every night, or waiting/looking

Lately everything is time. Everything is always time but lately I can’t stop being aware of it. I feel stuck in the awareness of it. How time gives and takes away. How so much of my life is waiting, even though I don’t know exactly what it is I’m waiting for. How downtown trains pull into stations and end moments that I want to linger in for a while.

Two weeks ago last night, I was at the Apple store waiting for repairs on my phone to be completed, and the Brendan Benson song “What I’m Looking For” came on, which ends with the line “I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for but I know that I don’t want to wait anymore.”

That night, I went home and watched Blue Is the Warmest Color in which Adele goes looking for something, and finds it.

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But things fall apart, and then we see Adele not looking but waiting, living in the past, going back to the places that she and Emma had been. And that same day, in A Lover’s Discourse, I read this in the section on waiting:

“Am I in love? –Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.

Better not to wait but to look. To go looking for something. Not long ago, Masha blogged the line from Renata Adler’s Speedboat, “My capacity for having a good time exists.” And I know mine does. And I know that there is life out there in this city. But as I’ve told a few friends this week, if I were to look, I wouldn’t know where to start looking, as an inexperienced, 37-year-old trans woman with high standards and little patience for or skill at social games. (One friend told me that I’m “very sincere.” He meant it as a compliment but also it struck me as the sort of thing that maybe some people don’t quite know what to do with.)

A lovelorn friend was recently immersing herself in every version she could find of Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” and made me aware of the incredible version by Bon Iver.

It’s already a song that speaks almost too precisely about things I’ve felt, but in his version, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon concludes the song with a line from Raitt’s song “Nick of Time”: “I found love, darling, love in the nick of time.” To find something, don’t you have to be looking for it?

Masha also blogged the line “When the time comes” (specifically from the film Melancholia) when I’d already been thinking about time, wondering when the time would come. And in the third act of the extraordinary game Kentucky Route Zero which I played and reviewed this past week, there’s a song with the refrain “It’s too late to love you now.” Everything is time. The moments in which we encounter each other. Where you are and where I am when we meet. What you’re looking for vs. what I’m looking for at that moment. In her piece All Ears for Entropy, about her project Love Sounds, Masha writes:

The work of Love Sounds is also a reckoning with the tragic but familiar way that we talk about things at all the wrong times, to all the wrong people, as we don’t quite know what the right time or right people—the right feeling for the right thing, or as Bresson put it, “passionate for the appropriate”—are. Arrangement and timing have never been our human forte. Because cinema largely takes place in the subjunctive mode (wishes coming true), and love in cinema is about seizing language in a way we usually fail to do off-screen, the history of love is also about loving the wrong people with the wrong words at the wrong time, so movies, unlike life—so hell-bent on wronging rights—have always attempted to right these wrongs.

I had coffee with a friend last night. He’s thinking of moving to be closer to the woman he loves. “I just feel like I’m missing out,” he said. “Like I’m just waiting.” Time, he said, has turned “I wish I could be there” from a heartwarming expression of affection into an expression of real, painful longing.

He and I understand each other, I think. We both spent a long time being used to being alone. Then we met people who cracked our hearts open and now we’re acutely aware of being alone. I quoted Fromm for him, “Love is the answer to the problem of human existence.” We talked of love as an action, love as something that our society doesn’t value enough, something that is complicated (at least if the person you’re in it with is interesting) and something that takes work. He said that there’s a kind of defeatism, what he called a fate-ism, common in our society, that if things don’t seem to be working between two people, those people are often too quick to think that it simply was fated to not work, that they weren’t meant to be together, rather than really trying to make it work, being committed to each other and to love. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t really know what I’m capable of right now, but I feel like for the first time in my life I understand these things, and I’m willing to do the work, with the right person.

We talked, too (again) about absence and presence, about how just having someone else there can make all the difference, how we acknowledge each other’s existence just by being together and how acknowledging each other’s existence is at the heart of love.

In Tom Waits’ song of loneliness and unrequited love, “Downtown Train,” he laments, “Every night is just the same.” And at the end of the video essay Love Sounds/Love Tests (a small sample of Masha Tupitsyn’s project Love Sounds, a 24-hour audio history of love in English-speaking cinema)…

Masha Tupitsyn - Love Sounds from Penny-Ante on Vimeo.

…we hear George Clooney (as Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air) say:

“Your favorite memories, the most important moments in your life–were you alone? Life’s better with company. Everybody needs a copilot.”

“I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for but I know that I don’t want to wait anymore.”

“I’m just about starving tonight.”