Time in a bottle

Main Entry: quiddity(1)
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: the real nature or essence of something which makes it different from others

I've had a pretty exciting life. By 'exciting' I mean 'insane'. Sometimes I wonder what I'd be like now, you know, under different circumstances. But then I would not be me. I wonder what it's like to have friends that have known you since you were however wherever whatever. There is one person that I have known since I was eighteen, Diane, and she is my oldest friend. But I have not seen her in almost four years. I talk to her, and will be in her wedding this year, but we don't really know each other anymore. If we met today for the first time, would we be friends at all? Who knows. I hope so.

So lately I have been spending a fair amount of time with my friends. They're the best. I'd forgotten, you know, what friends are like. Toward the end, the last year or two with Scott, our friends just fled, ran screaming, hoping to get far enough away that we wouldn't infect them with whatever we were cultivating in our living room. Then after that I was such a mess, such a mess, and was interested in nothing and no one for some time. Then the ridiculous situation at my house, just when things were going all right. So it's been a while. But!!

I have these friends, see. And they really are the best. And seeing them, and spending time with them, and listening to them talk and reading everything and doing retarded things together, I wonder what I was so worried about, you know, before. With everything. I was worried all the time, worried that I was doing horrible things to people and worried that I was losing my mind and worried that I had no idea who I was or what I was doing and that some celestial line judge was going to flag me for going out of bounds. I don't worry so much about that. In fact, I don't really worry about it at all. I do all right. And even when I don't, that's all right too. Because I don't think they're going anywhere. And then when I'm, oh, fifty, there may be people that have known me since I was whatever. People other than my cousins. My cousins were always there, all the time. Cousins, strangers who wandered in and never left, random people that we absorbed into our family.

Sometimes I think I'm ripping the kids off, having the life that we have. When I was growing up we lived communally for the most part, when we lived anywhere at all. I miss that, now, I miss that more than I would have believed. Even when things were bad, and they were sometimes very, very bad, there was always that. The community, togetherness, working for the good of the whole, being more than the sum of your parts. And it's important, to learn that, to have that. The kids don't know anything like that. They've never been on a team of any kind. They've never lived with anyone other than their parents. They don't know anything other than what I tell them and show them, and that's a lot of pressure. And I don't think it's good for them. Cause maybe I'm wrong, you know. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing with them half the time. I want to take them somewhere else, let them see things and learn things and experience things that do not even occur to me.

I went to a party type thing with my friends a while back, it was at this commune. Oh man, I did not even know what to do. We walked down this road and there it was, the whole thing and the people and the houses and the kids and the life and I thought I would cry. I was standing there, following them around, kind of in awe. It was like my life, all over again, happening without me. I don't know what happened, or when it happened, but I am almost thirty years old and I have no idea where it all went. It's like when you do your taxes and you see how much money you made and you go Where the hell is all this money? I was watching those little girls running and dancing and having a whole world of people to love them and take care of them and I went, I am that little girl, or I was, and now I am the little girl's mother and the little girl is now nine years old and I have not given her a single thing that I wanted to give her. I have no time. I have no space. I do my best with what I have but then I think, I think, I only get one shot at this and it's going away, faster than I can even see. And the kids will grow up and have nothing, and no memories, and no stories and that will be my fault. What will they tell their friends, and their children, about their life? Oh, yeah, it was great! Mom would go to work and we'd sit in our grandparents' living room cause they have no space and nothing to do and we'd just sit there quietly for twelve hours at a time, sometimes we'd watch TV and sometimes we'd play the Gameboy but mostly we just sat around. Then Mom would come home and we'd sit around at our house cause she was tired and maybe we'd ride a bike but usually not.

My brother and sister, damn. Some of my friends have been around the three of us together and they watch and listen and every now and then someone says Are you making this up? And we are never, ever making it up. And we can't get those things, you know, as adults. It's different. And I'm in a constant state of panic, as it occurs to me that the kids get older every day and every day they get older and they keep getting older and older and they will never have a life or a childhood if I don't give it to them and I don't know what to do.