Loneliness

This is the most potent emotion I have ever felt.

I’ve been driving for a while now…it’s a weird feeling.  I feel like I'm suffocating.  I've never been someone who needs human interaction at every turn; I actually prefer my own company much of the time.  But this is when I need other people the most.  I need to feel like people care that I exist.  I’m not in a familiar enough place to know of any spots to detour off the highway and say hello to anyone…not only am I alone in this car, but I’m alone in this world.  The place where I feel safe, the people I love, who love me, are all hours behind me.  I've left all that for a less comfortable place.  I’m headed back to where no one is excited for me to arrive; no one is waiting to give me a hug.  It's "home," but it’s not home yet, not even close…should I just turn the car around?  Why am I going back anyway?  I guess I have to...It’s all piling up.  I’ve never experienced such a profoundly debilitating loneliness.  I turn the music up higher to drown out my own thoughts.  I don’t normally cry by myself; I don’t really cry, period.  But, oh god, this song couldn’t have come on at a worse time.  It makes me teary even when I’m not feeling vulnerable.  I try to sing along to stave off the tears, but it triggers the lump in my throat and I overflow.  These earth-shattering sobs are reaching into the depths of my body and I feel sick.  How long do I have to be patient before I finally feel like I belong in the place where I’m going?

Age

Jen had a young face.  She had a spray of freckles across her nose and big, innocent eyes.  But the biggest contributors to her youthful countenance were her cheeks, which had never deflated from their cherubic appearance of her babyhood.  She had been told countless times by various adults, embarrassed that they had mistaken her for someone six years younger than she actually was, that she would appreciate it when she was older.  Every time Jen heard this, she had to bite her tongue to keep from responding, “Yes, I’m sure I’ll appreciate it when I’m your age; you’re a fucking antique,” or something along those lines.  She knew that she shouldn’t take it so personally; short of plastic surgery, she couldn’t exactly control the way her face looked.  But the fact was she hated when she was helping someone at work, and she knew that they weren’t listening to a word she was saying, but waiting for her to finish so they could ask her.  She saw the confusion in their eyes and knew the question before they even said it.  “How old are you?”  As if it was impossible that someone so young could know so much about this trade; that she could speak with such confidence on the subject.  Upon learning her real age, most people would smile apologetically and say, “Oh, I’m sorry.  You just look so young.  I’m sure you get that all the time.”  Yes.  She did.

Outside of work, Jen ran into similar problems.  She could almost always tell when someone was underestimating her age by the way they spoke to her.  At times, it was more obvious than usual.  She went out to dinner with her mother.  After rattling off the night’s specials, the waitress looked at Jen and said, “We also have a children’s menu.”

Ironically, Jen was mature for her age.  She got along better with her parents’ and her older siblings’ friends than anyone in her own high school class.  She was well-spoken and bright.  But this made constantly being treated younger than she was even harder to swallow.

Jen’s biggest frustration with people thinking she was so young was that she did like some childish things.  She watched the Disney channel and slept with stuffed animals.  Of course, she also adored foreign films (Spanish were her favorites) and slept with her boyfriend (in these cases the stuffed animals were hidden under the bed).  Jen was about sixteen when she decided that if she couldn’t look older, she had to act older.  Her interpretation of this was probably not the most effective approach; she went wild in high school, but still managed to make it through senior year with everyone still assuming she was a prude abhorred weed and alcohol and swearing.  It seemed that all of Jen’s peers wanted to talk about was who went to which parties and who slept with whom…unless it was Jen, in which case her face not only preceded her reputation, but created it.  As soon as she turned 18 she started buying cigarettes, simply so she could pull out her ID and prove that, yes, she was legally an adult.  She got her nose pierced and a lower back tattoo.  The way Jen saw it, the more things she did to prove her age, the more people would see that she wasn’t a child.

To her credit, Jen didn’t do all of these things only out of pressure to be different than she seemed to other people; she actually enjoyed much of it.  She liked the way she could express herself with tattoos and cursing.  During a summer job at a sandwich shop, one of Jen’s coworkers (about 30 years older than she was) dropped a nearly finished sandwich on the floor.  She swore loudly and picked up a knife to start chopping vegetables for a new sandwich.  Predictably she looked apologetically and said, “Sorry. I shouldn’t swear in front of you.  You probably never use language like that.”  Jen asked her what she meant.  “Well,” the woman said, “you’re just so young and innocent-looking.”  Jen smirked.  “My face doesn’t keep me from saying fuck,” she replied.  The woman nearly brought the knife down on her own finger.

