I Stared Past Her
There's no such thing as the one that got away.
When I was young I stared at my hand for so long that I decided I was an alien.
I don’t remember why I started. I was a kid. I just locked onto it. The fingers, the palm, the lines, the space between the fingers, the way the ligaments moved when I made a fist. I went part by part. And the longer I looked, the stranger it got, until the whole thing stopped feeling like mine. How could this exist. That was the question. Not how does a hand work, but how could a thing like this be here at all.
I never did it again. I’ve never since picked one ordinary object and followed the question of its existence all the way down. And for a long time I thought that was the loss. That I’d traded away some childhood capacity to be amazed.
But that’s not it. Back then I wasn’t appreciating the hand. I was registering that it was out of the ordinary. The strangeness was the whole content. Appreciation came later, and I learned where it comes from. It comes from the possibility of loss. The more I could lose something, the more I appreciated it, and the longer that appreciation lasted. The hand never qualified. It’s always there. I’m not going to lose it. So it never triggered anything except that long, dislocating stare.
When I was eighteen I had a gap year in Israel. One of my first nights out, there was a girl with a British accent. The moment she spoke I was gone. Nobody else in the room could shake me. Mesmerized is the right word.
There was another girl there that night, standing right next to the British girl. But I was so locked onto the one that the other wasn’t even in my world. Months later I actually spoke to her, and somewhere in those conversations I understood, maybe for the first time, that personality was worth something. That it actually meant something. At eighteen you don’t know that yet. By the time I knew it, it was too late. I’d already shown my hand. I’d spent my move on the wrong person before I understood who was worth reaching for.
The hard part was never that it was too late. It’s that it made sense that it was too late.
She was from Miami. I don’t know where she is now. And I’ve built a whole disdain for that city on top of her, because it turns out almost every girl I’ve truly cared about came from there. Ten years later, it happened again. Another girl from Miami. The same failure underneath it. The one that got away because I stared too long and never did the thing. And I’m from Los Angeles, so when someone tells me they want to move to Miami I get this reflex, I see them as fake, materialistic, empty. But the people who actually came from there, the ones I cared about, were the people I connected with most.
Every time I visit, I have a good time. And I still arrive carrying the pain and leave carrying it, because there are people there I never closed the door with. I caught myself in the middle of blaming the city and realized it wasn’t the city. It showed up from the beginning as me.
The disdain protects me from the actual thing, which is seeing an opportunity and not taking it. Not waking myself up in the moment. And the shape of that failure is exactly the shape of the hand. I stared too long and the thing turned alien. These people were never alien. They were natural. And I almost lost them the same way, by studying instead of reaching.
So what’s the difference between the staring that makes a thing strange and the seeing that lets you grab it in time.
There isn’t one. That was the mistake, thinking I needed to grab anything in time at all. There’s no such thing as the one that got away. If it got away, it was away. If it was meant to be there, it would be there. I don’t get to know which, and that’s the part I’m accepting.
So I’m not going to stare anymore. Not at the hand, not at the person standing right there.
I don’t need to stare at something to appreciate it. I can appreciate everything I look at. That’s the whole thing I missed. The staring was never how I held onto anything. It was how I made it strange.