Last

I was supposed to go see the last Music Box show on Windward last night.

Anything called “last” hits me like a human death. It makes me weep, even if it’s some small nonsense. I think part of it is the disconcerting realization that that specific thing touches in me, the thing that says that everything is the last time. Because it is.

Anyway, my plans to go to the show with a friend got derailed when he cancelled at the last minute, and I wasn’t so keen on attending anymore. Still I got ready and drove there. “I won’t want to have missed this.” As I walked up, the energy felt all wrong. Off-putting. Too loud, too cacophonous, too much. And I stood there a block away for a while, my eyes and ears assaulted by the crowd of Burning Man-type revelers with their bikini tops and fluorescent hair, their unmarred skin and their skateboard tricks and their fire dancing and their fistfights and their mosh pit, in all their youthful idiocy, making me feel far away and old. I wondered there if I should push through the discomfort or turn back. I ended up turning back. Walked to my car and sat there awhile, wondering if I’d regret missing the Last One Ever. Opened my texts and sent a message to my friend Will, whom I’d said I’d see at the show. “I’m sorry,” I wrote, “I’m just not able to get my mind into the right place tonight.” No response. Started driving home. At the border of Venice and Santa Monica, a panic rose in me. I turned around and went back to my parking spot. Waited there to feel ready. Was sort of stunned and bewildered once again to find that the feeling never came. This time I drove home.

This morning I woke up wondering what I’d missed. Got a text back from Will: “it kinda sucked. I left after a few minutes. It’s all different now; the live music was competing with the DJ at the newly-reopened Townhouse next door, and drunk people were streaming through. We weren’t alone on the block anymore. It wasn’t the same. It had its place in time, but I’m glad it’s over. It had its purpose during the pandemic. But now it’s over.”

I sat and looked at that message for a long time. Then I got up and went for an aimless drive. Driving always helps me think. It dawned on me with the spring of hot tears that this pandemic pause on everything, this yearlong silence, this forced isolation, had been something almost beautiful. I realized I was beginning to mourn the loss of the silence, the isolation, the lack of normal life. I liked it. It made the world more like my mind. Now, suddenly, the normal people were back outside, and I hated them. I don’t like normal life. I don’t know what that even is. I’m not ready to go back to it. The pandemic made everyone an outsider. I fit right in.

It’s odd and certainly offensive to many who have lost so much with the loss of normal life, but I find myself in a full-body rejection of this reinstatement of old ways. I was done with them. I liked the empty streets that matched my lonely insides. Now I’m confronted with couples in love, people being young while they’re young, on time for it all, showing up to their world fully while they are in it. Striving and falling short, trying again, making strides, making mistakes. Growing. In their way. At the appropriate time. On time. On time.

On time: I’ve never been on time. In my early days I was years ahead of my peers; now I am a decade at least behind them all. Slipped by, slipped through, gone, no return. Even this moment on 9th street by Interstate 10 in the early evening twilight in my car with the window open, writing: I will miss this too, am missing it now. I’m missing it.

Everything is the last time.

I’m caught somewhere between despondency and regret, panic at losing time and resignation that it’s already gone by. Trying to pin down what Too Late means. And if it’s now. Gathering myself up again and saying okay let’s go back out and try again, then giving up. Again. I don’t know when I got so old. I was drunk and high when everyone else became fully-functioning adults. Whatever that means. It looks different. It looks different from me. Inside my apartment, which I’m avoiding by sitting here to write in my car, escaping any way I can, it’s a mess. There’s no one to keep me accountable, and I have crafted it that way, though not always consciously. Just avoiding, avoiding. Still the years turn. Still I grow old, despite my insistence on hiding and stagnation.

Day has turned to night. I’m still in my car, in the driver’s seat but not driving, writing about things I can’t see. Things I never wanted to know. Regrets I never knew I’d have. Every lost hour of my fearful little life.

Like this one.

Everything is the last time.