Jen’s ability to handle interactions like this with humor instead of bitterness evolved as she grew up.  She embraced the fact that she wanted to bring her teddy bear to college and that she still watched children’s cartoons when she wanted light entertainment.  Although she had always known that the people who judged her for things like this weren’t worth her time, it wasn’t until she stopped judging herself that she actually started looking older.

Bar Conversation #1

“You know what I fucking hate?” Eric sat at the bar with his drink.

“What now?” said Jill.

“There is actually no way to consistently and effectively communicate how to say hello or goodbye to someone in any given situation.”

“Well,” Ben grinned, “I mean, there’s always the standard ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’”

Eric gave Ben a withering look.

“Physically, douche.  Seriously.  When do you shake hands and when do you hug?  It drives me up a fucking wall.”

“Yeah, wow.  What a conundrum,” said Ben.

“Seriously though,” Eric continued with fervor, “I know there are those obvious times like a job interview when you’re supposed to shake hands or whatever, but like, every other fucking situation is completely fucking ambiguous.”

“Not necessarily.”

“What do you mean?”

“I always hug people at interviews.”

“Shut up.  You know I’m right and you’re shutting me down because you think I’m drunk.”

“Well you are, sort of,” said Jill.

“Who the fuck cares?” Eric was getting fired up, “I think better this way.”

“You swear better too,” Ben pointed out.

“Listen,” said Eric, “I want to come up with a formula for this.”

At this, Ben and Jill groaned and rolled their eyes.

“Seriously Eric,” said Jill, “this isn’t something you can control.  It’s not a regulate-able part of life.  There’s not even any point in trying.  You just have to accept that you won’t be able to avoid that kind of situation.  No one can.”

“You know,” said Eric, “I fucking relish my inability to effectively navigate social situations when I’m drinking, but it’s not something I can live with when I'm sober.  I overanalyze, and I start thinking I offended someone and then I feel offended for whatever reason and then I feel really uncomfortable and then I get mad at myself for fucking overanalyzing myself in the first place and then I drink because it gives me an excuse for all of it.  It’s just what I do.  So, the way I see it, the only solution is to come up with ways of avoiding uncomfortable sober interactions or become an alcoholic." He looked at them, "As my friends, which one do you want me to choose?”

Ben waved the bartender over to them, “can you get my friend here another drink?”

“Fuck you,” said Eric, “Here’s what I think-“

“Honestly, Eric,” Ben cut him off, “When in doubt, shake hands.  That way you avoid any unwanted physical contact for either party.  Ok?  Can we stop now?”

“Ok first of all,” said Jill, “Eric, I don’t think it’s healthy for you to deal with the things you don’t like about yourself with alcohol, and your not seeing the bigger picture here, which is that find ways of letting go once in a while without the assistance of booze or whatever else you’re into nowadays.  Second, Ben, I disagree.  If anything, when in doubt, you should hug.  Someone might be left feeling slighted because they thought you were in a hugging situation.  Then you’re left looking like a stingy hugger-jackass.”

“Maybe, but then there’s another problem,” said Eric, “what kind of hug is it?  One-armed or two-armed?  Do you put your arms around the other person’s waist or their shoulders?  Or do you put one arm up and one down?  And which arm goes up and which goes down?  There's one way to shake hands, but with hugging, it’s all a huge fucking mess.”

“You could just bow,” said Ben, “Really, how much time to you spend thinking about these things?  No wonder you haven’t gotten a raise in three years.”

“You know, if it weren’t for your goddamn accent I’d punch your fucking teeth out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It does let you get away with a lot of shit,” Jill said, “It’s too endearing; our soft American hearts can’t handle it.”

“Oh yeah.  Well that’s why I live here, so I can move up in the world by simply speaking—oh and also to make you feel inferior, Eric.”

“Fuck off,” Eric turned to order another drink.

Seasickness

If I’m lucky, my seasickness will go no further than it’s primary stage of an incurable popping in my ears (made somewhat tolerable by constant, simultaneous yawning and nose-plugging) and some nagging tension in the back of my neck.  But, as my luck often has it, the seasickness moves beyond that, and the ear-popping intensifies and spreads to my throat, causing a thick, goopy sensation that feels on the verge of gagging me (although it never does).  No amount of water can fix the second-stage throat-clog—not that I feel much like drinking water at that point, because the tension in my neck has stretched its sickly tendrils towards my jaw and up into my head.  The resulting headache (often localized in my forehead) in turn makes me feel dizzy and nauseated.  This is my cue to suck on a ginger candy, my nausea treatment of choice (pills: drowsy, still nauseous; wristbands: bullshit), although results vary.

