Youth is Cruel

  Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers as she talks.
'Ah my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands';
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
and smiles at situations it cannot see.'

                           --TS Eliot, Portrait of a Lady.



I have always loved, and puzzled over this passage. And questioned it. I don't know what Eliot means about youth having no remorse. Mine is defined by remorse.

When I was in high school, I lost a grandfather to cancer; in college I lost my other grandfather. Also to cancer. Their lost was devastating, and far too soon. But still, as much as I mourn them even today, there is something we have to accept about losing grandparents.

Both of my grandfathers had served in WWII, married, raised their children, had careers. Losing them to cancer too soon was hard for us all; cancer is an ugly evil force that carves a person hollow from the inside. But if there is any consolation, it is in the fact that these men led full lives, accomplished great things, and left a legacy.

Yet, when I was in high school, one of my friends was killed in a car crash. In college, a best friend drowned. There is something impossible to accept about someone dying in the prime of their life, not yet realizing their potential. My friends who died ages 18 and 20, respectively, never had that chance.

Looking back at life, age 18-25, it's a series of small apartments, leaky windows caked with lead paint. French press coffee, books, bookshelves made from 2x6s and cinder blocks. Old worn wood floors and sunlight coming in. Lovers half dressed sipping morning coffee, faces pillow-creased, hair bed tossled. Our skin, salty and smelling musky with sleep and last night's sex.

Some lovers were profound, some more fleeting. Yet all a sum of those days, now dreamy and sunkissed by the Kodachrome of nostalgia.

Having loved photography since high school, I always had a camera. I'd document these moments. There are a few I can recall even today of lovers relaxing on the mattress on the floor. Sipping coffee. Giving that smirk that lovers do when the other has just pointed a camera at them. It's a moment of: I look like crap, I can't believe you're taking my picture, but ok...I trust you...I have nothing to hide...this is me, and this is us right now. It's a perfect moment, perfectly captured.

I had a few snapshots from a summer where I lived in a funky little apartment above a beauty salon, and a whole roll of film from an attic apartment of an old bungalow near college campus. At some point after college, I pulled out all these photos. I thought: What if I meet my future spouse and have all these old photos of old loves? Wouldn't that instantly create a fight? Could it even potentially ruin it? And deeper questions like: Why do I hang onto these? I'll never be that person again. Those people are not the same--they've moved on. Why can't the past be allowed to fade away? Why do I need a small 4x6 glossy image to prove that we were once young and in love?

When you're young, consequences aren't always obvious. Life feels perpetually renewable. Youth smiles at situations it cannot see.

One night--I still remember vividly--a rainy, melancholy night beside a fire, buzzed on red wine, I decided to have a symbolic letting go of lost loves, and move forward into my future. It seemed like a poetic gesture at the time. Perhaps it was the wine, or the patter of rain on the tin roof of the old cabin.

I was alone, lonely, and sad that the beautiful moments of my past would be forever gone. The only way I felt I could make room for new moments was to ritualistically purge the old. Fire is the destroyer and bringer of new life in a forest. And so--fatefully--I cast all my old photos into the woodstove.

In an instant, they flickered, turned bright yellow, and then to grey ash.

It felt, at the time, the right thing to do. In hindsight, I miss those photos. Even though they represented a past I could never go back to, they were in themselves significant. They were the record of those moments--and in their own way told the story that only they could.

TS Eliot was wrong: youth has remorse. I regret burning those photos.

One of our Dear Readers, "Debbie's Boyfriend," recently wrote in and shared his own photos. If you are a Dear Reader of SexySex Blog, you may recognize that "Debbie's Boyfriend" is a long-time commenter on our site.

I'd always wondered why he picked the monicker of "Debbie's Boyfriend." Recently, he shared with me that Debbie was his first true love, and that she died young.

Then I understood: she will always be part of who he is, and because of that, she is in a way, still his girlfriend--living in the way the dead live with us--spirits within our spirits, informing us how to love, how to be loved.

Unlike me, Debbie's Boyfriend didn't foolishly burn the snapshots of his past.

Luckily for us, he shared a few beautiful moment from his past. These are moments--perhaps taken the same day, or perhaps different days. It's more than just a frozen moment in the past. They are the spirit of youth, and, I hope, a moment captured in time, and a moment that carries forward today.