Come with me into the midst of this fight. We are in the Starbucks near my high school, circa 2006, in the slush of February (or March, or even sometimes April, depending on the mood of the winter that year). Outside the cars wear incomplete coats of salt kicked up by their tires, and everyone wears boots that sink deep into puddles that hide cracks in the pavement that, come summer, will be filled only to crack again. The seasonality of these roads and their repairs, not totally unlike the human heart. Or so I might say circa 2006.
Inside this Starbucks you’ll find me in one of the big dark blue plush armchairs they had then, before everything became clean, minimal, before they sharpened the edges like a new pencil. These were chairs that could swallow you, and I am feet tucked up into them, hot vanilla latte in hand (was it skinny already then, was I already asking that of my body? I don’t know). My best friend is in the other chair, and she is telling me about Nietzsche, who I have decided I hate without reading anything he’s written. This friend of mine, I wish I could tell her now that I’ve read Nietzsche, I still don’t love him, but I respect the yearning she felt in his words and yes, I do, I also love the idea that sometimes we are not ripe for our fruit.
But we’re spiraling away from Nietzsche himself, and our coffees are tucked on side tables because we both talk with our hands. The fight is playful - is a mark of hours of knowing each other - but the disagreement is fierce. She thinks things are a spiral - that life itself is a spiral. I can’t remember if she thinks this involves reincarnation. Perhaps she does. But we circle to the same lessons again, and again, she says. And we’ll be in different places on the spiral and see things differently. Truths that appear contradictory can both be true, depending on where you are.
I argue back that life is linear, progressive, that something cannot be true and untrue at the same time. I am quick to hear what sounds like a contradiction (many years later, this will be my favorite means of proof in logic - derive the contradiction, and assert the premise). I argue that we are not spiraling, that we are going somewhere, that we aren’t going to return back to where we are now. How could we ever hope to make progress?
This is perhaps both a silly fight and the story of my own mind fighting itself. I want my life to arrange itself according to an equation that progresses onward without any loops. I want to present myself as ever-moving, ever-bettering, and anything I have done before (mistakes, so many of them, and sins, yes, those too, and all the other kinds of being that I have been) I want to leave in the dust. Why would I want to go backwards?
I’m still on that 16m circle, by the way. Today she told me it took her months on her upper level, advanced horse to get the foundation between them of the forward, and the round, that form the beginning of the conversation.
Okay, a quick aside - it turns out that I can hardly ever make sense of my life except by putting it up alongside these visceral, concrete experiences, and so for whoever knows how long if you read what I write you may feel that I never talk of anything but horses and dressage. But back the forward, and the bend. “You ride them forward until they are round.” I’m on the circle asking the same question for an hour which is about being forward and being round, but it is also about the depths of love - can you trust me, here and now, can I become what you need, here and now, can we do this together, can we be good to each other, can we accept and love each other in this ask, in all its imperfections?
Is it any wonder that when I got off today I wished I could tell my friend she was right - it is a spiral? The third time on the circle going left I see the horse again, but differently. The twelfth time on the circle going right I see myself again, but differently. I cannot leave behind the turns on the circle that come before, they are swept up in our forward motion. But perhaps that is the thing I got wrong. On the spiral, we are still going forward. On the circle, we are still becoming something new.
Circa 2006 I was terrified of returning to previous selves, of holding memories of mistakes with anything but regret and reprimand. Now I ride in circles, I revisit memories of fights about this very thing, and I hold her with a tiny bit more tenderness. I am on the spiral, going forward.
We are returning to ourselves and we are becoming ourselves. I love the Hilary of 2006 in her fierce defense of a view that is incomplete and her fear of progress which is more complicated than the straight arrow onward. She has become someone new, and she will become herself.