The energy to care, just a little bit

I could easily have spent another day in, but CW, before he left, told me to get out; and I'm glad he did--it was the nudge I needed to breathe a bit of fresh air and sun.

I went jogging.

I woke at three in the afternoon. I woke with only four hours left of daylight. That's how much I had slept. That’s the price of partying: losing the moments in life that might ever measure up to something, like church-going and accordion-playing and breakfast- and lunch-eating. I woke with most of the day gone, the promise of fluorescent lights illuminating the rest of my waking hours.

--

At night, MJ asked me to read her letter to CF, and I made the requisite remarks about editing, suggestions about structure and tone--that was familiar, yet the content was alien, unexpected. She is cheerful, except for the moments when pain slides through the cracks, sorrow bubbling up through the crevices, but she mixes the cement to pave over the holes, and there it goes; it vanishes again beneath the youthful pizzazz, the unabashed cursing and enthusiasm.

I hugged her and all I could offer was "I'm sorry you have so much hurt in your life."

She shrugged and flashed a mirthless smile as she looked away, "It happens."

I'm sorry

­­I awoke to find despair had mutated into terror in the hollow dark of night; my familiar bedfellow had grown horns and fangs and claws. I awoke hungover, and the jackhammer in my temples did not relent as I cooked eggs and pumpkin pie pancakes for brunch. I wanted to leave this world, to leave it all, come back or go somewhere else after I'd done my time in a place amongst people I do not know, who do not know me. I could be anyone then, and I suppose that is why I drag my feet everywhere I go: I am trying to run away to a world that I fear (that I know) will be exactly the same, so I move ever onwards, always looking backwards, afraid to be anywhere but exactly where I am, the vastness of the discontent such that it spreads into my past, my future, my termination (it destroys my determination), but I try to pretend I can/will/would-if-I-could outrun it.

Texans don't all have drawls--I thought I knew that

Waking to the vibrating hum of my cell phone alarm and a feeling of dread is fast becoming routine. Despair does not make a good breakfast item, although it is even worse as a late-night snack.

I had lunch w/ TF at Café Gratitude, and we commisserated, both veterans on the field of worry. As worriers (introverted extroverts, extroverted introverts), we put on a brave face for the world but carry our worries heavy in our hearts and on our minds and they simply will not go away, no matter how nicely or often we ask.

Later in the day, swinging on the faded green hammock on my westward facing balcony in the afternoon sun (it gets only afternoon sun), I realized I don't believe in hell enough not to commit suicide.

On the living room floor

For those of you with kids, the first time you’re trying to teach your kid hide-and-go-seek and they just lay on the floor and close their eyes. Because they can’t see you, you can’t see them. That’s how they’re thinking. That’s how you’re thinking spiritually right now. You’re just like, 'Come find me, come find me.' You’re on the living room floor. --Matt Chandler, of The Village, a church in Flower Mound, Texas, in the first of a multi-part sermon on Colossians

So I picture this: I'm fucking lying here on our dirty rug. I'm just lying there, on this disgusting rug that used to be beige and orange and is now gray and orange, that hasn't been washed or vacuumed or shaken out or brushed off since the beginning of the semester, and I'm pretending nobody, least of all God, knows that I'm falling apart.

--

I went biking again, for hours, until not just my toes but my feet were all numb. I thought: when you stand up on the pedals, as you're going downhill so you don't have to worry about peddling and swaying from side to side, if you just spread your featherless arm-wings, it's as close as you'll ever get to flying.

Reciprocity

I did not leave the house today. Today, the house was my shelter, my fortress, the walls my barricade against an unrelenting world. Correction: it is not unrelenting, it has relented, has given me up for dead. Today, I did not exist in the world.

I waited in line for food, although I knew I would not eat, as I was fasting to cleanse my system and myself, seeking a physical levity in place of a psychological one (so much harder to attain). CW was in front of me, and I can't recall what we were talking about when he suggested I find him on Facebook.

"I don't add people," I said, flippantly but honestly. "People add me, if they want to."

"Ooh, you're one of those people."

Sometimes I suspect he thinks he has everyone figured out, typified and categorized, neatly folded and placed in a series of mental boxes. I can almost see them, sometimes, through his small, well-shaped head of brown hair. People are understandable to him and always, with few exceptions, less interesting than he himself. But that is a harsh suspicion; he is entertaining to listen to and earnest.

