Crash

The downside of getting older is that there are fewer and fewer surprises. You go into battle armed with the experience of what you've already survived, a living journal of dos and donts. You also have those who have been there before you, those who have a pretty good idea of where you are because they've been there. You hear their words long before they begin to make sense, until you surrender to what makes sense.

My father always knows what to ask me. He can find his way through the complex safe door behind which I try to hide things only to confess them to a select few that changes every few years. I am watching the my local 20-something fleet drift in many different directions, completing a cycle that began on my 27th birthday. As we grow into adults we either learn to keep better watch over the decisions we make or become slaves to them. It's just that simple. I'm rejoining the people in the world who made the same choices I did and learning how to love the rest from the growing distance between us.

Last night I watched the first three episodes of Crash the series, an hour-long drama on Starz that has very little in common with Paul Haggis's critically-acclaimed opus. It starts out with these four different stories, two of which are interrelated by a car crash and follows them on what will obviously be an overlapping trip meant to remind us of how worlds intertwine. There are things I like about it and things I don't. In the the end I'm leaning towards making it watchable, which means it could go either way from here on in.

But the scene that struck me the most was one where a white wife directs her repressed sexual feelings towards an African American character into a cowgirl seduction of her self-involved husband, her hunger for something beyond her fed by satisfying something trivially domestic and unquestionably fleeting.

Something about it reminded me of the long-term relationship that was hardest for me to sever but easiest for me to put behind me, one of the few open-and-close cases in my not so long log. Though I have no regrets about what did and didn't go down in our liaison, I missed the unapolegetic way in which she craved me in the darkness before we got up early, how she wasn't afraid to do what it took to get and keep the party started.

Looking back I think I was the first man she couldn't put a leash on, or who at least matched her in a need for control. I think our long ago collision ended up reminding us both of who we were and who we weren't. Going any further would have led us into a darkness that I know my soul would have never fully returned from.

Such emotional outpourings are a thing of my increasingly distant past as I wade through waters of the needy and the greedy and the lost souls who think all their problems will be solved with a diamond ring and six trimesters on a four-year plan. I wonder what it will feel like the next time, once I'm freed from this rock where the birds pick at my liver daily, where I am demolished and rebuilt like blocks in the hood that go condo. It's the forbidden dance that I was born to do. Like riding a bike you're never really out of practice. You just need the two wheels and a reason to get there.