It used to be like

It was a Thursday afternoon, half past four, and you’d finished the call to the city finance office earlier than expected, though it had dragged on dangerously, dangerously to your psyche—your mind and your heart and your guts all felt poisoned by it. It was a Business Tax Registration Certificate you had to get, not a City Business License (the latter of which you’d paid for on time at the behest of the old accountant who’d instructed you with no uncertainty that this was the only thing you needed).

The actual thing required was overdue by seven months, and had accrued thirteen hundred dollars in fines, it would have been waived if you’d paid it on time, the gladsome woman told you over the phone as she took your card information. The fees waived? No, the whole payment waived, plus the thirteen hundred in fines. You have exempt status, isn’t that great? Well, great for next time I mean. Can you repeat the card number? The system needs it twice.

The sun stayed out later lately, just a little but it was enough to restore something. You were struck abruptly by a compulsion to do something, something novel and life-full, something that would plunge you back into the body you’d left at some point some years back without realizing where you were headed.

It hadn’t used to be like this. It used to be like, What are we doing tonight, or I’m coming over, climb the fence to that gated community in the foothills that was half built, or someone knew the gate code and no one knew how they’d gotten it, smoke some weed in the unbuilt lots, watch the lights turn on and think This Is It. I am doing it. Now, you think, this isn’t it. This isn’t it, and I don’t know where it went or how or where on earth it got away to.

Even buying weed was it, before. How to get it, someone had a guy, the guy was out, he sent you to his friend, his friend’s house was in an unfamiliar neighborhood on the canyon side of the freeway, and the lights stayed green all the way down, around the bend, the cars seemed to move out of your way, the wind flying through your snarled hair. A stray dog ran alongside the car woofing, and looked at you, and you felt a conviction that you were going somewhere you hadn’t been before, and you couldn’t possibly know what you’d find there. 

Now you just went to the store, any of them, and swiped your card. 3% transaction fee for credit. 

What else had it been before? Climbing trees in that park that charged an entrance fee for non-residents. The wrought iron spikes in the fence poking at your jeans and ripping the pockets when you hoisted yourself over it to get in. A curfew that flirted with brokenness. Finding your way into a group of people you’d never met before, maybe they were older than you, they seemed to know things like they were older than you, and they climbed, shaking the branches so the leaves all fell, til you were sure they’d break their bones, and then hurled themselves into the air, hooting.

Seeing the people again another day on the sidewalk outside the diner. Going over to one of their houses for cards. Someone brought a gravity bong they’d fashioned from a Gatorade bottle. You borrowed someone’s blue leather coat when it got cold.

Was it just——being new at life? Was it just newness that was there and then it wasn’t and there was nothing you could do about it? When had the invisible line come, and how come you hadn’t seen it coming?

It couldn’t be just that, it couldn’t, they would write those headlines that scrolled in bright red letters above the entrances of important buildings about it, and newspapers would block out whole pages for it and write in block letters about it and people would be screaming and writhing and shrieking about it, if it was.

Then, what?

Get some food? Someplace new? There’d be a line, people wearing the clothes they’d picked out to be looked at in, other people wearing less-good clothes they’d picked out to be looked at in, and ogling at the first kind of people, who’d planned precisely for this kind of ogling, and now looked away, pretending not to notice it. The food would be fine or maybe even good, and definitely expensive, and then it would be over.

Then, what? A new hobby? Put your body in the water. Use your hands to do something good.

Still, none of it is it. It’s disjointed now. Maybe you put yourself in the way of something, using all of your effort to do so, and you’re there for a moment, or a few moments, but then you’re back, and you have to labor and labor to find your way there again.

What was it before that made it fluid, the moments running together like yolks, all of it pliable and ready.

Was it the readiness? How to become ready, then. How to put yourself in the way of it and stay. How to move into being in the way of it, unpack your things, hang the frames that’ve been sitting in a pile in the stairwell and settle in. An easy question to ask, in metaphor. Impossible-feeling in practice.

Being in the front seat of someone who you don’t know’s car. An aux cord, and an unknown destination. Someone else gets in who you didn’t expect. Your new friend who you have been playing it cool around leans up and tells the person driving that you’re like her best friend now, and you blush.

The mutability is gone now. Things are the same every day. This is what they told us we wanted. We knew even then that we didn’t, and yet. We knew even then that we didn’t and here we are, anyway.