by
Martin Riker
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At some point Jason came out with beers and sat next to me. He drank beer now, which was disappointing. Then again, so did I. It was disappointing that both of us now drank beer. In high school, not drinking had felt special, like you were making a statement about the clichéd expectations of American youth. In college, beer was just beer. There were different statements to make. After some chitchat, I asked about his engineering classes, a topic we’d somehow avoided over the previous days, perhaps intuiting that it would lead to nothing good. I brought up the story about his dad.
“Aren’t you worried your life will end up being just sort of normal and boring?” I said. I could hear how presumptuous this sounded, but at the time it seemed important to say.
Jason looked surprised. “As opposed to what?”
Maybe something you actually care about? I wanted to say. Maybe something you ever once expressed interest in the entire time we were friends?
“I always thought you’d pursue music,” I said.
There are ways I could improve myself, but I am also capable. I am not powerless. I am not my past.
I am not the product of other people, not Maggie, or Evelyn, or Ed. I made myself and, if I choose to, I can change. I can imagine myself differently. I can make the imagination real. Who said that? Maybe I did. Not every phrase in my brain belongs to someone else.
Having a child doesn’t make you better than other people, but it did make me better than myself. It made me less self-absorbed, if only because I was suddenly absorbed with Ali. Being absorbed with someone other than yourself must be better than being absorbed with only yourself, but it’s still just one other person, and what needs to happen, what I think is supposed to happen in the progress to becoming a better human is that being a wife to Ed and a mom to Ali is not an end but part of a process, to train me for greater things. Finding yourself no longer alone at the center of your moral universe is only admirable if it helps you imagine committing yourself in other ways, to other things, other than yourself. That seems right. That is the person I want to be. God, I hope I remember this in the morning.