recently, i've been keeping lists

notes-app ramblings turned into rambling substack post

Homesick for so many moments that have already passed, I develop a tendency of scratching at the same wound again and again — a bad habit now that I still haven’t learned how to stave off. I woke up a few mornings ago and realized that I’ve missed you now for just as many seasons as I knew you. I wonder when I will stop marking the passage of time this way: in befores and afters, in what-could-have-beens and what is.

I decide that I want to start making lists, because I’ve been feeling like my life is an animal deboned, all flesh and nothing to cling to. I try making a list of everything that makes me happy but forget to make it past the third item. Sometimes I think of how I don’t actually enjoy writing because I much prefer the way things sound in my head, before they have oxidized on the paper.

In my head, I’ve been making a list of every way I will make myself better. Less for self-improvement and more to prove to myself that I am a thing in motion. My dad tells me that college was the best four years of his life and suddenly I am scared of the future becoming brittle, of things once seen as malleable calcifying into what is irreversible. I am scared of stagnation and regret balling up like tight little fists, of feeling like I will always be trapped inside myself.

I am still learning what to cling onto and what to let go of. This I place on my mental list of things to work on; I can feel the new year unhinging its jaw and I am so determined to be different this time around. I place little reminders on my calendar, peppering it with notes to call home and shirking off the guilt this surmises; I am not a bad daughter because I am trying. I sign up for a 7k and force my friend to mark our running dates on her calendar, the two of us laughing about the red faces and clumsy limbs this idea presupposes. I tell my roommates that I’m committed to us becoming a “living room suite,” the kind that draws out conversations too long and lingers in the hallway even when it’s 1am in the thick of finals week.

This is all to say that I’ve been promising myself I will be happier, to stop being so picky about the kinds of happiness I allow myself to accept. Over Thanksgiving break, my mom tells me that happiness exists and that I am simply unwilling to invite it into my life, and I am angry at her in the moment but have since been working harder to follow her advice.

I want to get good at noticing, too, but instead I’m always remembering. Maybe time feels counterintuitive because I have gotten so adept at returning again and again to what is somehow safe and impossibly sharp, stomaching the melancholy just to come back to a memory that has been immortalized as good, nevermind how it once cut me.

I am always remembering and remembering and remembering. Would you care if I told you this now? Sometimes I wonder if your memories have claw marks in them the way mine do. I am rarely decisive, but I’ve found that I can be stubborn in the most inconvenient of places, which is to say it has taken me this long to accept what you long ago solidified as true.

Happiness is hard, I realize. Recently, I’ve returned to the running list on my phone of each time I have felt happy, still trying to pin down the feeling and mold it into something tangible. In the thrum of a friend’s laughter, in the swell of a good song, in mornings that swing open like doors, all lightness and promise, I have tried to grip happiness in my hands and will it into form.

This is all to say that I am maybe overly cynical, but that I am also hopeful. In my introductory psychology class, we learn that the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is self-actualization, and I think of how hopeful it is, that kind of striving. Of believing that there is meaning and purpose to be fought for.

I am stubborn and life is stubborn and a few days ago, I forgot to turn off the car’s engine, just left the thing idling in the driveway, suspended in its waiting. I am waiting for something, but I’m still not sure of what. And yet, all this waiting feels somewhat willful, derived from some inner belief that life is about to pitch forward into something graceful and good, that this is something I can will into fruition with persistence.

I am stubborn and life is stubborn and I am hopeful and life is hopeful, and on the right days, at the right times, this feels like just enough.