Soft, dry snowflakes drifted into orbit around me, blanketing my hair and melting onto my skin, evaporating in the steam rising steadily from the hot tub. Tall, uniform pine trees encircled the pool area, dripping with snow with such perfection that it seemed contrived. A full round moon pierced gently through the hazy sky, gazing over Maggie and I as we rested our sore muscles. Tilting my head back, I closed my eyes and breathed in Aspen.
We rolled into town in the evening on Monday, ripe from the road and raw from nights of fitful sleep and hours grinding asphalt and watching the liquid blur of road side signs and landscapes streaming at a steady rythm. I was apprehensive about Aspen, concerned that the stigma of sacharrin blondes and wealthy cowboys would ring loud and true in every facet of life here, a frosted Stepford.
In the days that followed, I realized that Aspen runs on a delicately balanced fuel, comprised of equal parts genuine locals and modest work force intermixed with the diamond draped fur coats and walking manequins that inject capital into the mountains. For every tourist coated in mink weilding a bottomless purse and loads of pretentiousness, there is an Aspen local rolling their eyes and waiting for powder, unconcerned with keeping up with the Joneses. Just when I wanted to dismiss it as a concentrated, frozen version of everything I found contemptible about Greenwich, Aspen rocked me slowly back on my heels, unable to make a final judgment.
We skied (or, rather, I attempted to, managing a controlled slide down the mountain) runs that dwarfed Killington and Stowe, curving through clouds of powder for what seemed like days. We slipslid our way through town, stopping for coffee and peering into windows at local oil paintings thick with texture and brimming with vibrant colors. We unleashed Kira into a field of snow, and watched her race around in delight. We drank too much at Eric's and sloshed our way home, giggling and shivering under our puffy down coats. We watched Sean build fires, and harassed Luke at work. I panted my way up Smuggler, gasping in the altitude while geriatrics practically ran past me, talking on their cell phones.
I tried to keep up, listening to Maggie's friends talk about riding, "pow-pow" and "steez", but felt like a square peg in every sense of the term. Feeling like an old lady, I questioned the usefulness of terms that contained the same amount of syllables as the word from which it was derived (pow pow, powder? seriously...why?), and failed to see the attraction to tall tees that Meridith proclaimed looked like nightgowns. Aspen is not for me; it is far too fashionable, and strives way too hard to be "current". A girl like me, happier in a hoodie and sweats, really doesn't stand a chance in a town full of minks where Christmas never ends. True to the cliche, it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. However, the allure of the town isn't entirely lost on me. On New Year's, we venture up the staircase of a small party where women wear sparkly dresses and sip expensive champagne from flutes, discussing interior design and the upcoming elections. I strike up a conversation with a lawyer who switched jurisdictions to move out to the ski town, and ten years later couldn't be happier with his choice. Letting the soft jazz and champagne inflitrate my mind, I mentally toy with the idea of a move, envision ski lessons and powder mornings, extended winters and daily cobblestone jaunts from home to work. Slowly, the idea of me and Aspen as a couple permeates my thoughts, and I am flipping through the newspapers, seeing what's out there for a young intrepid attorney. Somewhere between New Year's and my flight home, I land back on Earth and realize that running away, whether it's done in a semi-constructive manner (i.e. getting a job that is relevant to my field, yet in an extremely far off land) will get me nowhere.
For someone who craves continuity, I have to admit that the past few months have been a wash. I flew from the tropics to the mountains, from beach side shanties and rural simplicity to cobblestone streets where US Weekly captures shots of Kate Hudson strolling merrily with her latte. But in the throes of the extremes, I have been able to identify constants, ever present threads inextricably woven into the very fabric of my life. My beautiful friends, whether it's my nearest and dearest, flying around the world and sending me packages, or sitting next to me on the chairlift, make my life what it is. Aspen, for all of it's impossible beauty, would be empty without Maggie, Sean and Luke. I realize that it is them that I'm truly craving, community, connections, not the skiing or the cobblestone streets lined with expensive nothingness.
