July 4

It's the Fourth of July. I should probably be getting ready for a party. But I've decided to opt out.

I like the fourth of July but I'm having a hard time getting into it this year. It's always strange when you can compare the years of your life by one day. This fourth of July, for example, I'm living in Brooklyn and spending the evening probably doing Pilates, taking a bath and falling asleep by 9. Last year I was in Harlem, with the guy I was dating and his sister and brother-in-law, grilling steaks on my roof and wandering around the city, laughing and drinking like tourists. It would be the last time I saw any of them. It would be the last pseudo-relationship I've had, not counting the two or three short disasters last winter.

The year before that, I was in Charlotte, with the one before him. We'd just spent the weekend at our friend's lake house in South Carolina (the Dirty Dancing filming locale) and came back to Charlotte that evening. We went to dinner, drank too much wine, and he drove my car home beneath the fireworks puncturing the night sky. It was our first weekend together. He told me, as I rested my head on his shoulder and watched the fireworks through the open sunroof, that it would never be better than that. He was right.

Because the two relationships correlated (that one is hard to explain), it seems kind of like the first fourth of July marked the beginning, and the second marked the end. It had come full-circle for the disastrous triangle that no one created but me. It was one year, flanked at each end by a different relationship, a different city, and a different kind of July 4th entirely. My entire world was turned completely, strangely on its head in the long months between those two days. And now, since then, has become completely different again.

I'm pretty sure I'm in a much less complicated place now. Even more sure, in fact, that in general, those things weren't as good as they seemed. One of them asked me recently if I had any weird feelings about the place he'd come to in life without me. I thought about it as an actual possibility. But no, it turns out, I'm not jealous. What I do feel, though, is a sense of detachment from those times, as if someone else entirely had lived them. I am surprised that everyone has moved on but me...but not sad or jealous. Just surprised. I can't understand how when I look back on the situation, like I'm watching a movie, that if it happened the way it seems to have...that I came out of it the only one alone. But I consider it to be for the purposes of reflection, and try not to question the obvious.

So perhaps next July 4th will be strange in a totally new and different way. I hope that I don't still think about the ones past. And I hope that I have the energy to do something more than Pilates and a bath. But for now, that's where I'll be.

Happy 4th of July!