One Year In Five Stories
Writing is, and has always been, incredibly personal for me. In its most fundamental role, it is the tool I use to sort through the barrage of thoughts and abstractions in hopes of uncovering purpose in the chaos of living. I need writing like I need rest. In 2018, I haven’t had much of either.
As I wind down for the holidays, I took one more shot at attaining perspective. I’m sharing it here because I think there are some experiences that others might recognize, too. 2018 has been both difficult and rewarding, devastating and joyful. I’m finding that most years are. The stories below are a collection of all those moments, told on the linear timeline along which they unfolded. I can only say now that over the course of this year I have done what any person might: what I could. That will have to be enough.
I’m standing just to the left of the black box theater seats. I feel still, statue struck. I’m never more still than in those few moments before I do something scary. The energy I usually work off by shifting my weight or drumming my fingernails all zeroes in on self-preservation planning. What do you say first, what do you say first, what do you say first. Over and over I’m repeating the first line in my head like it’s a rosary prayer. I’m clutching my letter, the one penned in a panic only a few days prior in my last attempt to summarize a decade of learning and of life. I’m holding it firmly because my fingers are numb and I can’t judge pressure very well, but I keep shifting it from hand to hand so it doesn’t get wrinkled. Wrinkled pages show fear; I won’t be afraid. I can feel exhaustion in my bones, but thank God for adrenaline. My mind is awake, sharp, ready to wage war. Because isn’t that what public speaking really is?
Someone says something to me and I hear it out of habit but it doesn’t sink in. Some part of my consciousness has replied and they are satisfied and I’m alone and quiet again. Even in that moment I couldn’t be sure what I said - my attention is in the future. Two of the most influential women in my life are sitting in the audience, ready and waiting to be proud of me; the weight of it holds like a debt unpaid. What do you say first, what do you say first, what do you say first.
I hear my name announced and there is applause and I know the drill so my feet are moving towards the circles of light and the wingback chair before me. I fix my face in a smile that is easy, the one I learned was a greater defense than any scowl I could commission. I turn to the audience, a short, small wave, and take a seat - perched on the edge so my back is straight and my feet are crossed at the ankles so I won’t move them around too much. I open the single fold of the pages that contain the only piece of writing I’ve been able to finish in the last three months, and I pray the last bead of my rosary.
Breathe at the commas, pause at the periods, and please, for the love of everything, please let them laugh.
‘Roiled’ is a word I taught myself this year. I had to dig a bit to find it, because the feeling I was trying to articulate wasn’t present in my existing, everyday vocabulary. I had churned, but that implied more process than I felt; bottomed out was too sudden and paralyzing. What I felt every day wasn’t immediate or in stages. It was a constant disquieting of my stomach that made sleep fleeting and restfulness only a distant memory. My stomach was in a constant roil, had been for months. I would wake up on weekdays sick with the thought of going in to face another day of it - all of it - and on weekends I wouldn’t fare much better. It would never be enough time to catch up, and I would only destroy myself more by trying to work through the extra hours. My notebooks and journals were filled with the same scribblings - a back and forth of ‘you’ll see this through’ and ‘I am angry, I am empty. I don’t know how to fix this.’ I had been here before, I am familiar with the hollowness. Every day my anxiety was winning, all of my energy going to covering it up with focused productivity and half-truth commentary. My mom began to worry.
I’m not a good enough liar anymore.
I made the decision and the last thing I wrote in my notebook was, “Today I am too far away.” My stomach roiled as I walked to the meeting room, as I sat down, as I stared at my computer screen that I use as a shield. I didn’t want my manager to think I couldn’t do the job, I didn’t want him to take it away. I didn’t want anyone to worry about me, lose faith in me, I didn’t want anyone to see me fail. I had worked so hard to get here, to make them believe I could do it; when they saw me stumble now, would I be Icarus at last crashing to earth?
“I,” was all I got out, overwhelmed by the adrenaline in my brain firing off every synapse - change course, get out…you’ll break it, you’ll break everything you built. I closed my eyes even as I felt the prickling of tears just behind my lids; a different voice echoed my resolve in barely a whisper. It already broke. You’re here to fix it.
“I am not doing well,” I said, and it started. “I hate this place, I hate my job. I am sick to my stomach every day I have to come here, and I don’t want to quit, but I don’t know how to keep going.”
For an hour, we talked, and I cried.
My stomach finally settled.
