On Time

It’s been over three months since I’ve posted here. Not because I haven’t thought of things to write but because the thoughts to the impulse to write mechanically was almost always interrupted.

It’s fall now, though.

And I’m writing in the (mostly) dark of the early morning. A peach candle is burning on the sill, a leftover from summer, another time-limited memory of something that isn’t with me, burning down. After I lit this candle, for some reason, I rubbed my palms past each other and triggered some visceral memory of the last person to hold my hand.

*All of September, I’ve been resisting time.* I’ve been resisting writing this, too. Blame it on the almost superstitious belief that saying it out loud or writing it down being the reason it ends, not that the time has passed whether you were prepared or not. But “Summer is over.” Because “Time waits for no man.” But this is trite, of course, and I am no man.

But a man recently gave me cause to revisit the graveyard of internets passed.

It’s been 10 years since I wrote nototherwise.com. Or since I stopped writing it. It was a fever dream documented real time through a period of my life that could never be repeated. Not only are my twenties very over (good riddance!!!) and not only have I returned to the east coast, but I am not the same person anymore (thank god!!!).

A few core things remain the same, though.

Two weeks ago. I went on a first date. It went well. Too well. It had been a few years in the making, so I’m not surprised in some ways. I will spare you the details, not because they weren’t exciting but because this blog isn’t paywalled. Regardless, before the night ended, he asked to see me again. We made plans for the next Friday. He walked me to the valet and as they pulled my car up, held onto my hand until the last second, trailed his fingers through my palm, and then released.

Anyway. You never know when the last second you will see someone may be.

I’m not a typically romantically sentimental person. I am more inclined to be sentimental about, say, the wrapper to a type of gum they don’t make anymore found inside of a book that I know my mother gave me at Christmas in 1994. For example. But on this morning, my own hands grazed each other in just such a way…

***

These days, i don’t use my real name in most places, including, of course and probably especially, dating apps. It’s for security not deception, but it also serves as a boundary in some ways that, while not impossible to cross, is a polite buffer to my privacy as a female human being before I decide if it’s safe for you to know more about me.

But I digress because in this case, it wasn’t up to me anymore because he’d found and read my entire 10 year old blog within 48h of leaving my company. This was a series of work that got the attention of established agents at WME and elsewhere when I lived in LA. Looking back now, I can see it was ground breaking. It is a piece of the background that has gotten me cited all over the media in the past decade in places like Playboy, Vice, Wired, Engadget, The Cut…i don’t even know anymore. All over. And as people with names other than the one that appears on my passport.

But, I felt a privacy invasion when he asked me a question relevant to a post as a way to announce that he had tracked me down, no matter how complimentary he was about it. The post he first mentioned to me was one where the music I had embedded 10 years earlier, was the same he had played for me when me met a few nights before, not knowing I had a blog at all. Sometimes ‘coincidence’ and novelty can lead to short lived obsession. And before our second date, he was suggesting we fly to the virgin islands.

Here we go again.

Images: Dario Creative

But he did have ME reading through my own discarded past. In the few days after we met, I listened to music from that era. Dropping out of med school. Working in NYC. Working in DC. Driving to California on the strength of some bartending and a blog. Working in LA. Leaving LA. Why. And how far away I am from all of that now, a decade down the road.

Most people are familiar with “triggers” or something that makes us remember or re-live a negative experience. A glimmer is the opposite, a moment that evokes calm, joy or awe. For a second, I thought it was probably embarrassing (to who?) to remember something that another person did naturally and casually. But then I thought, “Who cares?” (i deserve a treat!) That’s cute. So what’s the problem?

Well. I blocked his number before our second date.

We had planned to meet that friday, Rosh Hashanah. Now it’s 10 days later, Yom Kippur. I am not a definitive scholar on the Torah obviously, but this time of year we’ve just concluded is concerned with the harvest. [God] is in the field. We are looking back over the seasons of rest, planning, and growth. We are auditing ourselves and course correcting.

We are making amends. We are starting something new.

Writing here now, I’ve jammed the digital signals from the past. You can look back from here to the old blog, but you can’t see this from there unless you already know it exists or find a link somewhere else. And due to a lot of account suspensions over the years, some of the semantic and explicit links have been erased without my repair. I don’t live there anymore.

It wasn’t the blog reading that scared me off but it did set the stage. Men get ahead of themselves around me all the time and then panic when they’ve had some more time to come crashing out of whatever fantasy narrative they’ve invented. It can be fun. It can be monetized. But it always subsides. So when Thursday’s energy didn’t match Tuesday’s, I didn’t care to know why. Was I being rash? Maybe. Did he have a good reason? Allegedly. But. Time is a gift. My intuition is divine. And I can deal with my own emotional whiplash after and alone. What I can’t deal with is wasting my own time.

But still, it’s nice to be reminded of something that felt precious. Even days after my decision had been made.

That ex from LA messages me sometimes now. He’s a peach. But we’re able to have a distant and platonic relationship because of the passage of time leading to perspective on when and where we met each other. A period that felt dramatic and painful being somehow transformed into a precious memory about a time in our lives that has gone by for both of us but overlapped. I want the best for him, and peace.

I know at this point, thousands if not millions of people have encountered my writing and other work. A lot of people who don’t know me but who follow along have their own ideas because my life can’t be explained to the average person. But from my perspective, the past 10 years have been fruitful beyond measure. I am rich. Not because of whatever number is in my accounts at any given moment but because of how I’ve used money and time up until this point and what it has yielded. Results against long odds.

And time is more precious than ever.

No matter how much pressure I applied to myself to write before this, I couldn’t have written this post until today, when I had this feeling. A few minutes before I started, I was even sure I felt differently. So thank you, M.

And with that I pray that our pains are softened by time. And may we all find someone we want to hold our hand.

xx.

And P.S. Dont’ feel bad for our friend, M. He knows my name now, after all. 🥲