I woke up this morning thirsty, but I didn’t know for what. Drank a Diet Pepsi. The bracing burn of those bubbles on a dry drowsy throat opened my eyes a little wider but didn’t slake the thirst.
The rising sun was growing shadows on the dining room’s striped wooden floor and all was peaceful but I was listening for noise–the whoosh of a car or the rumble of a truck down Water Street (for a desert boy to live on Water Street still feels like an accomplishment), the whine of a trimmer, growl of mower, pop of a hammer, anything to indicate anyone else was up and around and doing anything, but it’s eerily quiet in April, a silence that gives new meaning to T.S. Eliot’s line “April is the cruelest month.”
I miss being able to be among people. This six-week “shelter in place” is no shelter, but a prison. This quarantine has been long enough to feel like a hostage situation. Before I came “home” from my months taking care of my brother in Oregon I used to eat breakfast every morning at the McDonald’s in Forest Grove while I wrote, sipping Diet Coke, crunching down on that salty hash brown, taking a bite of my sausage and cheese McMuffin every sentence or two while the world whirled around me in the form of mostly Spanish speaking people–the two restaurant workers with their phones taking their breaks, chattering and laughing down the table from me, showing one another the texts and tweets and posts they found and just had to share; the homeless guy on his motorized wheelchair, a snaggletoothed Chihuahua perched on the housing snarling while employees and guests
alike joyfully ignored the “NO ANIMALS” sign; any number of kids who came in to ignore their godawful food and play on the playscape, which smells of the sweat and foot stink of 1,000s of other kids before them; the four old guys who always sat in the corner booth enjoying arguments then long periods of silence then laughter as if they had nothing else to do.
I miss those moments with MY friends. The pain and pleasure of their company. I miss them enough I’m almost crying thinking of them. The silly little things we do in each other’s presence. The way he wipes his mouth, or forgets to. The crumb on the tiny hairs at the corner of her mouth. The place he forgets to shave.
The way she sits there with something to say for the longest time but says nothing. Her unintended laugh, the little burp he tries to talk through that makes his voice go up in a tiny explosion at the end. The way he shifts in his seat, the way his upper lip shows his teeth when he finishes speaking and sometimes gets stuck there, the way she searches her phone when someone says something like she’s fact-checking every word, the way he takes a call right in the middle of our conversation and I have to say, “Hey, I’m here, too.” The shuffle of feet. The dropped pen. The way she bends in half and stretches like a flamingo to scrounge through a camera bag to give me a lens. The look of exasperation, the gentle smile, and loving gaze, all I get to take in silently in a group. The smell of my friend’s yoghurt that makes me practically sick, and the realization that the smell of my Diet Pepsi does nearly the same to her, and somehow we tolerate it just to be in one another’s presence.
I Facetimed that friend this week, and I find myself trying to recall every gesture–the surprise in seeing one another, her laugh when my tears come because I am old and it’s been a long time
and I was afraid I would do that but it’s okay and that cry/laugh thing is just kind of the greeting. The way her untamable hair is pulled back, the pause when I ask her “How are you” and she takes a breath and says “I’m struggling.” I replay it in my head for the unexpected. For the unwritten, unscripted spontaneity and out of control of it. The life of it. I keep wishing I had some pictures of it just to keep it, even as I know the “it” can not be captured. But even as I hold onto it I miss what I missed–where’s her daughter, where’s the puppy, what shoes is she wearing, where’s the food, what else is on the desk, what does the rest of the room like, who came in that she didn’t expect, what was the context I missed that would have truly put me in the room with her.
It’s a great exercise for a writer–what’s missing. But that’s not the point. I want my whole friend, that presence; I want my people back in my life. I want to play music with my friends and hear their mistakes and they hear mine and we keep playing. It’s the things we don’t intend to show one another, the accidental, the comment on something not in view, that sparks the idea, the laugh, the “what the hell,” the song, the love. The grace of the unintended, the holy flaws, the “I have no idea what’s happening next or what I’ll do” of it. I crave their interruption of my scripted life, the way their presence changes the way I am with those I live with, the way those I live with are with their friends, or even strangers, when we’re out in public. I need to be the person I am, not the person I write myself to be, and I need others to be themselves too.
I am an introvert, and I need quiet to focus and process things. I need being alone to re-charge, and I’m uncomfortable in crowds, a crowd being defined as more than one or two other people. And I
used to want to be a monk, to live in solitude with a very few people in an intentional and peaceful life with very few interruptions, preferably in a pastoral setting. Now I’m thinking, fuck that!