It’s the quietest town in my world. Smaller than the small town of Spring, Texas, and from there I thought I’d suffocate if I stayed. But it wasn’t the smallness that drove me out of Spring, it was the shellac that covered it. Here in Crowley, Louisiana, where there is one main street and not much else, I am not suffocating. There is nothing here that is trying to be anything else, and I feel like I can breathe. I am curled up in the living room of my grandfather’s home and he is writing in his journals as he does every day and I am reading a book as I do every day and there is nothing but the occasional lawnmower or passing car that disrupts the comfortable silence. I’m lost in another fictional world but I am finding my place in this one, too.
I am home, one of them. For the first time I am finding peace in understanding where I got it from - this instinct to do things that are scary in spite of and to do things that are hard because of. It isn’t because of ambition or neurosis, of which I am undeniably full up, but rather it’s hereditary. I never had to learn - or I spent my life learning - how to put my head down and just do the work. Before I even process a task I’m already chipping away at it; it is habit, it is the way things should be done. It is something that has earned me commendation and critique - but here, I am only accepted. Because here it is not a characteristic unique to me, but a thread that binds us. After so many months of alone, I have come home.
He stops writing and I stop reading and he’s telling me about West Texas again. His time on the ranches, the rodeo, the road: his impossible adventures. In turn, I know I can go back to my own story. One, because he has reminded me already twice now that I have to - that other people don’t dictate what we do with our one, precious life - and two, because I am fortified by the understanding that in this family, we can do impossible things.
The only place it existed was in a tiny box trapped in my phone that no one else could see. In the moment that I read the message, it was as if reality spiked. The music in my earbuds grew so deafening that I ripped them out, the dark interior of the bus became an impenetrable black that strained my pupils as they tried to let in enough light to see.
He had died, my Uncle John was dead.
It was over.
We hadn’t spoken in almost two years, a decision I had made when I assumed there would be more time. He had reached out, voicemails left on my phone that I never had the stomach to listen to or delete. He had been cruel, manipulative, unreasonable in the end. He had wanted to fight, in truth he had wanted to win, but it wasn’t within me to engage in his nonsensical bickering. When he tried to isolate me from my parents, I walked away. He should have asked my brother what happens when my loyalty is questioned. He might have deployed a different tactic.
Now, I’ll never know.
It wasn’t always bad, I tried to tell myself on the walk home. I had loved him once, so it must have been good before. I had wanted to impress him, to make him laugh, to be loved by him, once. I thought - well, I was a child. My parents had let me believe that he was quirky but that he was good. I figured it had been the drinking, the money stress - I thought that he had become this person that I had to walk away from. I never imagined he had been this all along.
I was wrong.
I sank to my knees in the midst of the ruins he left behind, and I cried until my abdomen was sore, until I couldn’t breathe, until my head hurt enough to distract me. I wasn’t grieving but I was devastated. For what I had lost, for what I had known that I couldn’t know anymore.
He was a monster, and I had loved him, anyway. What did that make me?
Seven different kinds of meat is a lot of meats. We figured that out after the fact, of course. After the board had arrived and we had to clear everything off the table so it would fit, after we had sampled each kind and poked at the globs of pickled things we still couldn’t identify even after tasting them, after we decided where the too-spicy line was and divided the meats up accordingly. My higher tolerance for heat means I take the multi-pepper rated salamis and relinquish some of the lesser spiced ones. That’s friendship: a mutual agreement on who eats the spicy meats on the charcuterie board.
It’s autumn, but the air is warm in San Diego. We’re in short sleeves and jeans, and the restaurant is warmer still from the open kitchen. I barely notice after a few minutes. My face remains windswept from the drive home with the top down on the rented convertible, and for one of the few times this year, I’m here in this moment, laughing about our adventures at the Safari Park, sharing our enthusiasm for the movie “Hocus Pocus,” and chatting excitedly about salami and cheese.
I think I finally know what the ebb of the year has been, as much as the difficult times have flowed. And I don’t ‘know’ it like you think a coherent thought - I ‘know’ it like a feeling in my chest that pulls tears to the lower lids of my eyes. I am grateful. The ebb, the balance of 2018, has been love. Love that listens kindly as you struggle through your anxiety for months at a time, love that cheers you on from the audience, from the comments section, from right by your side; a love that goes on a 36-hour trip down the coast so you can get out of your head and feed leaves to a giraffe. The ebb to every flow has been a love so unconditional and present that I can forget to see it from time to time. I figured this out after the fact, of course.
“We probably didn’t need to order entrees,” she said, staring down at the now empty block of wood.
“I choose to regret nothing,” I said. “This is my one, precious life.”
“May it be forever filled with salami and cheese.”
And impossible things, of course.
