BEFORE I KNEW BETTER
A fictional diary from someone who was looking for the right life in the wrong places. | CHAPTER 07
BEFORE I KNEW BETTER
Chapter 7
THE UNBEARABLE THING ABOUT COINCIDENCE
Tuesday, July 10, 2001, evening
Yesterday I got a postcard from Andrea. From Thailand. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her, but I can still picture her exactly. Her last line on the card: she’s enjoying the incredible lightness of being.
Fine. Nice. I put the card down and turned on the TV.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Kundera adaptation. Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin. Just sitting there on the screen like it had been waiting for me.
I don’t know what to do with coincidences like that. I never know if they mean something or if I’m just the kind of person who notices patterns because he needs them to exist. Maybe both. Either way I should probably get in touch with Andrea when she’s back from wherever she goes. Perhaps.
Andrea. My first love. My first unhappy love. I still love her somehow, secretly, somewhere deep down. But the hope is gone. That died a long time ago.
With beer, wine, and whiskey.
Today I went to see Susie.
It can be summed up as nervous stammering. I don’t know what happens to me in her presence. I lose the thread completely, lose the version of myself I actually like. What I want, what I’ve always wanted with her, is one evening at a party, a beer, enough time to actually talk. To show her who I am when I’m not falling over my own feet. To not be drunk before midnight. To not spend the next morning reconstructing everything I said, searching for damage.
I love her. I’m fairly sure.
Meanwhile, Andrea is somewhere in Southeast Asia, moving through different cultures, meeting people, expanding whatever needs expanding. And I’m back in Vorarlberg trying to be a writer, squeezing thoughts out of my own fingers, trying to make my life sound interesting on the page.
Although. Who else is doing this? Who else is sitting somewhere asking what any of it means? The world probably doesn’t have a meaning beyond its own existence, but that can’t be enough. It can’t just be that consciousness showed up and made everything worse. There has to be something.
I’m getting away from myself. This is a diary, not a philosophy lecture.
I’ll stop here before I do any more damage.