A Home at the End of the World

“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.