Patterns
When I was small, I used to try to make sense of things by organizing, labeling, and stacking them.
I liked it when things repeated: all of the forks, of the same size, in the same place. All the green pens snuggled up with the other green pens. All of the socks folded up in the exact same way, with all of the other socks.
Repetition was good. Routine was safe.
It never occurred to me that maybe sometimes it is good to break out from the pattern: after you can see it for what it is.
I can’t forget the yellow.
I can’t forget the way that it lit up the courtyard of our Copenhagen apartment building, which we would see each morning as we brewed coffee by the kitchen sink and looked out at the clouds as they tumbled in from the north, collecting more wind and rain from somewhere over Scandinavia and casting it all over the Danish peninsula, in the same way that a hush spreads over an audience when the thick, red velvet of a curtain spreads wide to signal the beginning of a show.
The walls of the building behind ours was the color of mustard, the color of turmeric — so saturated that half of me wanted to go up to the walls and rest my forehead against the doorways just to see if I could smell my mother’s cooking, soaked in bitter mustard oil, with just a hint of freshly-grated ginger root.
We spent four days in Copenhagen. Each morning, I stood by the window, and waited for my sister to finish showering.
On the first day, I poured Cheerios into a polka-dotted Ikea bowl and counted the windows that repeated themselves across the facade of the building opposite ours.
On the second day, I washed the french press and I counted them how many of the windows were propped open.
On the third day, I counted how many of them were closed shut.
And on the last day — the day that we were leaving — I counted all of the windows again and realized that my pattern of counting had been wrong all along: half of the windows weren’t windows at all. They were balconies.
When I was small, I used to think that people always meant what they said.
I liked it when you could turn to your friend and say exactly what it was that was in your mind. Sentences carried just as much weight as someone’s actions. It never occurred to me to perhaps be quiet for a moment and instead: to watch what someone means when they say I love you. And see whether they meant it in the first place at all.
The three of us are sitting on the stoop outside of a single-family St Mark’s home and I’m a little drunk.
Okay, I’m a good bit drunk.
Fine, I’m just a lot drunk.
The three of us are sitting here, me on the lower step, one friend on the step above me, and the third standing up in front of the door that is directly behind me, his weight shifting back and forth between his legs in the way that it does when he’s washing dishes at the kitchen sink.
I start talking about things that I’ve talked about before, sipping from this glass that I’ve sipped from before, wondering things that I’ve wondered about (again and again and again) before. And for a moment between a gulp or two — and then a third and, once more: a fourth — of Pinot Noir, my mind stops to shake me out of the lull of the red wine tannings that are tickling the insides of my cheeks and the roof my mouth. I scream to myself without opening my mouth to say a word: Haven’t you been here before? Haven’t you had this exact conversation before? Haven’t you seen these patterns before?
My friends don’t hear me, of course, because I haven’t dared to even whisper the words loud enough for the letters to form some semblance of a shape: the way that all sentences are forced to make a shape in the air in the exact moment that they leave your lavender-colored lips and make a place for themselves in the world.
We all know that I’m falling into the same patterns again and we all know that they won’t say the words, and neither will I. Instead they’ll point out my patterns, the way that I used to run my fingers down the tiles in the downstairs bathroom of our very first apartment, admiring the way that they used to repeat over and over: a ridge and a bump, a mountain and valley, refreshing on your bare feet in the summertime, and smooth like ice on the bottoms of your socks in the wintertime. My friends see my patterns the way that I used to see the patterns in the seeds of a sunflower, round and round, one seed after another. Repetition which, in its own way, became a kind of meditation.
They are both telling me about my own patterns — ones I recognized long ago, before either of them realized that I was paying attention.
And while they’re reminding me of the things that I am letting myself be trapped into yet again, I am sitting on the bottom stoop and, quietly, silently screaming to myself:
Haven’t you said that you would stop?
When I was small, I used to think that things were always going to be the way that they were now. I couldn’t imagine my parents getting older. I couldn’t imagine myself getting taller, my hips getting wider, my smile getting bigger.
The future was something that was here amongst us already, and the past was someone who would always look the way that it looked to me now.
It never occurred to me that we all grow up — some of us more quickly and more obviously than others — and that in all of our growing, we can pick and choose what we decide which of our patterns to hold onto.
