Doc Brown Could

I watched the feelings unfold like a flower in stop motion.  She walked into the room with a slump in her shoulder and a crease in her forehead, and it broke my heart.  She looked tired.  Not just didn't-get-enough-sleep-last-night, or had-a-long-day tired.  She looked worn.  Slowly threadbare. Then she looked up and there was this moment of honest relief, and when I felt her arms around me it was as though I was anchoring her to the moment, keeping her from remembering whatever it was she had been going through.

As we sat, her head on my lap, my fingers in her hair like always, I watched her face slip in and out of that same fatigue.  I asked because I had to ask, but never too deeply because that kind of tired only comes when talking about it on anyone else's terms has stopped doing any good, so mostly I sat and waited because silence stopped being an absence of communication between us a long time ago, and I couldn't say or do anything to make it better.  Make it fixed.  Doc Brown could.  I could only say the things like, "Give it time." But what good would that do? She can't very well actively make time pass.  "Things will get better." They might.  They might get better.  They don't get better for everyone.  Sometimes they get worse.  Sometimes people don't recover.  Probably, for her, they would get better, but who am I to tell her what things would happen? I didn't predict this.

So instead of empty words I gave full attention, and we sat –my fingers in her hair, her head on my lap – staring at the ceiling, waiting for the silence to become oppressive.

Finding a Moment Among Conversation Gaps

I sit across from a familiar face at a familiar table and have a familiar conversation – a commentary on shoes and late night television programming and a strategy discussion on awkward social encounters (exchanging tactics and horror stories).  The conversation is buoyed by jokes and words that are more fun to pronounce than useful to the discussion, and I watch the gaps in conversation fill and wonder when my moment should be, wonder if there's a not-awkward way to steer the conversation, because her not asking isn't necessarily a product of her not caring.

I'd like to tell her everything even though she probably doesn't want to hear it because telling everything is the only way this will all make sense.  I have previously given bits and pieces and walked away feeling misunderstood, and this is too important for her to misunderstand.

I want to tell her it rained on a Friday night in October. I want to tell her that I begrudgingly left a blanket-nest in my apartment to find a substitute comfort in cheap beer and conversations with near strangers, and that my watch refused to lie and let me believe I could leave without questions, so I paced and rotated through the people I knew until a conversation became a little bit interesting, but before the conversations grew distracting enough, my reason to leave walked through the door: a reminder of everything I hadn't figured out, everything I wasn't doing right.

I want to tell her how I didn't leave.  How I froze.  How I sought sanctuary in the fading crown molding and how I buried my head in the shoulder of the only person in attendance who understood, but that beer had made that person distract-able, and the story was stale and not keeping her focus, so she passed me off onto the next person. I want to tell her how I let a stranger be my sounding board.

I want her to know that it took me a few minutes to make eye contact, that I don't actually remember what it was he said that made me turn my head toward him except that it was a challenge in some way, it was something I wouldn't expect a stranger on a couch to say, and it wasn't the familiar empty house-party banter that leads to more drinking and less talking. I want her to know that at some point in what had evolved from my rant to our conversation, the stranger and I made the kind of eye contact you have to recover from and that after a few twists and turns of the evening, we found ourselves on the front porch with uncertain smiles and sideways glances.  She already knows that the empty street once had meaning to me, standing as I was across from a house filled with a bumbling series of mistakes, but I want her to understand that as the stranger disappeared into that same street, I lost my thoughts and my balance.

She knows he's not a stranger anymore, but I want her to know that his kisses separate me from reality and his arms keep me from losing my mind, and that even when phone calls get tripped up by awkward pauses or we unintentionally hurt each other, it feels like we've figured it out, like we're doing it right. I want her to know that it's not the familiar story to tell at the familiar table amongst familiar jokes and familiar conversations, but I'm in a world with a whole new concept of familiar, and I'd kind of like her to be part of it.