Ordinary

I am just ordinary. I am ordinary. Oar-duh-NAE-ree. The tongue carresses the roof of the mouth not once, not twice, but three times, each different, a tap, a touch, a brush. Ordinary. I am.

Gliding across the landscape on my road bike, the sun on the road above the freeway by the hills through the trees, it was so hard to believe.

"我們是普通人. We are ordinary people. What makes you think you're so special?" my mom had asked, as I sat there, trying, trying to explain all my half-baked plans, of salmon packing in Alaska, barback-ing in Ireland, sheep-shearing in New Zealand, pearl oyster diving in French Polynesia, waitressing in Hawaii, cycling across the US mainland, organic farming in Israel, au-pairing in France, menial-job-working and starved-artist-living in Portland. And then I'd come back and write about it, I told her. I'll write all about it and get my degree.

Muay Thai and accordions

The gym is small, a row of punching bags like sentries guarding the training area, opposite a mirror. The boxing ring hems you in on the left as you enter, an informational table, tiny, on the right. The room reeks of dried sweat, unwashed and unwashable mats, gloves, pads, fighters' bared feet and handwrapped hands. A frenetic dynamism everywhere in the room, a methodical whump-whump-whump of jump ropes echoing one another at the start of every hour.

Descending into the catharsis of violence, all you hear is your breath, heaving from deep in your chest, through your clenched teeth. Hhhh, hhhhh, hhhhh, the metronome for your jab-jab-cross, right kick, right-knee-left-knee jab-hook-jab, left kick. All the world is but pain and precision, precision and pain. You ration your energy, measure it in breaths, listening for each bell. Three minutes a round. Three rounds.

You see not a person, you fight not a person but targets, bulls-eye's, stomach, side, temple, cheek. It is pure rage, pure muscle, not malice or hate. It is a strange dissected emotion, limbless and malformed, unloved, unreal.

Which contrasts sharply with accordion playing later in the day, the doleful notes resuscitating memories of Metro stations and ancient archways in which/ under which beautiful and beautifully dressed French people sit and play. I had talked to one, sitting (as they do) on his accordion case near the marché at Denfert-Rochereau: he had come from the countryside, looking for a way and a place to be and to stay in Paris, and I thought his dream was not so different from mine, or from that of anyone who, in visiting a city, searches not for a physical place but an abstraction; it is (before you arrive) what you have always dreamed it will be, and whether the reality measures up is a different matter altogether.

Clambake

The man shook his head. Then the woman. A faceless sequence of heads shaking, no, we are not leaving the parking lot, no, these coveted spaces are not yours to have, no matter the little size of your car, no matter the significance of your venture to the beach today, we are not going and you are not parking.

But we found a spot, in the end, that is, someone left at just the right moment, which is really what searching for parking is, anyway, isn’t it? A massive board game of chance in which we, all of us who are automotively inclined, are willing or unwilling participants in, players hungry for fortuitous timing, blind to environmental consequences, as we circle and circle about the playing board. And sometimes, particularly in Asia, we try to rig the game and up our chances and send out scouts, our little antennae-agent-family-member-feelers, who stand in newly vacated spots for us, as we go round and round.

We unloaded our precious cargo, lifting out heavy baskets filled with foil and artichoke hearts and Two-Buck Chuck, with bread and cheese and garlic, a pot of potatoes and onions and asparagus, with little dead shellfish, the centerpiece, and there it all was, the sun and sea, and sand and surf, and we, with our clambake goods to our chests. We did not know at the time that hours later the food would not in fact be cooked, that the banana leaves we had stolen and carried across campus on our heads, barefoot, tribal, a college replicate of a National Geographic glossy, that the leaves would not serve any real purpose later in the day.

Melted Butter

It will be a long time before everything is okay again.

The guilt of my impetuous non-decision weighs heavily on me. I walk with a mountain on my shoulders, but I'm sure I put it there myself. I sculpted it with my own hands, my head, my bleeding heart; I sculpted it with tears, with equal parts anguish and anger, a spoonful of resentment, some bitterness to taste. What have I done? What have I done?

I cried, yesterday, in front of someone that was not family. These past few months have chipped away at my veneer of false confidence and chipper life-is-lovely posture so well, so much, that yesterday I cried in front of a friend. Life is not so very lovely anymore, the beautiful weather notwithstanding.

