There are these compromises you have to make in life. Like when you want some coffee with your milk, but you find that your fridge offers only heavy cream. Or when you sit down at the bar to order a Brooklyn Brown, but find they only have Brooklyn Pennant Ale.
Or when you finally decide what to do with your life and you spend eight years perusing that goal only to meet with constant resounding failure.
Some compromises are harder to swallow then others, but I'm doing the best I can to get there. I'm giving up on my career ambitions. I'm giving up on my creative goals. I'm giving up on this city. I'm giving up on my hopes for a family.
But mostly I'm just giving up.
Over the past week, Gretchen and I had numerous fights about what I'm doing, or rather, what I am not doing with my life. We argue over the future, we struggle to set a deadline for this city, I contemplate a roadmap for surrender.
I tell her that I just want to produce a short film before I leave. Just one thing to give me a sense of accomplishment, one thing to justify the four years I spent in this city. And as I struggle to pen the pages, as I begin to project the required finances, I come to understand that it is one more thing that won't be finished.
One more thing that won't be accomplished, one more way to stall.
She asks me if I know anything about a city near DC. She tells me that there is an engineering firm that wants to interview her this week. She asks how long it would take me to move down there, but I have trouble defining the hurdles in my way.
It's hard to define figments of your imagination.
I know that the longer I resist, the farther I drag her down. As long as I continue to put my needs before hers, I will poison this relationship until it becomes just another chapter in a life of failure.
Gretchen says something in passing about how if she ever had a child, she would be crushed if it were a girl, but I don't pursue the conversation any further. I know she's been thinking about children lately, and I also know she's only thinking about it for my sake...
but to be perfectly honest, I don't really want anything else to hope for anymore.
Some compromises are harder to swallow then others, but I'm doing the best I can to get there.
I'm pinching my nose and telling myself, this is milk, not buttermilk.