So as my time wound down, I sat in the hot tub, my eyes closed, allowing the falling snow to rest gently on my eyelids and sink softly into my skin, and let the past year or so soak in as well. Life is different now: the house is empty, echoing only memories of a different time. Connecticut is different, each phase of my life swept away with the seasons. I am no longer a law student in transit, on the way to being a lawyer, and I no longer have the luxury of floating complacently to a date fixed somewhere in the future. The bar was over, the year was over and it was time to face the reality that I created. And now, with greater clarity I see that the creation wasn't painful, but rather a painstaking process. I carefully carved out my future and was so afraid of failure that I was literally blocking my own path to success.
After a year and a half of distractions, from emotional clusterfucks to a jaunt overseas, it took the cold mountain air to awaken me to the fact that playtime is essentially over, and no amount of travel could return me back to the consequence free comfort of academia. People move, people move on. And now it's my turn.
Change is in the air. The sharp, crisp air verges on winter when it cuts through my lungs now, and the days fall from the calendar like the final leaves that parachute to the hardening ground from the ashy branches above. And each day I wake up the same, slightly different person in the same unfinished room I left vacant a year ago. Laying in bed in the early morning, blinking last night's dreams from my eyes, my memory hears conversations from last fall, in the very same room, where I packed suitcases and wondered aloud with friends how my life would be on a small island.
November seems to have slipped through my fingers, a blur of welcome homes and Thanksgiving clamour. December arrived quietly in the night, slipping in through the back door while we were all soundly sleeping. As a child, December was a melodious word, brimming with happiness and sparkle, pine scented childish greed and whipped air snowflakes melting lightly on hot cheeks. Now December is different. Though still busting at the seams with holiday cheer, mainly the kind contrived by marketing departments, December has a more ominous ring, warning of an end, the final rinse cycle on a year spinning to a close, to be stored in the cabinets of my memory with the rest before it. December holds a large amount of weight for me this year, for it is a goal month for me, to find a job, to "land," to begin to find roots in my life.
And as of late, my roots have yet to take hold. I own nothing remarkable to speak of, like a house or a nice car, and my plans for the immediate future remain, well, shapeless. My efforts to hit the ground running have been largely fruitless, leading to frenzied spells of internet job searching and a slow build of anxiety. When friends ask innocently, "so what's next?" my stomach churns. I want to answer with something more than "I don't know". Anything more than I don't know. Or do I?
This morning I cleaned my room. And by clean, I mean overhaul, tossing sentimental notes and shapeless childhood clay creations, even my old equitation saddle. There's something wonderfully cathartic about ridding yourself of excess belongings. I mean, you really can't get more symbolic than literally tossing old baggage into a dumpster, can you? At the near culmination point of my cathartic unearthings, I lifted a rectangular storage box onto my bed, unaware of the contents. Wrapping myself into a cross legged position, I lifted the top of the box to discover a verital time capsule, a chronology of my "greatest hits", condensed into a rubbermaid bin.
A genuine, childlike smile spread across my face as I flipped through progress reports and secret notes from high school friends, letters from my grandmother while I was away in college, photos of my life in Costa Rica, my travels through Europe, all neatly stacked for me to peruse.
In my own private Ulysses moment, I reveled in my own life. Curvatures of Roman architecture, psuedo artsy over the shoulder shots of gargoyles presiding over the ledges of Notre Dame, soft rolling waves sighing against black sandy beaches of Central America, charming cottages punctuates the angular Swiss countryside, all sprang from photos that I took. Large red A's bled into title pages for papers I wrote, on feminist philosophy and Marxian political thought. Ball point confessions spilled across the textured pages of journals, referencing loves and friends and worries from a different time. Behind the lens of each camera, or over the pen scrawling across each page, was me, the same me, maybe a little different. And over the short span of twenty seven years, what this documentary evidence made incredibly clear to me was that I have truly lived. Maybe not exactly in the way I would have predicted or hoped, or in the shape I would have molded, but in a beautiful series of moments, both serendipitous and scrupulously planned.
I sat for a moment, amidst the piles of paper and photos that represented so much of my life, and absorbed my history, basking in a gratifying happiness that had evaded me for the past month. Journals read of jobs or men I thought I wanted but didn't get (or in some unlucky circumstances, didn't realize I didn't want and did get), and photos captured places I would never have gone had I always taken the safe or easy route, or if everything had worked out as planned. Suddenly, encircled by tangible proof that indeed, what's meant to be will inevitably be, I felt ready to embrace the three little words my first year torts professor deemed the hardest phrase to utter in the English language: I don't know.
