The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, June 27th. It is the 50th of a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays.
Last week’s essay: On These Essays
I always like it when they say the Confiteor there at the beginning during the Catholic Mass. There’s something satisfying about the chest-beating. Something relieving about acknowledging the sin.
Towards the tail end of summer, the summer I drove around the country, I found myself crossing northern Wisconsin, heading from Minneapolis to Marquette, there on Lake Superior atop Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I had a cooler full of La Croix with me those months, to keep me hydrated and alert and awake, and I refilled it at a Target in Eau Claire before jumping onto the state roads, which is when it occurred to me that I’d never really listened to Bon Iver. I knew Skinny Love, and I remembered seeing reactions on Facebook to Justin Vernon winning those Grammys a few years prior, but I’d never listened to his stuff, and so similarly to how I’d listened to the Counting Crows discography front-to-back as I drove up the California coast and put on John Denver as I rolled past Morgantown down into West Virginia, I decided I’d listen to Bon Iver as I crossed those woods from which he came.
I was tired that day. My brother’s bachelor party had been the weekend prior, and I’d stuck around for a day or two after it, poking around the city to which I’d be moving that coming winter. On one of the nights, I’d called Emma, and I don’t remember the circumstance but I remember the call was hard, and that I sat on my brother’s balcony while the sun thought about setting there in Uptown and there was an unease with me, an uncertainty—a concern that I would not be able to be what Emma needed me to be.
My hope, when I saw that Bon Iver’s debut album had the name “Emma” in its title, was that it would be reassuring. That it would be a love song of an album. And it was, but it was the ending of a love song. It was a sad love song. And by the end of the title track my stomach had dropped into my intestines, and I thought of all the pains I’d caused over the time we’d been together, and while I let my phone charge between albums that guilt hung heavy in the car. That fault smelled thick in the car. And I wondered whether we would make it, and whether the pain would then have been worth it, or if it made any difference at all whether we made it or not, because the pain had been there, and I sat and thought back through every wrong I’d handed her, every wrong from three years of a college relationship, and I felt fear amongst the sadness. Fear that it would not be a happy healing.
One of the nice things about driving so quickly between so many places, as I did, is that as I didn’t dwell long in one geographic place, it was easier to not dwell in one emotional place. That evening, I sat on a point on Lake Superior and watched paintbrushed clouds billow and flow and slide across the sky in slow motion as the most glorious sunset I’d ever noticed grew more and more glorious by the minute, and a family nearby scattered someone’s ashes and put their arms around one another and sang “Amazing Grace” while some couple down the rocks from me shared a picnic on a date. And I thought of Thomas when he put his hand in Jesus’s side and recognized Him, his Lord and his God, and I felt that sense of recognition—not an end to doubt, as the story goes, but just the recognition of something, for there must have been something there.
But it was a long time until dinner after I finished that album. And dinner came well before the sunset. There were hours left before Marquette. The sky was gray.
I don’t know how unique this experience is, and I don’t want to portray myself as especially honest with myself, in case that’s not the case. I, like many of you, have spent time consciously and otherwise trying to convince myself I’m not the things I’m afraid I am. But given enough time, if the thoughts fall a particular way, I do visit the guilt. I visit the memories of the things I’d rather not remember. The things I’ve done I wish so badly I had not done. And so it was, that when I finished the litany of wrongs I’d imposed on Emma, and my phone had charged enough to put another album on the aux cord, the other wrongs came to mind, and with them the thoughts of those I’ve hurt.
We’ve all hurt people, but again, I don’t know how much. I don’t know how the hurt I’ve inflicted compares, and I don’t know how much it matters. I won’t speak for you. I can’t speak for you. But there are things I’ve done for which there was never an excuse, and there are things for which there may be excuses but were wrong nonetheless, and there are things that may not be wrongs but that go unresolved—the people I’ve loved and love who I will likely never speak with again, forever separated by walls of some emotional glass I didn’t know how to do anything but build.
There’s a desire for resolution there. A desire for some to know I’m sorry. A desire for others to know I love them, and I did, and I’m sorry, and I can’t change it now. These aren’t desires for their sake, of course. They’re desires for mine. I want the resolution for myself, to stop the wondering, to stop the guilt, to feel the peace. But all desires are desires for our own sakes. Even when we want something for those we love, we want it because we love them, and because that love has reached a point at which their interests supersede our own, thereby becoming our interests. There are definitions of love of which that’s a part: that love is just caring about someone to a point where you want their wellness and goodness above your own.
About eleven months after that day driving across Wisconsin, I went to Taylors Falls, on the Minnesota side of the St. Croix, and I hiked and I walked and I sat and looked out at the river and wondered again what would become of Emma and me, and I drove home to Minneapolis and listened to Bon Iver again, the second album on the way back—the one with Holocene on it. Through my speakers, again, Justin Vernon sang, and in that song he sang about a cold, barren clarity:
And at once I knew: I was not magnificent.
I am not magnificent. I know this. But a consequence of the work that I do is that if it works, there will likely be examinations of me here and there, and praise for me, and a desire by this ecosystem of ambition to build me into something I am not. It’s half a terror. It’s half a dream. And if it comes to pass, if one of these plants I’m watering does grow, and I by consequence become someone of whom people want to know and some website publishes some bullshit glowing profile of me and someone I hurt reads it, I want them to know that I know. I want them to know that I know that I am what I am, that I have done what I have done. That much of it was wrong. That I regret those parts. That I wish they were not so, that they had never been so. That I don’t know what to do to make it right, and I would do the thing in a minute if I was told what it is, but I don’t think such a thing exists, because here I am, wanting it, in the end, for me. I want them to know that I know this all, and that I know that whatever people want to think of me, I am not magnificent.
A week after that day in Taylors Falls, Emma and I went to Baltimore. We had a wonderful time. Looking back on the best weekends we’ve shared, that one’s right up there in the pack behind our wedding last fall. And I flew back from that weekend and I thought that we were going to make it, and thank God and God willing, so far I’ve been right. But not everything ends up right like that. That’s not how everything works. It is what it is, and the weight behind those words is that there are things that cannot be changed, and things that cannot be fixed, and things that exist because of the core truth of this: The core truth that I am not magnificent.
Mea culpa.
Mea culpa.
Mea máxima culpa.
Next week’s essay: On America, and Love
