Well spent

The legacy of a body.

I’ve always had an inherent knowledge that life is very, very short.

For years, I attributed this to the death of my childhood best friend’s mother when we were eleven. Watching my friend lose her—and lose her again every Mother’s Day, birthday, and Christmas that followed—transformed my relationship with my mother forever, and seemingly too, my relationship with life.

But I have memories of being afraid of time’s passing long before eleven. I remember an eagerness for each day to be filled to the brim—to experience everything urgently and to great extremes, because how lucky were we to be here, even if only for such a brief time?

I never felt the invincibility of youth. I took risks not because I thought nothing could hurt me, but because I knew something would. I had an understanding that everything was fragile and quick and did not belong to me. Time did not belong to me. So I needed to use it all up before someone noticed that it had gone missing.

Even in my family, I always felt some inevitable wreckage hovering nearby. Maybe it was my siblings’ impending departure for college, or homes and babies of their own—but before I ever had braces, I would freeze-frame moments in my mind, knowing that, someday, all of them would be gone. Entropy is the natural order of things, and it terrified me before I even had the language for it.

No one had to tell me: don’t blink or you’ll miss it. I’ve always known. I never blinked.

This sense of fragility informs every decision I make. It certainly impacted my divorce; as soon as I knew the marriage was over, or had an inkling that it might be, I wanted to get it done quickly so that I could move onto whatever was next.

I do not linger; I never have. Not in relationships, nor cities, nor identities. My response to a terrible lack of control has been to beat it. To gobble up all the love and joy and flavor like a hungry urchin and skedaddle before the vaudeville hook came swinging.

It is strangely productive, this race against time. I have lived many lives already at twenty-nine. I feel akin to the journeymen in old country songs, pulled onward and away by some unseen force. I want to experience it all, see it all, feel it all, taste it all, touch it all—before I run out of time.

This habit of devouring the world in a single bite is selfish, I know. If my time is limited here, I should be thinking of impact. Of how I can help people, how I can leave a positive mark on my community, how I can “make something of myself” (bleh).

But the truth is, I do not care much for legacy. I hate to waste time, but I am not ambitious with it. I do not have grand ideas for my writing, or my work, or my wisdom, or how I am to be remembered when I’m gone. I wish only to fill my body up with the world, to understand what it means to be human. Not to make sense of it for anyone else, or to elongate it in any significant way, but as an act of appreciation for the fleeting gift that it is.

Mary Oliver encourages us to put down our worries, and go out into the morning, and sing. I have learned, in the last eighteen months, that this is all we really can do. Any legacy we build, any community we have, any health we count on, can be lost in a moment. We can love our people and do all the right things, and in a single day, it is gone.

(This is not a manifesto for holding things lightly; if anything, it is an invocation for the opposite: abandon concern for the future and relish in now.)

Nowadays, when I am thinking of what it means to live a full life, I am not concerned with the posthumous. I wish to do no harm, of course. I wish to do right by my people, and to make art. But I do so because they are basic human functions, because they are beautiful and affirming—not because I wish to build something that will keep my name alive when I am not.

Rather, let me become wind. Let me live well and deep and then, let me go.

All I have is my body, and my heart, and my soul, and I want them all to be thoroughly used up by the time I am through, the way one feels after cleaning the house, or walking many miles with a heavy pack. When I sashay my way into whatever awaits me in the After, I want to do so with a luscious ache.

With legs well spent chasing nieces and nephews and climbing mountains and dancing on foreign streets.

With arms well spent holding bags of fresh groceries and wriggling toddlers and hugging too tight in open doorways.

With fingers well spent digging in fresh soil and tracing lovers’ spines and scribbling poetry on the back of a bus ticket.

With lungs well spent smelling sidewalk roses and the air before it rains and the smoke of a drunk cigarette at a dive bar.

With skin well spent on too much sunshine, scratchy from hours sprawled on the grass and embellished with tattoos and scars and stories.

With eyes well spent staring into the sun’s reflection on a lake and crying with a friend in pain.

With a tongue well spent on spicy noodles and buttered popcorn and licking that sensitive space beneath an ear.

With lips well spent kissing strangers and warm baby heads and loved ones goodbye and hello again.

With hair well spent being twirled around fingers while flirting and writing and tangled with sand and sea on the back of a moped.

With toes well spent wrinkled in the shallows of a river and curling with pleasure and crusted with dirt.

With a stomach well spent on strange foods and red wine and the thrill of telling someone I care for them.

With a voice well spent yapping with my girls and belting pop anthems and defending my ideas.

With a mind well spent on books and films and deep conversation and self-learning.

But perhaps most of all, I hope to finish my time here in this blessed place with a heart well spent—a resilient, wide-open heart strengthened by the daily practice of loving too fiercely and losing out loud and feeling with depth. A heart overflowing with music and beauty and devotion and words of kindness, shattered and sewed up again and again and again and again.

That is my legacy. A human body fully inhabited, lived in and well-worn like a beloved home, because it is.

So when I return to stardust—years from now or tomorrow—I hope I’m not thinking of whether I’ve left a mark on this world, but rather of all the marks this world has left on me.

If I’m very lucky, I’ll relive it all, right then, in some cinematic, sensory montage. One last song. The story of a life, hummed from a body to a soul, in gratitude and farewell.

And in that final melody, only the sweetest notes: mango juice sucked from the side of a palm, the smell of fresh bread and a lover’s mouth, the softness of a dog’s cheek, a sunset over the African bush, my best friend’s laughter and my sister’s eyes, the shock of cold seawater against my ribs, a meteor shower seen from a sleeping bag, a child’s head pressed to my neck, my parents at the breakfast table, and the wild rhythm of blood in my veins allowed, at last, to rest.