It was the winter of 1996 when I discovered this musical gem from George Michael’s catalog, years after it had originally been released. I had just started living in Boston, and the snow had arrived earlier in the month, after my Uncle and cousins had painted the condo for the first time. We’d spent a frigid few days there, in a haze of my Uncle’s smoke and the gentle clicking and dribble of the coffee maker.
I’d say love was a magical thingI’d say love would keep us from painHad I been thereHad I been thereI would promise you all of my lifeBut to lose you would cut like a knifeSo I don’t dareNo, I don’t dare
When they left, and I was alone in the condo that first winter, I felt the first twinges of loneliness, and there was such terror and horror in that I immediately pushed it from my mind. Knowing myself, I understood I might not survive if I gave in to that, and so I willed myself to be ok with being alone. You can do that. We like to pretend that we can’t, but it is possible. We can train ourselves to endure. I won’t, and can’t, say whether that’s right or wrong; so many things aren’t simple binary choices. And you can will yourself to be something better than you are today.
‘Cause I’ve never come close in all of these yearsYou are the only one to stop my tearsAnd I’m so scaredI’m so scared
At the time, I didn’t entirely realize what I was doing. I understood that I was forcing myself to grow up, but it all felt like another guise, another image, another facet of a personality I hadn’t quite figured out how to reconcile. There were minutes when I seemed to watch myself go through the motions of life – stepping out of a shower into the cold air and shivering as I watched a mottled city through the steam-clouded window. Standing in the kitchen and swigging a carton of orange juice after ravenously tearing into an untoasted and undressed bagel – as I didn’t have toaster or glass or chair. So many things seemed to be missing, and somehow I felt more complete and whole at that time than in recent years. Maybe we are the most full in our youth, and with every passing year we simply lose a little bit more of ourselves.
Take me back in time, maybe I can forgetTurn a different corner and we never would have metWould you care?
I don’t understand it, for you it’s a breezeLittle by little, you’ve brought me to my kneesDon’t you care?
I knew that I craved companionship, and for a socially-anxious introvert (try as I might to outwardly dispel it by donning the role of flamboyant extrovert) I realized my quest would prove quite difficult. That was the restlessness I felt, that was the longing. That was also the unsettling sense of confusion that piled question upon question up in my head. Rooms filled with wonder, not the kind tinged with marvel, but the sort bound with worry, and when I look back at my prior selves I grow weary with the nonsense I put us all through.
With each day, however, I learned to be a better companion to myself. I remembered when I used to walk in the woods as a boy, perfectly content to make the journey on my own. Solitude was something I once craved too. In a foreshadowing of mindfulness, I inhabited the moment, taking each hour as it came rather than planning out weeks and months and years in advance, as had been my overly-organized wont. I studied the way the sun moved through the space, the way the light ebbed and flowed during a day. I made myself the occasional dinner, realizing at an embarrassing evening with a close friend (thank God it was Alissa), and at an embarrassingly-late stage in life for such things, that I should put the pasta into the water after it started boiling, not before. It may have felt like I was merely going through the motions, but in doing so I was simultaneously living.
We lead so many lives in a single lifetime. It’s exhausting to look back at them all. Satisfying too.
