I’ve expected very little of it all
I checked in at 3:45. I’ll be checked out by 5:30; less than an hour from now as I write this.
Nothing’s wrong with the room. It’s spacious, by Manhattan standards, and comfortable. But my plans didn’t quite work out, so I’m heading home early.
I’m in New York for two reasons. The first is that my partner and I have birthdays in close proximity, and we came down to celebrate each other for a few days — see shows, eat food, take selfies, buy books, and fuck in sheets we don’t have to wash. Missions accomplished.
The other reason was to teach my second class of the semester in person, which is now not happening because New York is not the Midwest I in which I grew up, and the mere possibility of snow causes things to shut down well before the first flakes have fallen.
This new agenda isn’t what I’d expected nor imagined, but it’s fine. A sudden, last-minute reset of plans for the day that happens to be my 40th birthday isn’t quite on the nose enough to call it poetry. But it rhymes; there's so much I didn't expect.
I didn’t expect the loneliness to ever wane, or at least not how long it would take. I didn’t expect the meditation, the reflection, the therapy. I didn’t expect to ever find ease, but I did, at times, and more so, now.
I didn't expect doctor after doctor to simply shrug: "Beats me!"
I didn’t expect to join a fraternity, probably shouldn’t have. I didn’t expect to stop playing the french horn, and I didn’t expect to become proficient on the guitar. I didn’t expect to major in radio and television production, and in fact put off declaring a major until the last possible moment.
I did, in a way, expect (hope?) to get married, and to whom, but I didn’t expect what would change, who we’d become, how it would end … nor how it would all, eventually, be for the best.
I didn’t expect to visit New York again after the first time, let alone work here on occasion. I like this city. I first visited ~1999, again two years later, as part of a Drama Club trip. I took pictures with a disposable camera, and got my finger in my only photo of the World Trade Center. So it goes.
I didn’t expect to ever find myself in places like Tokyo or Munich or Lisbon, or even to get a passport, really. Travel was for the rich kids.
I didn’t expect to live in Minnesota. I didn’t expect to ever have a reason to visit Arizona, let alone live there for a year.
I didn’t expect the diagnosis, the rebound, the return, the wasting, the emptiness. I didn’t expect how she’d look when I got down there, the last time. I didn’t expect how much I’d have to say and never say. I didn’t expect to learn the word cholangiocarcinoma, how to pronounce it, where it starts in the body and what it does when it spreads.
I didn’t expect that I’d be a drinker, then a drunk. To ever get there, to have to reckon with it, to still be climbing back from it.
I definitely didn’t expect Rhode Island, a place I still cannot point out quickly on a map.
I didn’t expect to be on the radio, to film hockey games, to have an IMDb credit, to publish a book. I didn’t expect the jobs, nor the layoffs and hasty exits. I didn’t expect to love stagecraft, to learn welding, or ever get into running. (Running?!)
I didn’t expect, on basically all counts, my 30s — the jobs and the cities, the partners and friends, the clubs and the trails, the shows and adventures, the peaks and the valleys, the shape of my world.
I’ve expected very little of it all. In part because it’s been unexpectable. And in part because I planned for very little, and have let the universe share whatever it has to offer whenever it was ready to offer it, good or bad, high or low.
These 40 years have been just fine, I suppose. I'd be happy to do it again.