The Fall: A Poem

Do you know what it's like to fall in love with something you essentially know nothing about? Like, you've already made up your mind in your head of what it will be like, so you've fooled yourself into thinking that's what it actually? I do that all the time.

I fall in love with things and people the way I want them to be. Before I've even experienced them for myself. Most of the time, I'm setting myself up for bitter disappointment upon the discovery that the fantasy does not synchronize with the reality. I was worried about that same disappointment setting in when I first moved to NYC three months ago.

Ever since I first moved to this country at age five, I coveted New York City. The Big Apple. The City of Dreams. My parents had visited NYC together before we officially made the big move and I was hoping they'd trake me straight there. They didn't. They took me to Maryland. But I never lost my passion for the city. I swore that I'd make it there one day.

New York City now isn't what it used to be. That's what people say. It used to be uninhibited. Audacious. Bombastic. And now it's lost its fire. Famously, in a Sex and the City Scene made epic by Kristen Johnston, she plays life-of-the-party-girl Lexi Featherston, who hasn't stopped even after the party is over. No one wants to do cocaine anymore. No one is fun anymore. "New York is over," she says, cigarette in hand, before falling to her death.

I'm sure NYC was an amazing place before recessions, AIDS and the Internet but it still possesses some of the very things that made it what it was: diversity, eccentricity, the ability to make things happen for yourself and pursue your dreams on a bigger scale than you'd be able to in Nowheresville, MD. And after nearly a decade of wanting it, I finally made it happen and it was the most terrifying thing ever.

I had been so eager to reach this goal that I hadn't thought about whether or not it was something that I still really wanted or was worth it. That didn't hit me until I was here, sitting along in a strange room and contemplating for the first time what I had done. But at the end of it all, I know my biggest regret would have been not taking this risk at all in the first place. These are the moments that make the most enchanting stories. Cheers to refusing to play it safe. Oh, and then I scribbled this poem onto some rusty piece of paper.

The Fall

Something uncontrollable stirred inside me,
like I was a teapot.
Water or hot lava perhaps
bubbled to the surface
and emanated furiously from my eyes, stinging.
Tears I had not cried in years.

Everything hit me all at once.
That I had accomplished what I set out to.
That everything would change from now on.
That I had to change with it or risk
being left behind.
That the kindness of people had led me
to this moment.
And that I was completely alone.

My comfort had been an enemy to my success,
so my discomfort would have to serve as its companion.
There is nothing so terrifying as uncertainty.
That leap of faith is no longer frightening
because of what lies below,
but because of the fact that
you can't retract once you've taken it.
There is nothing left but the landing.

So taken aback was I by the intensity
of my emotion that I forgot to be
thankful that I could feel again.
That I was bold enough to risk the pain
of crashing.
And so, if my landing is rough, I hope I have
the strength left in me to do it all over again.
And if my landing is smooth, I hope
to never forget the rush of the fall.

-Maryline

Dying Young and I'm Playing Hard

"I'm not old. I still have my legs, my force, and my spirit by God's grace. And I use them everyday. So I'll never be old."

That's what my dad just said to me on the phone. He turned 53 today. He said as long as you live

He's actually pretty hot.

young, you'll never be old. And those who have fully functioning bodies and minds but are too lazy to use them are the old ones. I've always admired that about my father. We've had a difficult relationship and differences that run deeper than I can even scratch the surface of in a blog post (or care to, at that), but he's always possessed certain qualities that I find refreshing.

He looks at life with such a youthful, if at times naive, alacrity. Everything is an adventure waiting to be had, new territory waiting to be explored and new experiences waiting to be memories. He lives life hard, with passion. He's more active and engaged than most men I've met half his age and can probably even still drink them under the table. He laughs hard, parties hard and spends every dime he makes trying to ensure that he never lives a dull moment.

In that sense, he's the complete opposite of my mother. She plays by the rules, never daring to go where she's told not to go. She keeps to herself and only ever does what she has to do, as opposed to what she wants to do. And yet, for a split second, sometime decades ago, they saw something in each other that perhaps they wanted to see in themselves. In my father, my mother probably saw a spontaneity she secretly longed to have. And in her, he saw an impressive and awe-inspiring level of self-mastery.

And they came together and bore a Libra; a balance.  A perfect coalescence of yin and yang. I like to think I'm the perfect balance of their opposing personalities, but I'm not. Not yet. I've struggled all my life with the two extremes. On the one hand, being too unhinged and unpredictable like father and on the other, too reclusive and inhibited like my mother. I've learned to tone down the wild side of myself but still struggle to ignite a fire in the tamer side.

"No one ever excused his way to success."

But my father is right. I've been out running and seen people three times my age pass me. I've heard people old enough to be my parents make exciting plans for the weekend while mine consisted of doing laundry and catching up on reality television. Life is for those who realize how much it's worth living. it only asks one thing from us and that is effort. We can sit around all day expecting our goals to be miraculously met, but that's not how life works. We have to get up and earn it. We have to take the initiative and stop putting things off. We have to go out and engage in the world, or as Chbosky would say, "participate." That's the only way to ever truly avoid getting old.

Oh, and happy birthday daddy...ya old fart.