'I’ll see you very soon'
How creativity enriches a life
It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940.” – W.H Auden, Paris Review, 1974
I did something you’re not supposed to do recently; I googled an ex. I had, in fairness, gone a very long time without doing so; in fact, it had been twelve years since her last words to me at the airport, ‘I’ll see you very soon.’
There was a trigger for this – her father had died. I learnt about it from her siblings on social media. To be clear, I don’t stay in touch with her siblings but I’m still aware of what they’re doing, in that weird situation of mutual studied ignorance which is also theoretically breakable at all times. It’s the same as forgetting, really, just with a theoretical possibility of taking the thread up again.
I sent a message to her sibling telling her to pass my condolences on. I’d blocked her long ago on all social media, and the only time I learnt something concrete about her since the split had been when a LinkedIn message had informed me she was now doing a law degree. I’d assumed, on the odd but recurrent occasion I thought about her, that she’d gone on to get married and have a baby, as we’d in part broken up because she wanted a baby and to live in America, which was altogether too much baby and too much America for me.
I read the obituary of her father, in which she and her siblings were named, and of course that made me discover the new surname she had now. She no longer went by the name I had known her by. At the bottom of the obituary there was a tally of the surviving grandchildren; I knew her brother had a kid, and I knew via Facebook that the other two of her siblings didn’t, so that meant she’d had two kids in the twelve years since we split. I googled her new name and found her – on a prestigious company website, her picture came up prompting me to say, aloud, ‘There you are.’
I’m not sure why now felt like the time to found out what she’d been up to. I’ve been in an odd state recently, a sort of second adolescence after moving city and country, and it’s had mee feeling some of the same the heightened emotions I’d felt during our courtship. That was another time, as in a time which is really a time.
Addicted now to my memories, I took up my phone and searched in the email archive for my correspondence with her. For a couple of hours I collapsed into a nostalgia for that part of my past. I read the archive in non-linear fashion, from the negotiations over trips abroad, the pregnant early words establishing our deep mutual affection and even right back to the single curt missive after our first drink. Our first date took place, I remember, at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, and I remember saying to her that you could put a turtle shell on a snake or similar, and her saying so drily ‘That would look all wrong.’
Inevitably, I noticed how much we’d loved each other. The care with which we wrote, the affection, our endless wordplay. I’ve been thinking a lot recently how essential language is to my ever fancying someone, that the seat of all eroticism for me is always the way someone uses language. Traipsing through the messages I noted too how much my writing had improved over the relationship – it seemed that the progression of that love affair had turned me into a better writer. That that healing love, and nothing else heals like love, was allowing me to write more openly about who I was and what I felt. I was, to quote the best writing advice I’ve had, relaxing on the impressive and going for the expressive.
I stared at her work mail and thought about contacting her. I wanted to tell to tell her that I lived in Brussels now and had begun to work as an interpreter. To say this felt particularly salient to say that as she had, when we’d once discussed what we thought we’d end up doing, she’d told me that she could imagine me making a nice interpreter. That moment had surely never troubled her brain again but for me it was a moment that I’d often thought of someone precisely predicting my future.
‘You called it, baby,’ I wanted to say, reminding myself she had also once written to me that she would appreciate if I didn’t call her baby. It was infantilizing, she said.
I looked too at our old pictures. I wondered whether to delete some of the ones I didn’t even know I still had. I was shaken by the scale of the love, the spellbinding time we’d had together, and just how perfect a little archive these few hundred emails formed.
But I was also a little bemused at her new employment profile. We’d both been artists, slogging our strong young selves around the Berlin scene; many a time had I lugged her keyboard from bar to bar. What had happened to all that in the career path she’d chosen? Even after we’d parted she’d been working so hard on her writing and music. If she were to look at my life life now, she’d still see recognizably the same person, hammering away to be understood in words, yet from her artistic life the only thing that Dr Google provided was a very old billing on the website of the comedy club we’d performed at – the same half-remembered photo of her, beautiful, young, wearing a long and droopy fake comedy moustache.