Thirteen Percent Chance of Sunshine

I stared down at the bubbles floating around in my cup, wondering if they were, in fact, carbonation, or if something had dropped from the ceiling and caused a commotion. (Then I thought perhaps I'd be better off not knowing.) My shoes were sticking to the basement floor, and my brain was not yet so clouded that the sound didn't make my stomach turn. We stood in the corner, beneath the pipes making disconcerting noises, contorting every so often to ensure successful evasion of the walls.

Not that any of this was particularly unusual. Trying to avoid letting my elbow touch yours... that was less usual. Being afraid to speak to you as we stood alone in the corner of a dark basement... that had only started making headlines a few weeks earlier (when we realized that whatever fault-line we had been sliding across had finally left us disconnected).

I peeled my feet off the floor, left then right, then left again and right again because there was nothing better to do except perhaps be entertained for a moment by the couple prematurely inebriated on the empty dance floor.

You had disappeared. Your eyes were disconnected from the scene, your elbows pulled in tightly to your sides as though you expected a guy with an ether-soaked cloth and a scalpel to drag you into a closet and leave you without a kidney.

Your facial features twitched along with the movement of your thumbs on the touch screen that had given you more cause for attention than any person in the room, and we were both losing patience. I broke and spoke. You broke and screamed.

My grip on my cup tightened, the ridges leaving marks on the pads of my fingers, the beer inside forced toward the rim. I felt my tendons melt and turn my body into a stack of useless bone and tissue, my shoulders frozen in tension, my eyes retreating into my head like a trapped homecoming princess in a horror movie. I watched from within as my mouth made noise, as my feet pivoted and carried me up the stairs, as I sunk wordlessly into a stranger's couch.

Chaos on the Trail

I have been walking through a narrow path locking arms with people who are locking arms with people who are locking arms with people. We've created quite a mess in our wake: peeling bark off trees and provoking more than one rodent, more than one hundred birds (fucking birds). We don't always get along: some people have escaped the clutches of our awkward network of limbs and scampered off to join other groups, some unceremoniously let go to do the same. I don't like letting people go. Once I've linked an arm through an arm, I like holding onto a pinky, at least. It's not always fun. In fact, sometimes it's awful. And sometimes the network needs to be broken, sometimes both parties are better off if you just let go. But at one point, you chose to link arms, and at one point, you enjoyed it. Holding on can be a pleasant reminder of the way things were, or it can be a reminder that things are no longer that way, at all. Things have changed, and were it today that you were making decisions to link arms, it would never have happened.

In the last year, we've been moving a little faster, causing a little more chaos. People have joined, people have dropped out, people have been kicked out, and people have been clawing to stay connected. In the last year, I've been making it harder on us, leading us toward steeper terrain, aiming for smaller spaces among the trees. Sometimes we are unstoppable. Then sometimes we stop. Bleed. Cry. Scream. Sometimes we take our frustrations out on an unsuspecting briar patch with our fists, or unprepared mounds of dirt with projectile rocks and sticks.

Right now, we're stalled. (Or maybe I'm just stalled. It's hard to tell sometimes if everyone is stopping with me or if I'm letting myself fall to the back of the pack. It doesn't always matter.) This hill has us losing our footing, so our grips have grown a little tighter and our breath a little heavier. But we’re almost there. (Right?)









I'm saying things here today, too.

There Are Climbers, and Then There Are Leapers

We were friends even though we sat at different lunch tables. People didn’t seem to understand that. When they would say things and I would defend her, they looked at me cross-eyed.

“She’s my best friend,” I’d say.

They’d look at me, then look at her sitting halfway across the room and raise their eyebrows.

We were different. We dressed differently, had different political and religious beliefs, different taste in guys and friends and different goals.

But we both wanted to win, and we were dedicated to helping each other do it.

I wanted to climb. People are more comfortable with climbers because little battles don’t threaten them.

She wanted to leap.

When an individual sizes up a crowd, the crowd sees it as hubris: destined for failure and asking to be humbled.

The crowd throws stones. And she watched them fly past her, unflinching, and waited for her chance to soar over everyone.

It’s the climbers that can stand with the leapers. I’d never throw a stone. I might even be able to stop a few. It's hard watching people look at her and see insanity.  All I see is strength.