love & the city part two: electric boogaloo

I recently turned twenty-six; shortly thereafter, I started wondering exactly how I've gotten this old without achieving the kind of greatness I always hoped was in me. It happened sort of like clockwork; I'd certainly been warned by plenty of my friends that a quarter-life crisis would be in order. I'd shrugged it off, though, on the assertion that I'd already been there and done that, but it turns out all those other occasions were false starts and that this one may well really be the real thing. I can tell it by the certain measure of calm I seem to maintain even as I feel panicky about my future; it's like somewhere inside me, my body's working hard at giving up and becoming complacent even as my brain fights against it.

I always thought that by the time I got this old, I'd have created something: a book, a business, a career, a record. It scares me to suddenly realize not only that this is not the case, but that I had my little wake-up call to this effect already and did nothing about it. The winter before I turned twenty-four, I came quite close to dying, and upon my recovery I vowed that things would be different and I'd do everything I'd been putting off previously. And certainly, there were some huge life changes made, but mostly I concentrated on fighting an uphill battle back to the kind of normalcy I'd left behind, and somehow all those particularly good intentions got left by the wayside.

Shortly before getting sick, I'd been closer than ever before to achieving the life that I wanted. I was writing about bands I loved, I was working at a label for bands I was passionate about, I was becoming closer with some people who really inspired me, and I was starting to date the kind of guy I'd always thought must exist somewhere but hadn't yet experienced. It's that last bit that was the real coup, and the way things played out made me realize quite a few things about myself.

I've lived in this city for a good eight years; at least once or twice a year, I have to get out of town and go back to where I came from to figure out how far I've come. And every time I do, someone inevitably asks me why I don't have a boyfriend, and how it's so much as possible that I live in a huge city, know so many people, and work in an industry with such like-minded people, but can't find anyone to settle down with.

"I don't know how to get it in their heads," I said to a friend later, "that settling down isn't something most of us ever think about."

As much as Christiana looks inside herself and sees a girlfriend girl, I've always looked at myself and never been able to see it; it's with this in mind that it seems as though New York is the perfect place for a girl like me to be. At the same time, though, as much of a single girl as I am, I've also never been a "dating" kind of girl. The boy I'd been seeing before I got sick was an incredible mix of the things I'd always wanted in a guy: He was successful, but on an indie, non-scary level; he was passionate about all the same music I was, down to the obscurities; he would hold your hand and sing in the street and make a fool of himself if he knew it would make you smile. And he was every bit as unselfconscious as I was completely unsure of myself.

What broke my heart in that relationship was less the boy himself than the knowledge that he still wasn't what I wanted; when I found out he was less serious about me than he seemed, I was pissed, then relieved: this can be just a casual thing. And that thought stayed with me, though the boy changed; hell, I even still believe that friends with benefits is possible if you play it right.

But the operative word has always been just that: friends. To bother with dating in the city is to engage in a series of relationships that very rarely pan out as friendships, and that's the part that I've never been that up with. In romantic relationships, in personal friendships, and in "business" circles, if I can't truly be friends with someone, then I have a really hard time figuring out why they're worth my time. It's one of my biggest hang-ups, I'm sure, but it's the truth. Where this has led me, unfortunately, is down a series of dead-ends whereupon I always ultimately realize why someone and I were "just friends" to begin with.

Christiana put it best when she said it's always the one time you let your guard down that you end up regretting it; I have been incredibly cautious over the years, and in those brief seconds where I've decided to take a chance, the rapidity with which its bitten me in the ass has been a bit alarming. I guess the question is whether or not I regret it. Immediately, yes; after every failing I hate the words that I've admitted aloud and thus can't take back or make myself forget. But ultimately? Ultimately we are a product of our own mistakes but also our regrets, and I can't help but think that it would feel worse never to know how things might have been - or, for that matter, to have played things any differently than the way I really wanted to.

Since when has adhering to convention - in business, in friendship, or in love - ever gotten us anywhere truly extraordinary? That's the question I keep asking myself as I fumble through whatever crisis I've found myself in, and that's how I hope to find my footing again. I still have a mental image of how I want my life to be, and though it's evolved over the years, there are some basics that are the same. Some of it is vague and quite probably unachievable; at this age and in this time, it's unlikely that I'm ever going to find success as a musician. But there are parts of it that seem somehow so close within my reach that it almost hurts to articulate it, parts that used to just be shadowy "I'm not sure what goes here" bits of a dream that are now becoming clearer with time.

It's scary as hell, but the only thing I can do is take chances where I find them and hope that other people can take the same chances on me. And I will never be a "girlfriend girl", but somehow that very fact has guided me into the most comfortable relationship I've ever been a part of. It's very easy to imagine that biting me in the ass as anything else has, and then that I'll regret with stunning immediacy every word I have said, but ultimately? Ultimately I may feel like I'm getting old, but I haven't given up the hope of having something extraordinary.