Sometimes the seasickness stops here and I’m left with a dull, nagging, and for lack of a better word, moldy feeling in my stomach.  But much of the time, that original neck tension ekes its way into my shoulders.  Thus begins and achy chain reaction that spreads to the tips of my toes, and I’m left wanting to do nothing more than hold my knees to my chest and sleep…or cry.  Or both.

That’s the other thing about seasickness; while it’s not making me unintentionally fall asleep or vomit over the side of the boat (for which the aforementioned nausea is commonly responsible), it’s very emotionally taxing.  Somehow, it manages to sneak into the deep corners of my psyche and drag out every unhappy detail of my life—details I’ve been trying no to focus on: homesickness, dissatisfaction with my work, old romantic wounds, you name it.  Rachel and I spent 3 wretched hours below deck the other day, while we were supposed to be cleaning, crying and feeding each others’ fires and just validating the living shit out of each other and our miseries.  Anyway, after this 60-ish-hour crossing, I’m hoping we won’t have anything too much worse, although we might.  I’ll cross my fingers for the former, but the fact is, I feel better now and we’re anchored, so I can sleep.

Honk

We’ve all had to cope with frightening or dangerous experiences now and then.

Phoebe didn’t cope well with these situations.  Thankfully, she also had a strange condition that caused her to make uncontrollable noises like a car alarm any time she was threatened.

Her parents didn’t understand it, but there wasn’t much they could do about it either.  They first noticed it two days after she was born.  The hospital did a good job of covering up the fact that a child snatcher had come into the newborn nursery and almost taken Phoebe right out the front door.  But given the circumstances, they at least had to tell her parents.  The nurse had found Phoebe, all swaddled up like a caterpillar ready for metamorphosis, lying on the floor by the elevator, a horrible, wailing honk emitting from her tiny, rose-shaped mouth.  Her face was as red as if she were screaming, but no scream; just that honk.

Phoebe was a quiet baby.  She hardly ever squeaked or gurgled or even whined for almost 2 years. When the parents asked Phoebe’s doctor if her silence was a problem, he jokingly said that maybe the snatcher dropping Phoebe on her head in surprise had “knocked the honk out of her.”  At the parents’ stony-faced reactions, he cleared his throat uncomfortably and told them that Phoebe would be fine, maybe just a late bloomer.

It soon became clear that the honk hadn’t been knocked out of her at all.

After a grocery store outing, when Phoebe was four, she and her mother were walking to the car when a man rushed by and grabbed her mother’s purse.  Her mother held on. Phoebe, watching the scruffy man from the child’s seat in the grocery cart, went red in the face and opened her mouth, as if to start crying, and out came the honk.  The noise was so loud that her mother and the thief both let go of the purse in surprise.  The thief stumbled backwards and swore. He turned and ran out of the parking lot, staring at the honking Phoebe over his shoulder.

Her parents tried to keep Phoebe away from anything that would bring out the honk.  They appreciated its usefulness, but it worried them.  They were afraid that if the wrong people heard Phoebe’s honk, they would take her away for experiments or use her for some sort of unorthodox police training.  But it wasn’t easy to predict when the honk would be triggered.

Phoebe often went hiking with her father.  During one hike, when she was fourteen, Phoebe fell behind and couldn’t see her father anymore.  Although her father had taught her exactly what she should do if she ever got lost (in the hopes of avoiding exactly what ended up happening), Phoebe panicked and started honking.

The hiking incident embarrassed the adolescent Phoebe.  Her father had only been around a bend in the trail and had found her right away honking with tears streaming down her face as she held her hands over her mouth to try to cover the sound, to no avail.  When they got home that night, she asked her parents if she could get her vocal chords removed.  They told her no.

Over time, Phoebe learned to embrace her honk (indeed, her parents knew she was beginning to accept it when she started calling it “my honk” instead of an expletive).  When she bought herself her first car, she also got a bumper sticker that said, “I brake for tailgaters,” but she crossed off “brake” and wrote “honk.”  The more she embraced it, the more she was able to control it.  Indeed, there was a time when Phoebe was 26 and she was walking to her car one night.  She noticed a man following her in the shadows.  She turned around and let out one loud HONK, and the man fled.  Phoebe smiled and kept walking.