
You have the same coffee at the same restaurant with the same waitress at the same table. There is a sense of knowing exactly where you are and what is next. There is peace in this. Even a sense of pride.
But this intimacy of space and comfort comes with a price, the understanding that people you loved or hated or even both – have an expectation from you. Good or bad – helpful or harmful, these expectations ooze off people as either a lovely scent or a rotten stench. There is no escaping the awareness of even the most simple expectations – just as it’s been impossible for me not to have my own toward the same said people. But wait – it gets better!
There are also the hidden expectations that sneak up on you like a Kato attack that renders you speechless and those are the expectations that you had for yourself – the ones you project onto other people so you don’t have to face your own disappointments. As far as I can tell, these disappointments are the fiercest, the hardest to recognize and also the most damning.
For example: As I talked with a guy in my class and he asked about my divorce – I suddenly got choked up. I couldn’t talk and I thought I’d start crying. I quickly changed the topic and at the first opportunity I bolted into the bathroom to clean up mascara and think.
Ten people must have asked me where Reggie was, or how my marriage was and it didn’t bother me – but because it was this guy (a notorious gentleman, friendly and compassionate) I felt all of the sudden as though I’d let him down. Like my being divorced at my ten year reunion was a terrible mistake. I couldn’t understand it.
It took a couple of days to really understand that it had nothing to do with him – it wasn’t him asking me, it was him asking – and me projecting my own disappointment of being at my reunion without the man I always imagined I’d share it with. This reaction was just the tip of the iceberg.
While there are many things that happened that are similar in nature, I also understand I’m in a town where I was once happy, secure, and childlike. Every corner, view, walkway, house and hangout is laden with memory of that era – as well as with my first marriage. I fell in love in this town. I got married in this town. I had a life here, and a future that is no longer an option – and it all started in this town. As much as this is a reunion to see people I was excited to see, it is also a purging session to expel the parts of my life that no longer apply. These memories are great – but they need to be sorted, tagged and stored so my visits to Valdez in the future will no longer be charged with the electrical current of bitter disappointments and defeated expectations.
My expectations for my life are the most hurtful when I think I see them through the eyes of people who shared the raw beginnings of my evolution. I think I should be a famous writer/actress by now. I should have a house in Valdez and houses in Scotland, New Zealand and Portland. I should have a husband, two kids and a list of bestsellers as long as my leg. I should have a full passport and a sailboat parked in the Keys as well as a schedule of my own making and a bevy of studio executives trying to kiss my ass. I should have all this because in my naiveté, in my foolish ideas of how long ten years really was, as well as the hopes of a teenage drama queen and a passion for living big – I expected I would have these things accomplished before I turned 25 or I’d be dead. Being that I’m 27 and not dead – and not anywhere near these things leads me down the emotional and mentally unhealthy path of thinking “I’m a failure”.
I can sit here writing this with a sardonic smile on my face and a shake of my head only because I KNOW how stupid it is. I know how ridiculous and frivolous and well – childish and yet, it doesn’t change the fact that I’d imagined my life being something completely different than it actually is. I can laugh now that 25 is not dead – because I can push the mortality rate all the way back to 40, and when I’m 40 I’m sure I’ll laugh at myself as I was at 27 and push it to 65.
The thing I really don’t know how to comprehend is this sense of being let down by your own life. I can’t comprehend it, because I made all the decisions.
I CHOSE TO BE HERE!
Why? And what do I do in the future to prevent myself from asking the same damn question of myself at my 20 year reunion?
The people at my reunion weren’t judging my failed life – I was judging it. I was damning it. They could care less if I’m happily married or happily divorced so long as it’s HAPPILY. The kicker is, that despite my own expectations for how my life should be by now – I’m happier now than I’ve been in the last nine years. So clearly I’m on the right track. I just need to get my ass in gear and get a move on… before the housing prices in Scotland go up.
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