We sat outside, AW and I, and made amends across the crate-like coffee table, sitting on twin black armless leather seats yet undamaged by the afternoon sun and occasional wind and winter rain. We sat outside because I breathe better beyond the confines of stuccoed walls, because the paranoia and claustrophia take longer to set in when the air is fresh and free of mildew-mold smells, unwashed-slept-in-sheets smells, dead-and-dying-skin-cells smells.

Enlisting

There was something wrong last night; there had to be. AW was so distant, his usual loquaciousness directed at everyone but myself, the absence of his words and attention leaving a ragged emptiness and hurt such that, during my long, long run, cruelty and self-righteous fury would intrude on and punctuate my arrogant self-sufficiency. I avoided his gaze or he avoided mine. I stood, waiting to be addressed, not daring to address, in an uncomfortable proximity, hungry like a dog for breadcrumbs of affection, finally concluding that I needed no one. No man is an island but I. I am an island.

The corpse of an idea revived itself--I would enlist. Beneath the incessent salvo of commands, the ordering and re-ordering of my life by an external entity greater and nobler than I, the island, could ever be, I would find some semblence of happiness. I would earn financial self-sufficiency.

That was the insanity, the uncertainty, the depression of an otherwise pleasant day. It was suicide Tuesday, the morning after, buyer's remorse, all bundled up with a bit of ribbon on top.

I sat in the public library, light streaming in from the windows high above, head bowed over my future in the shape of a test prep book. The librarian had paused, had asked with a quizzical bend of the brows, "How do you spell that?"

"A-S-V-A-B. The ASVAB? It came up when I searched in the library catalog...I just don't know where to find it."

"Ah, then we have it. It would be here," he was so kind as to walk me to them, even though they were just behind me, a bit to the right, in the Exam Prep books section, the various futures squeezed together onto a few shelves and organized by that greatest equalizer--the alphabet, with issues of class, status, potential income utterly beside the point. When the future is beyond reach, a mere dream for which one must study and think and question, labor and sweat and bleed; when a book represents that future, it need not be ranked, it need not be differentially valued--it does not exist.

My future does not exist.

The beginning

The insanity from yesterday still lingered when I opened my eyes this morning, like perfume put on for a party that was so exhausting you had not the energy to tuck yourself in, you just fell asleep on top of your blanket and sheets, and a restless few hours later, had awoken with make-up smeared, body reeking of yesterday's perfume and the forgettable somebody you rubbed up against the night before.

It was glorious last night, the intensity of my exhilaration, perched as I was on the edge of another reckless irresponsibility, in fact the same thoughtless decision, a choice that seemed to make itself, what had I to do with it? Of course I had to withdraw, of course that upsetting conversation with the parental units (oh, how much they care! they care too much!) meant I had to escape from their dominion, from this insufferable domination by external uncontrollable undesirable forces! Of course, of course, it had all made so much sense, I would declare myself an independent agent with my petty act of teenage rebellion...but somewhere, some unobtrusive part of my brain whispers with timidity that I am not a teenager anymore, no, I am not so young or stupid anymore.

But oh, to be young and stupid! To embrace this youth and stupidity while I have it still! No crow's feet mar my eyes, no worry lines--or at most, merely the faintest promise of them etched across my forehead, no spouse, no children, no care in the world to weigh me down in my youngness, in my stupidness. Let me be young and stupid, damn it! If youth is wasted on the young, let me--ME--not waste my youth, let me relish every destructive act for which my body forgives me, let me cherish every silliness for which I am forgiven and forgotten before the world begins to judge.

At any rate, I rode the wave of last night's high, clinging to the memory of all the hopelessly hopeful things I'd said to AG and AW when withdrawal seemed the only reasonable answer to my routine frustration and walked with AW to his 2 o'clock class today, barefoot outdoors, my soles kissing the warm pavement with each bouncy step, but with sandals in hand the better to stride into the L&S Office of Undergraduate Advising. I smiled at the man setting up my appointment and smiled at the counselor processing my withdrawal, wondering if I should veil my happiness, whether the corners of my lips ought not to be so blasphemously upturned during my act of shame.

Later, with uncooperative candor, my mind conjured an image of me, graceless, standing before a toilet, a fat wad of cash in hand, new money, in fact, with the bank's paper band around it still, readying my hand to throw it in and flush; I would not miss--I was sure of it.

So that was my Thursday. Day 1 of freedom and frustration.