And this thought, this erasure of the person I’d thought I’d been with, made me feel that something perhaps had been lost. Perhaps I should have been with her, perhaps I should have kept her on the artistic straight and narrow – ridiculous, really, when it was so evident that she’d accomplished all her primary goals. They were still the same old goals just as mine were. It was just a question of us having different priorities; for her it had been family and for me to write bittersweet prose for no money. Yet it was hard too not to think of the life that might have been, where we’d stayed together, where I refused to acquiesce quite as volubly to the demands of money and status, and we’d somehow made being in America work. I mean just look at this archive, look how much she’d loved me and how much I hadn’t seen its extraordinariness, just look how good we’d been!
By then I’d widened my search to look at correspondence with a friend, with whom I’d often discussed my relationships. Here I found an email which contained the paragraphs below.
Now I must mention the latest adversity: S wrote to me at the weekend that she had ‘moved on’ and wanted me to know that; this is either a reference to a new partner or a general state of moving on or of course both. Clearly I was working on the assumption that this would be how things were. I also have a very clean conscience about the U.S. and know that, despite my best intentions, something just did not connect between me and the people there. They seemed very distant from me, and unworldly.
But S was something special, and her words had the ring of finality; a closing down of what was – in any case surely a very marginal – possibility of reunion or even further friendly contact, which I had been keen to maintain, bearing her little ill-will. (Increased in the immediate aftermath of her mail of course). So we have arrived at the terminal point; the end of the end. This stage is clearly something I had been preparing for for a while, but it’s still hard. I think in the long run she will turn out to have had a positive legacy, but at the moment I’m trying to figure out exactly what that will look like and come to some kind of productive peace: I’m also considering whether I should write a response which is likely to be my last words to her for a long time. The Germans have their infelicities, but I would grant them Trauerarbeit as a fantastic word.
There it all was – soberly laid out, exactly how it had been at the time, straight from the horse’s mouth. All my fantasies evaporated. I found myself confronted with the voice of how it had been then from then, what I’d actually felt, the decisions I’d taken and why. Oh, of course, it’d been hard, of course it was still to some extent a shame but there had been very good reasons that this split had occurred. I realized that this archive was complete; there was no email I could add to it, no ‘I’m an interpreter now’, which could make it more or spoil the past. That was their time, not ours.
Of course, I hoped that for her, vertiginous corporate job notwithstanding, there was some small locked casket in some obscure corner of her heart where she kept the memories of the time we’d been together; for us as a going concern, all remained exactly as complete as it had been at the start of the evening. ‘I’ll see you very soon’ would always be the last word.
I wake up on a Friday morning and find that on old friend of mine has died. Indeed, just the same time as I’d been writing that final email of analysis; I’d just been about to turn 30, and we’d done a comedy roast of me to celebrate. Stephen had helped out with a sketch and he’d been so deft, so generous, so quick on his feet.
And now he was gone and would never utter another word. Here’s the thing though – we had a recording of the sketch, so I was able to share the clip. That thing we’d done, that moment in time we’d had together, was there to bring back then. I shared it on my socials; people watched it. I watched it. There I am, I think, even more hair come back now. Who am I? I’m showing myself. I’m showing myself who I was to who I am.
I go to parties and I meet people, and they tell me about their kids or their houses or their favourite wine, and I think, And what do you do with the fact that you have for a brief interval time been inexplicably incarnated on a strange spinning orb? I want to tell them I think that life should be something beautiful, that life has to be something beautiful, and that one of the few ways to do this truly is to live as a creative act.
Perhaps they know. But I have been a creative person for decades and it is only now becoming clear to me what that commitment does to a life. Twice in the last week, my own creativity has reached out from the past to counsel and console me. Each time unplanned – as the product of the intersection of events and moments when I tried to live with my best creativity. I do not believe creative action has the power to change the course of our lives but in midlife I am learning that it has the power to better explain the life I have lived to me. This is what you thought. This is what happened. This is why you are where you are. You decide at some point to be creative but after a certain point your creativity begins deciding things for you. I have five thousand pounds in my bank account and I am very rich.
Stephen Patrick Hanna 1960 - 2024