Hi!

Happy Sunday. ❤

I have a funny story. One that I have accepted could, theoretically, be found by the person I am talking about. Which would, theoretically, be quite embarrassing. But like I say, I can’t help it. Plus, the whole thing inspired some thoughts about the times that we spend alone with the world and how grateful I am for them. It can’t not be told. So here we go.

A TRAGIC, FUNNY STORY

The other day I found out that the guy who I thought was lightly flirting with me in my Spanish class, the guy who for the past few weeks I have assumed to be a single twenty-something, is actually 33, married, and the father of four children. Totally not my fault. At 20, I’ve never exactly had to check for a ring before. But anyway. We got partnered up in class and he was making fun of me for reading in the stairwell during our break. I’ve never seen anyone just like, reading in the corner before. Like oh, a ten minute break? Let me just pull out this book. I laughed. Because first of all, what else is one to do with a ten minute break? And second, reading in stairwells has practically been my entire college experience, so it was of course comical to remember that some people find that kind of thing strange.

It started back in high school when I just needed somewhere to hide from the hundreds of teenagers that I couldn’t connect with or from the teachers who would feel the need to come and ask you if you were going to kill yourself every time they saw you sitting alone. No, Janet, I just can’t stand the toxicities of the modern adolescent, you? So I sat in stairwells and read books. The more hidden, the more remote, the better. Though the security guard would usually come kick me out of those for reasons that I still don’t understand. I wasn’t shooting heroine between my toes, I was conversing with Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien. I was staring out at the ocean and feeling its pull. I was scribbling rancid poetry into the margins of my history notes. I loved the feeling of my black Old Skool vans against the concrete steps as I did these things, it made me feel like the tortured protagonist of a coming-of-age indie film. I suppose that was the silver lining of being a wallflower in an environment that makes such an endeavor as painful and as difficult as possible. I got to feel like an individual, but at the expense of being the kid who sat alone in stairwells.

So when I got to a college campus, the thing that struck me the most was how acceptable it suddenly was to be alone. The place is crawling with nooks and crannies for you to sit in while waiting for classes, reading, studying, eating lunch. You can eat alone and it’s not tragic. It’s designed for that. You see people by themselves all of the time. So sitting alone has not felt strange in a long time. People don’t come up and ask me if I’m okay or if I have friends or if I’m going to kill myself. No one cares anymore. It’s brilliant. Most of the time, I feel pretty invisible actually. And not in a bad way, just in a I can do whatever I want and no one is watching kind of way. So when that guy in my class made that joke about me reading in the stairwell, I felt oddly exposed. Like oh, you saw that?

HOPE FOR HUMANS

More than anything though, it was just nice to converse with a mature human. Have you tried talking to a twenty year old guy lately? Have you tried getting them to actually look you in the eye? It’s insane. I suppose that this guy’s ability to do so should have been the dead giveaway that he was, in fact, 33. That was my bad. Obviously, I will now avoid him like the plague, given the whole wife situation. But it has got me thinking.

This isn’t about the very brief, now comical, interest that I had in him. That’s not the point. The point is that I felt seen and heard when talking to him for reasons that had nothing to do with my appearance. The random, little things that he noticed and asked about made me smile. And that was enough. That was enough to remind me that I am only 20 and that there are beautiful people out there who I’m going to love and who are going to love me and they don’t devote their weekends to beer pong and football. People that I have not met yet, that I have not loved yet. And for the first time, I’m not in any rush.

I used to be so eager to meet “my person”, to fall in love. As the child of parents who met in high school, young love was always on my brain. I was always waiting for it to drop right out the sky. I wanted it all immediately. And I don’t know when that changed, but it did. Maybe because I am on the brink of a huge life transition and I have other things to be excited about, or maybe because I talk to a lot of older people who give me perspective, but I’m almost hoping that I don’t meet anyone for a while. I just want to love the world right now. I want to meet it all on my own first.

So yeah, he’s 33 and married with a whole life set up. But I’m not. I still get to go out and be on my own and explore beautiful cities. I get to look forward to falling in love and connecting with people and places and stories. I’m practically a fetus in the womb of the world. Talking to him reminded me of that. It also gave me hope for humanity. Like yes, people are going to grow up and look you in the eye. They are going to say brilliant things and you are going to laugh because you will remember all of the times where no one seemed to say anything interesting at all. The thought of that is like medicine.

CONNECTING WITH THE EARTH

Speaking of medicine, whenever I need inspiration or feel that I might die from the weight of the world, I’ve noticed that I reach out to touch the earth. It never sounds like it will solve anything, but then you’re outside and the sun is on your face and you are seeing the sky, really seeing it, for the first time in days. You have nothing in your hands and everything under your feet, a whole planet of things that matter so much more than the fleeting moments of stress and anxiety that consume everyday life. Suddenly, you can breathe again.

It’s like looking at the stars. I used to be obsessed with space and it always felt like a superpower to have that constant, larger picture of the universe in my head. I suppose that that is what religion does for some. It gives you a larger field of meaning to orient yourself and your life within. And we all need that, whether it’s a church or the ocean, we need something immense to feel connected to, to gather nutrients from. Nature has always been that umbilical cord for me. Standing bare foot in the summer grass and stretching my arms up into the clouds has always transported my entire body. As a kid, I would stay outside until the last drops of pink and orange ink were drained from the painting that was my world. In those final moments of light, when all of the houses and all of the trees turned to black silhouettes against a screaming red sky, black birds would fly over my head like clockwork. They would crow and I would speak back to them like the psychotic child that I was. I can no longer imagine standing in the middle of the street, cupping my hands into the shape of a cone, and crowing to the birds, but I dream all of the time about the days when I could. It was only the world and I back then. I don’t remember anything else existing.

So now, as an adult, when I am outside and the sun is falling out of my sky and into someone else’s, and those birds come out of nowhere to sing their beautifully broken songs, I succumb to a kind of trance. Tears roll down my face like I just saw god himself and for a few moments, it is just the world and I again. That’s the feeling that I want to hold onto.

Sending love, m.

JOIN THE FUN

Subscribe to give your inbox something to look forward to.