7 year cycle
Today, I awoke to the first scent of spring slipping through the open window and a message from an old friend on my phone.
I will call her D. (If D reads this somehow: I'm sorry, but you know I'm like this. This is a version, but not the version. I am leaving many things in the drawer.)
I met D seven years ago. It was July, on high ground overlooking a valley, many thousands of miles from where I grew up. I was 17. I wanted to touch the electric spirit of humanity. I wanted to store up the world, but first I wanted to know it. The year prior, I had finally found my stride as a young short filmmaker, starting to play at student film festivals and to make things that I considered beautiful. I desired the beautiful, but I was fundamentally skeptical of it, as I felt that it was the condition of young womanhood to be allured by and barred from the elite circle of beauty. I established mantras meant to cure me of this unworthiness. I made films about "being a young woman" and I was fixated on the ethics of portraying femininity in the image when the image was what imprisoned femininity. A paradox that I tried to solve through film, and that I have since ceased trying to solve. But through all of it, I experienced and synthesized life in teenage poetry. Ambitious, as always.
I found this in a notebook from that time, that July, far away:
So maybe it is here that I will announce myself to the world. No one here to question but myself. All exploration to be taken as fact.
I had suspicions – as did many of my close friends – that I might be Queer. It's strange what we take as signs of Queerness, even when I am explaining my 17-year-old self now. "I had a septum ring and a buzzcut," I sometimes say, "of course I was Queer." Obviously that has nothing to do with it. Obviously.
So, D and I. D was beautiful. I have both sharpened and flattened the story of us over many years, so now I am hesitant to tell it. I will say that we held hands and lay under a billion stars. I will say that I remember the back of her head well; I remember looking at her dark curls and knowing I had to say something I did not know how to formulate. I will say that we talked around and around the truth of the situation and could not bear to say it. And we said goodbye, and "I love you," which could have meant terribly different things but I think meant the same thing, and we separated – because it was coincidental, all of it, and the session was over. We had to return home.
Although I'd hoped we could stay in touch, that I could keep her presence virtually with me through messages and video calls, that maybe I could express to her – as I'd already tried – that I loved her, D wanted something else. It was too painful for her. She disappeared and did not say good-bye.
4 years ago, I finally asked why. I demanded, actually. She explained, kind of, but she could still not face it and disappeared again. Her phone number changed.
Last week, I told this story to my friend Carleen (hi Carleen!) after a long time of leaving it to rest. Every few months over the last years, I have paused to measure the distance between then and now. Then gets farther and farther away. Maybe it's because I've just settled again and am looking down the barrel at my mid-twenties that the estrangement from her memory gained a sudden new meaning. I thought, I am waiting on D but I no longer know her, and so it feels wrong to remember only the old D. It is so strange. "Not before known, heard, or seen". She is strange.
But, what if I tried one more time to find her? I've tried a few times over the years, and mostly come up with nothing. (I'm such a stalker! I wonder if she's stalked me the same way. If she has, she would have certainly found this blog.)
So, I tried and I found something different this time. I found her. D is no longer across an ocean. She's much much closer. Fuck it, I thought and drafted a message. It even required me to start a free trial on LinkedIn (the lengths one must go to for modern love!). That was going to be my last attempt. It was going to be the final test, and after the silence I would finally give our story up and I would let D go. But this morning, she responded.
By the time I see her again, hug her, look at her, sit down with her, maybe cry with her, it will be just barely 7 years exactly from when we first met.
What is it about sevens?
A lucky number. The most combinations with numbers under 10 (good for Craps). The day of rest. The only prime number preceding a cube. Seven seas, seven heavens, seven virtues, seven sins. Seven continents.
The odd number that feels even. The odd number that feels right.
P.S. If you're wondering more about the feeling of our story, and the way it felt at 17, you can watch the short film I made about it at the time. I will say, it's not an accurate rendition exactly, and it has a few cringey poetic moments, but it is, for the most part, honest.