“We fully expect you to make big mistakes your first few months here,” my boss told me on my first day of work, after I successfully completed my initiation by putting together my own rolling chair. I am not used to making mistakes–no–I am not used to making mistakes and having them mean something. I think that’s what sets the “real world” apart from the life we knew in college; this isn’t a rehearsal anymore, the curtain’s been pulled back. Now, everything counts in a way beyond emotionality. Everything counts in a way that can be mathematically measured.
I have made plenty of mistakes that have meant something, but perhaps only to me, their impact manifesting as a dark, throbbing coil behind my breastbone. Often times they start with the phrase, “I’m not going to sleep with you. I am not that kind of girl.” The truth is that I have no idea what kind of girl I am. The truth is that the girl I am seems to change as suddenly as the weather patterns. A confident version of me might saunter in with the fog, only to leave again by daylight. I have wasted a lot of energy trying to convince the men I’ve loved that I didn’t love them at all, that I ‘didn’t believe’ in marriage and that ‘kids are just a vanity project,’ but it’s exhausting pretending to believe all of these things, and I am not young enough anymore to feel that pretending is worth the effort. I don’t know what kind of girl I am, but at this point I like to think I know what kind of girl I am not.
I ran from someone who tried to kiss me a few weeks ago–literally ran, like a child, limbs splayed, hair flying like a superhero cape behind me. The only superpower I felt I had then was my innocence, which I have come to value as a precious thing. Somehow, it has started to feel like a live fish, slippery, spasming violently in an attempt to dislodge itself from me.
“You know what girls are like,” Murakami writes in Norwegian Wood, “They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed so sweet and lovable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing.”
There’s something dangerous about giving too much credence to the characters of Murakami’s novels, since they end up dead or sad or both most of the time. But when I read that line I cringed. I hope becoming more realistic doesn’t render a person less lovable. I hope living in a world where mistakes count, where life is measured with numbers and spreadsheets, doesn’t drain me of the sweetness that grew in me when life was measured more in music notes and cursive.
So I guess remember this: life is not a Murakami novel, even if often times it feels like it might be.
“In the deepening spring of may, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in the air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass–but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.”