The most essential yet always undermined privilege of being young, I sometimes find, is the right to/capacity for self-expression.
Once in a while comes along someone – someone that you really want to reach out for and ask to stay around a little longer, to tell them about your own idiosyncratic old habits, to listen to their childhood stories, to daydream about the tomorrows, or even to just stay in silence together. Because you know for sure it will be a long time until someone like that comes along again. If you were somehow younger, you would do it without even the slightest tinge of fear – fear of assuming too much, fear of sharing too much, fear of being rejected, or worst, fear of being accepted for the wrong reason. But you are no longer that young, so you stay quiet and let that someone go. And after a few times staying quiet and letting that someone go away like that, suddenly, you get to a point in life when it is no longer a particular someone that you miss. Rather, it is a long lost moment in time that makes you sigh, when you know exactly what is meant by "water under the bridge". With that moment sparkling and then vanishing into thin air, every little part in you - the life as you’ve known it, the romance as you’ve dreamed it, the hope as once possible, will soon depart.
There is a fine line between sharing and sharing too much. Sharing has to be selective because “cũng phải chọn người mới chia sẻ, đâu phải ai cũng chia sẻ được, vì nhiều khi nó có thể làm mình rất tổn thương; ví dụ là có những cái mà mình quý nhất thì người ta lại coi thường.” [1] Sharing too much makes people around feel uncomfortable – after all, not everyone is smart enough (pardon my arrogance) or caring enough to (want to) know what you really think and feel. Or simply because not everyone is curious and obsessive enough a peeping Tom or a voyeur.
A way to bridge the gap, for me, is to read. Fiction and novels are preferred to non-fiction and self-help as the former seems to offer both an emotional and intellectual outlet that the latter might not be able to do. Hopefully from the mass of things priceless and worthless of others, I may find a piece of writing that speaks something worthwhile, and share it. So here’s the very first piece. To Jack and Ennis of Brokeback Mountain and their tragic story.
In the book, the passages came after “I wish I knew how to quit you” and before the news of Jack’s death.
What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.
They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis’s pocket, from the sticks in the fire setting into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis’s breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, “Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you’re sleeping on your feet like a horse,” and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words “see you tomorrow,” and the horse’s shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone.
Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they’d never much farther than that. Let be, let be.
Sunday, December19, 2010
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