All’s Fair in Love and Latin
We look like a memory in Lizzie’s kitchen. We are making cookies, which means I am making cookies and they are watching. Arabella pokes a pot of fruit with a spoon. Lizzie stares at a pan of almonds through the oven door. I pet Opal with my foot while washing a bowl. I blink hard. Things that look like a memory are usually a memory.
It’s February but I want it to be March or April and I want it so badly I made a Pinterest board about how beautiful it would be if it was March or April instead of February. I spend every season wishing for it to be the next. It’s winter right now and I wish it was spring, but if it was spring I’d be wishing it was summer, because it’s really not about the winter, it’s really about the fact that nothing is ever good enough for me. Or by the time I realize something is good, it has been dead for six months, and is now buried under the snow, swallowed by time. Help, I’m still at the restaurant.
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Latin class feels like soaking in a lukewarm pool of Salvador Dali’s melting clocks. It’s soupy and liminal, timeless, and by that, I mean time does not pass at all in that room. We’ve read the same forty lines of the Aeneid every day since middle school. We respawn daily into the same iterative conversation. It is all made worse by the fact that we don’t actually learn Latin—there’s no progressive current, no tether, no proof that we are even real or alive.
When the Actual Latin has gone on for too long (ten minutes) and we all need our water bottles refilled, Andy loops our three Owalas around his finger and provides for us, because he is a boy and we are just girls. Mr. O’Malley tells us we’re the most hydrated teenagers he’s ever met, and when he was eighteen, he’d go weeks at a time without drinking water. We all giggle and stare back at him with glazed-over eyes while we drink from our sippy cups. Lizzie says “I took vitamin D and now I feel like I’m in the sun.” Andy hyperventilates after spotting “Moribus” and misreading it as “Morbius.” I draw interlacing spirals in the margins of my copy of De Bello Gallico as a portrait of our experience. Every day is Groundhog’s Day in HUM 8, and we will ride the spiral current until we graduate or die.
Last week we started a new fun thing where we hash tallies in the upper-left-hand corner of the whiteboard to prove to ourselves that we are real. If a tree falls in a forest with no sixth-day-in-the-prison-cell tally mark to bear witness, can we even be sure we ever learned Latin at all? It’s like a diary that we share except I’m always the tallyer.
The thing about keeping a diary is there’s no way to do it and feel like a normal person. If you journal consistently, days blend into one strand of hours interrupted by line breaks and ink colors. When done inconsistently, it makes time feel erratic and jagged. The CD skips from first verse to second chorus. You might catch bites of a bridge, edges of words that don’t sound like words. I’ll feel like I’m getting away with something, cheating time, and then I’ll realize that December 11th was a real day from a real week a real long time ago, even though it’s only a small stack of sheets away. I always get weird about time when something is ending. I like to operate from end-to-end, so I’m pretty weird about time always.
I am driving home from school with a blonde mother and her nine-year-old son. A song comes on shuffle and the nine-year-old son skips it, says, “You know, I used to really love that song. I don’t anymore.” The song is Believer by Imagine Dragons.
Blank Space. 400 Lux. Emily, I’m Sorry. I used to really love those songs. I don’t anymore.
The formula for love is duration x strength x connotation. But the fourth dimension is time—the negative space we swim through: there is someone that looks like me, and she is playing 400 Lux while I’m writing here, because that minute, this minute, and the minutes that have yet to be are all simultaneously occurring. We stomach one at a time, etch their tallies on the walls, find new things to love as we go, rinse, repeat.
I’ve been thinking a lot about love and how it changes. Love as a function of time. Love as loved. Love as a subjective refraction of place, not as truth. I love:
Glee Cast cover of Landslide. February sun on a bluebird morning. Swiftie Swipe mid-teeth brush. Cinnamon soy milk latte.
Everyone in my house and maybe the world loves Severance. I tried to watch it with them all but I started screaming and we had to turn it off because losing my memory is my biggest fear. Missing my life is my biggest fear. I don’t know how I’d deal with it—knowing that my life wasn’t all mine always, that if I met my severed self, we’d be fair strangers. How do they live while knowing that who they are won’t exist in a few hours? I blink again. I failed to notice the TV screen become a mirror.
I am peeling through the pages of a book I know the ending of. I won’t love these things at some point. I’ll love different things at some point. I want it to be March and April and yesterday and last year and next year. I want to be in Michigan and Syracuse and New York City and Philadelphia, all because the ground under my feet is softening to swallow me. This was supposed to be about Taylor Swift and Sumo Citrus. I guess my severed self took over.
