“Is there anything you can’t do?”
“I couldn’t be alone.”
~From A Home at the End of the
World
“Hi Nat.” He’s calling to bail.
It’s my last day in America for the next two months, and he is going to bail on
the “Bon Voyage Extravaganza” Mari planned.
“Hi.”
“I don’t think I’m going to go tonight…”
“Derek. You’re going.”
“My hips hurt. I don’t feel like going out.”
“Derek.” I paused so he could hear my eyes over the phone, “Do you
remember the last time you said your hips hurt, and we went out anyways, and
you forgot all about them ever hurting and just had a good time?” I could feel
his inaudible sigh over the airwaves.
“You know me too well.”
At the end of the night, I wanted to be sure, “Did you have fun?”
“Yes.”
“Do your hips still hurt?”
“I forgot they were hurting.” I smiled as he rolled his eyes, “Yeah,
yeah, you were right…I’m going to miss you.”
I hate admitting when I feel anything other than crazy, giddy, happy,
busy—especially of late. I find myself being that loud, out-of-my-shell person
that I used to be 99% of the time. It’s easier to hold on to momentary joys
than accept the deeper emotions. It’s like putting a quarter in a gumball
machine. You get a little round burst of color and sugar, but in a minute or
two, the sweetness is gone, and the chewy goodness is just a tough, lump of
chemical, leaving a sour taste in the mouth.
But where would we be without the flavor-filled gum sticks that claim
to be “longer-lasting”?
I’m chewing a lot of bubble gum—work, church, friends, colleagues. But
the bubble always pops and sticks to my lips and hair.
Tonight, I sat on the bus, too tired to read, looking out the window.
After two days of rain, the sky cleared. I could recognize my snow-scattered
shelter surrounding me East and West. It’s Thursday: Community.
Today I heard back from someone I love, someone I haven’t heard from in
a while. He didn’t have much to say, but it was enough that even a blue sky
couldn’t heal. I guess there are a lot of things like that. But I knew I
couldn’t keep up the “I’m great!” tonight, so I spat out a piece of gum and
decided not to go to Community.
Usually, I try to imagine Derek in the back of my mind saying, “If you
go, you’ll forget that you were even sad.” It only works occasionally.
Instead, I went home. I walked to the water and found a secluded shore
in the low tide. I sat on a rock and watched the sky deepen, hearing the water
over the bustle of the towering city. Is this what it means to be alone?
Laura and I seem to be falling into our own patterns. For the past
month, we have rarely been apart. We ride the bus together, come home together,
eat together, and go most everywhere together. I’ve enjoyed it. I appreciate
company after several months of loneliness. I especially appreciate the company
of someone I know so well and can speak so openly with without fear of
judgment. We talk about men and god and love. We most certainly don’t agree,
and it’s lovely.
But I kept wondering if it would always feel like college. Like we’re
roomies in the dorm again and just happen to be in the same classes. But we are
each coming into our own and learning that just because we already do so much
together doesn’t mean we have to always be right
there.
I find myself naturally pulling away, separating myself in need of
silence and space. Like tonight—I decided not to go to community at the last
minute. I wanted to stay home and be alone. Though I have a list of things to
do—laundry, paint, write, wash the dishes—I knew that none of them would get
done. It’s hard to be productive with so many thoughts.
As I sat on my bed playing bass and attempting to sing notes that were
too high for me, the door opened. I wasn’t expecting Laura until after
community, but I suddenly felt glad that she had decided not to go. What was I
really doing but trying to distract me from myself? The large crowd of
community wasn’t right, but the close companionship of a good friend was.
We ate dinner and blended up some Kahlua. There was a party in the
common space, so we decided to just watch a movie in the room instead of
hanging out upstairs. We pushed my mattress to the other wall and put the DVD
into my computer. A Home at the End of
the World.
Derek introduced it to me when he was in the hospital. We watched it on
Netflix, and I cried and still haven’t gotten over the shock of one of the
traumatic early scenes.
“The last time I watched this was in the Writing Center. There weren’t
any appointments, so my friend and I turned off the lights and watched this
movie,” I told Laura. Funny how something so simple could pull together all of
the things I was sad about today.
I met this friend in Aesthetics class my sophomore year. This was the
class where we learned the beauty of catharsis through art. We watched Iphigenia and cried in-class and felt
the relief of letting in something external, then letting it out again—letting
go. My friend and I started writing down all of our professor’s movie
recommendations and week by week watched them together—House of Sand and Fog, Thelma and Louise. Eventually, we started
adding our own picks.
Our friendship grew through these films, and somehow we learned about
each other and become close. We went from sitting next to each other in class
to cuddling up on a couch or dormitory bed. When the movie ended, we would go
back to our own rooms. The thing is, it seemed like there would always be more
movies.
The closing credits began, and I turned to Laura, “Such a sad movie!” Everything
I had been feeling was finally materializing on my face. Maybe it was
exceptionally sad to me because it was loaded with my prior memories of
it—tinged with the after taste of gum I’ve been chewing for far too long now.
I find myself wondering how to become close to another. I worry that I
may have tried to replace Derek in my life with my friend. I did what I always
tell my sister not to do—monopolize life around one other person. Why? Because
when they are not there anymore, there is a void.
I tried to fill the Derek void with many things, including a
relationship, including cigarettes and books and road trips and a leap across
nine states to a new city—fresh pieces of gum to help it all stick, help it all
hold me in one piece. But when a building crumbles, it doesn’t just lose one
brick; that one brick takes others around it, leaving a hole bigger than the
individual temporary patches.
I guess I’m just talking through it all and falling into way too many
metaphors for one composition. But what it comes down to is that I can do many
things, but I cannot be alone. I cannot spit out all of the gum without missing
the flavor it once had.
