chasing romance

I am at my most alive on an Amtrak. There's something about the stale air circulating whispers of $6 hot dogs (outrageously delicious and with little competition, the most devastating downside to my pescatarian diet), the seats intentionally designed to render your vertebrae gelatinous, and the beautifully beige, parallelogram-shaped, urine-soaked bathrooms. I can't explain it, never have been able to, but whenever I'm on Amtrak, I feel a sudden, overwhelming burst of energy. I find myself able to pick up books that have been sealed shut for months, able to respond to that email from December 2020 but above all, I am able to think. There must be a certain creative capacity derived from flowing at sixty miles past industrial park and bucolic river, something to be harnessed. When I can think, I can write.

I started this post/essay/rambling two weeks ago, in a cramped Amtrak coach seat in the fading orange August light. The engine was chugging along somewhere near Cold Spring, NY, where there's a bend in the river that perfectly catches the setting sun. I had squandered the first half of the journey on YouTube soccer compilations and was feeling a funky blend of regret and urgency. But you can't force these things, you know? So I sat there under mandarin sky and let my mind go blank.

The thinking yielded, as it always does on the rail lines zigging and zagging through America's busy Northeast corridor, a little bit of productivity. The few words I had down by the time the train slowed centered around a question I have asked myself with increasing desperation for quite some time. The question is as follows: after all these years, can anything be done for the first time? On a cramped Amtrak, it felt like a worthy question to consider. Now, no longer locomotive-bound, I'm not so sure. Of course, the answer is yes. Everything that is old is new. Same with the inverse. We create the new by looking at the old through light slightly differently refracted, by craning our necks to catch an angle not yet seen.

I'm not particularly interested in that question anymore - how boring and depressing is it to think that nothing can be original? Is there anything more derivative than being that derivative? Ask Thomas Friedman, I guess. What I am interested in is figuring out why the impulse to ask that question exists for so many of us, and why it lingers with such simmering intensity.

First, I suppose, I need to establish that I'm not the only one familiar with this fear of trodding familiar steps. My method of proving this supposition is neither scientific nor is it rigorous and it most definitely wouldn't clear the hurdle of peer review but try Googling "everything has already been done." You don't need to make it past the first two letters of 'already' before every suggested search is an iteration of that query. 'Everything has already happened.' 'Everything has already been invented.' 'Everything has already been said.' 'Everything has already thought of.' The only exception was 'Everything has alternative except Mother Earth' which weakens my argument but would make an excellent, albeit grammatically awkward bumper sticker.

In any case, it's clear that this kind of existential angst is pervasive. Where I expected a plethora of search engine complaints that 'Everything has almonds on it' (be real, they don't need to be on Brussels sprouts), I was met with only widespread doubt that any of us have any capacity to create the new anymore. And why shouldn't that doubt exist? Take the film industry and the over-abundance of serialization - most big movies these days have a '2' or a '3' after the title. Politics? Every political speech is an act of near-plagiarism. Politicians know that the same lines will always hit because, well, there's not that much to be said about the same decades-old problems that hasn't already been said. Even the most within the Beltway insider candidates present themselves as outsiders because they know that there's nothing voters revile more than the sweet stench of bureaucratic unoriginality. Of course, a cottage industry has emerged to lament all of these lamentations, its very own form of ironic unoriginality. Maybe nothing has ever been new?

So, what's the impulse motivating the posing of this question? Why do so many of us feel incapable of breaking new ground? I can't say why other people are weighing the (im)possibility of originality, but I know, with a fair bit of certainty, why I'm asking the question. Like almost everything in life - and certainly anything that holds meaning - it comes back to romance.

I have made a solemn vow to myself to not let this blog become a redundant shrine to all we have lost to COVID, but in this moment, I have to briefly renege. I'll make it short: the last 18 months have offered a pantheon to introspection and withdrawal. We have spent so much more time alone with ourselves than ever before, than we ever hoped to spend. That has fostered many wonderful things: self-acceptance, self-awareness, curiosity. It has also produced fleeting moments of emptiness, overwhelming sensations of being adrift and unmoored, and a peculiar, disarming feeling that everything you think and believe maybe, just maybe, can't be trusted. That doesn't lend itself to creativity. The process of endlessly turning the same thought over and over most certainly doesn't translate into originality. So yes, much has been lost to COVID. But we knew that already. What we've lost more than anything else - and talked about not nearly enough - is romance.

I have a distinct memory of being a pudgy pre-teen, no older than eleven, standing in a New York City Starbucks and making eye contact with a truly gorgeous woman. Looking at her immaculate bone structure and warm smile, I saw at once peace on earth for man and beast alike and a future for the two of us full of hope and possibility. Looking at me, she saw a boy with a BMI that classified him as medically obese. Now, I remember that moment not because she's the one that got away but because that interaction - even at the time - represented the purest crystallization of all that was possible as an adult. You can just be out at a coffee shop, I remember marveling with awe, and you can meet someone new and lovely and anything can happen. You can ask the stranger out. You can go to an airport and fly anywhere. You can reinvent yourself at any given moment.

When I talk about the romance COVID has stolen away, it's that spontaneity, that possibility (which I've written about a bit before here) that I'm describing. It's a kind of romance that can and often does exist platonically. That romance is manifest within the small details of life that give our individual worlds color and texture: the decision to take the scenic detour and the almost transgressive discoveries found within that deviation, the unexpected conversation with the ex-girlfriend that delivers an unprecedented sense of admiration and revitalization, the flourishing of a new friendship, and yes, the act of mustering up the courage to talk to the woman in the cafe. And therein lies the answer to why so many of us are asking questions that begin with 'everything has already.' When we only talk to ourselves, stay within the same four walls for days at a time, spontaneity diminishes. Romance fades. And when the romance fades, the weeks begin to run over into one another and one's own thoughts begin to present as suspicious, menacing. When nothing is new, the new feels impossible.

Last Friday, I quit my job. On Sunday, I turned twenty-five. I find myself gripped by the least original of youthful pursuits: a quarter life crisis. A week before my final day of work, I spoke on the phone with my boss. He asked me - earnestly, honestly - why I was leaving. I conjured up something about trying to find a purpose, needing to be outside after so many months inside, doing the same thing day after day. It wasn't untrue but it also wasn't the whole truth. What I couldn't tell him (because it's a super weird thing to say to your boss?) is that I'm leaving because I feel compelled to do all I can to chase and restore that escaping sense of romance. I feel compelled to rediscover the new. With a body that has not yet entered its inevitable decline and a sense of curiosity and naïveté that I am grateful have yet to be extinguished (and a deep, underlying class/racial privilege that makes it all possible) it feels urgent to elevate that pursuit, render it a priority.

Beginning in a week, I'll spend the next two months on the road, driving across America as I burn through my savings. For most of it, I'll be alone. I expect my experiences out there, in this big, fucked up country of ours, will give me no choice but to write on here more than my current rate of every two months. But I also recognize that I don't really know anything about what's to come. How could I predict with any authority what will flow forth from this period of transience and nomadic existence? Maybe I'll get mauled by a bear in Montana. Maybe I'll find the highest peak in the Badlands. Whatever happens, it'll be new.