there was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one
This Week in Reading:
Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw
A few weeks ago I asked for recommendations for a fun book, and Eleanor, who has impeccable taste, recommended Carol Anshaw. This one is funny and gay and tender without being heavy at all. It is a book that should be read during the summer, or when you wish it were summer, or anytime, if you, like me, live in a place where it is always summer. Aquamarine feels like summer in it’s lightness, but also in the way that it can make you ache, suddenly and surprisingly. This book captures a lot of things, but most acutely for me, it captured the way that when you love a woman, she will reflect all of your own softness back onto you. It is a fun read, but it also is a tiny bit devastating.
Aquamarine is about a former Olympic swimmer who was seduced by her competitor, takes second place, and never hears from the gold medalist ever again. Nearly 25 years later, the novel charts three different lives Jesse could have lived. In one life, she remains in Missouri, marries a sweetly harmless man, and is happy but complacent, seeking out excitement in the form of daytime soap operas and an illicit affair with a young pilot. In another life, she is an English professor in New York, living with the beautiful actress from the same soap opera she passively watched in an alternative life. And in another, she lives in Florida, running a floundering swim school and worrying about her teenage children.
Each path is completely different, but there are common threads that they all share. In Missouri, Jesse checks out a Flannery O’Connor book from her local library, while in New York, she is teaching Flannery O’Connor to her students. Though each fork has led her to love different people, many of the primary characters in her life remain the same. Whether Jesse lives in Florida or New York does not change when her mother retires from her job, does not affect her deep affection for her godmother. And in all of these lives, when she closes her eyes, she sees the aquamarine of the Olympic swimming pool, sees Marty Finch’s long long arms touching the wall a fraction of a second before she does.
I am only 24, yet I already feel like I have lived so many lives. I lived in six states between 2015 and 2016. In one life I was finishing my final year of undergrad, fretting over my thesis and hanging my senior show. In another life I lived in a Stepford wife style gated community and spent my days talking to old people about art and smoking pot on a dock. Then there was a different life— one where I woke up at 6 am to collect fallen apples in a weathered shopping basket for a bunch of pigs. I would drive an ATV across the farm and dump the bruised fruit over a low electric fence, watch the pigs chase the apples as they rolled downhill. After that life was a life back in Seattle, where I slept in my childhood bed and worked at a sushi restaurant and was very very sad. Another one— at a Girl Scout camp in Alaska, embroidering a half forgotten project by the edge of a lake, watching the sun slowly begin to sink at 11pm. And then the life I lead now, in Los Angeles, building crates and watching movies and going to the flea market.
I imagined that that year of continuous change would transform me, that each uprooting would teach me a lesson, turn me into a new person. That moving and moving and moving again would shake me in some fundamental way. But instead, each move made me more firmly rooted in myself. Every three or four months I would load everything I owned into my car and drive, start a brand new job in a brand new place. My surroundings changed around me, but I didn’t seem to change that much at all. I felt like the only static point in the center of an ocean.
For better and worse I have become cemented into my identity in recent years. I am the most productive I have ever been, and I am also my most tightly-wound self. I am more charming than ever, but also more exhausting. This is Nicole in 1080p HD. I am the same as I ever was, but sharper and quicker and more focused. I am simultaneously my best and worst self. It’s like someone turned the volume knob up two clicks too high on my entire personality. I am a sun, boundless and important, but also a little too bright, a little too hot. Altogether too much. I am spilling out into the world, a cloud of anecdotes and opinions. I have been shushed by strangers in restaurant and movie lines, I am forever the loudest person in any room. I am tired of myself too. I want to tell people: “I know I am a lot for you to deal with, trust me, I have to live with this 24 hours a day.”
I am still evolving, of course, but I feel like I am growing inwards rather than out. Slowly turning up the magnification on a microscope, discovering new intricacies hidden within the familiar. I surprise myself— with my capacity to love, with my ability to stick to a deadline, with my own stupidity, with the fact, that after all of this, I can still be caught totally off guard.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I stuck with one of those past lives. What if was still on that sheep farm in Vermont, bundled up in the snow, cracking ice off the sheep’s water dishes every morning? What if I was in Alaska right now? And then, there are so many lives I have not lived. The life where I stayed in Seattle and went to UW. The life where I work at a ski resort in Wyoming. I would probably know how to rock climb in those lives. The details, my daily routine, everything that makes up a life, would be completely different. But I would also probably be the same person I am now. I would probably have the same relationship with my mother, would have the same taste in books. And quite possibly the ratio of happiness to unhappiness in my life would be the same as well. It is not very hard, to change your entire life. But changing your circumstances is not the same thing as changing yourself. A small comfort, that you will always be familiar, no matter how alien your surroundings.
Further Reading
Other books I would describe as fun: Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple is a fucking riot if you haven’t already read it, and the perfect book to get you back into reading after a dry spell. Marvelous regardless, but it is infinitely more delightful if you grew up in Seattle.
The Wangs vs the World by Jade Chang is the most fun I’ve had reading a book in the past year. In the mad dash that was the end of the year I didn’t write a tinyletter about it, but it made me laugh, and also quietly gutted me.
(subject line comes from Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is a fine book that I prefer as a movie)