This afternoon, a friend stopped by my place. She stopped in under the pretense that she was in the neighborhood running some errands. After about 20 minutes of small talk, she turned to me in a serious tone and said, “I have something to tell you.” It’s been my experience that whenever someone needs to halt a happy conversation, take a deep breath, and transition to a serious tone whatever is about to follow will almost certainly be bad. Second, whenever someone needs to preface that something with a ‘I have something to tell you’ that something is probably big. Hence, in the blink of an eye, I concluded that this happy visit was just a pretense to drop on me something both big and bad. Maybe she was going to tell me that I had unwittingly fallen into massive, inescapable debt, having won a reverse-lottery of some sort. Perhaps, she was going to tell me that I negligently had been feeding my dog some of that contaminated dog food and that he would soon be dead. Who knows, maybe I was the one dying. Heck, who knows, maybe she had just returned from ninja training and was being paid by my arch enemy to assassinate me! Although this last possibility was the least likely, namely because I’m pretty sure I don’t have an arch enemy, I thought it wise to reach for my spoon. Just in case.
I was a bit relieved to learn only that my ex-girlfriend, not the most recent one but the one before, was engaged.
Of course, I realized that this presented an altogether different problem. I knew how to fight ninjas. That I had done before. I was mentally and physically prepared for that. However, having an ex get engaged was new to me. What exactly am I supposed to feel in this situation? Anger? Disappointment? Envy? Jealousy? Happiness? Relief? Enormity? (That’s right, enormity is an emotion I am considering.) And is it safe to put down the spoon yet?
After telling her that I didn’t feel anything in particular in response to the news, she confided that she has gotten physically ill when she received similar news awhile back regarding an ex of hers. Am I supposed to be feeling ill right now?
Hoping to find the answer somewhere between me and the road, I filled the car with a full tank of gas and headed west. I decided to drive until I was the last person left on the road, however long that took. I would know I had gone far enough when everyone on the road that was going somewhere got to that somewhere and all that was left was me and the places that no one would go. And that’s where it would all make sense. I got about 30 minutes into the trip when, unable to shake the cars either in front of or behind me and realizing the impracticality of this plan, I decided to stop for dinner.
The new plan was to find some old-time diner. I would sit at the counter and some waitress in a powder blue dress would fill my cup of coffee and offer me a generous helping of pie, like in the movies. I don’t even drink coffee, but I had seen how it was done, and who am I to mess with tradition? Between the caffeine and sugar, Old Rosie would have sage advice for me, indeed. Old Rosie would know what a man in my position is to do. And besides, who doesn’t love pie?
I even found the perfect diner in an old time town, but, this being the Bible-belt and it being Sunday evening, it was closed. I asked the skateboarders outside the courthouse where a weary traveler might find a diner ‘round these parts. (Admittedly, I probably had not gone far west enough to talk like that, but it just felt so right at the moment.) Their directions led me to a Mexican restaurant in a relatively new strip mall. Fearing that I would not find powder-blue-clad waitresses, bottomless cups of coffee, neither pie nor sage advice at this establishment, I got back in my car and headed back east. So much for living out scenes from movies.
As I made my way back home, my back pocket started vibrating and I saw that “home” was calling. It was my mom calling to tell me, as always, that nothing was new and that I should go to church. She also added, for the first time in my life, that it was about time I started looking for a wife. These things take time, she said, so I better get going. Of course, I had tried to get going, but by this time, I was about back where I started. I thanked my mom for her advice, hung up the phone, and headed into a diner near my house. They don’t have powder blue dresses here, but they do have my favorite chocolate-chip and banana pancakes and I ordered a triple-stack. As I waited for my food to arrive, I re-read some Jack Gilbert I had on me, cued up some Damien Rice on the ipod, and thought about what I was supposed to feel.
It occurred to me that my ex and I used to come here all the time. If we had a place, this would be it. How was it that I traveled half way across North Carolina (or at least 50 miles) to just end up here again? And
here of all places? And while I did not do it consciously, such things don’t just happen without design, do they? Freud didn’t believe in accidents, but he probably didn’t believe in eating breakfast for dinner either. So much for Freud.
I thought about how hubristic it was for me to make this story about myself. For the past 13 months, I was under the impression that I was the reason these two people were together. Had I not left her the way I left her, he would not have found her the way he found her. But what was this to say, really, other than that all people exist in some interconnected web of cause and effect?
I can certainly understand each person’s desire to be the central figure in their own life stories. But to be the central figure in this girl’s story is something that is no longer due me. And while I may have once been Chapter 12 of 12, and more recently Chapter 12 of 13, it now occurs to me that even when 60 chapters have been written, I’ll still only be one lowly Chapter 12 in her life story. The point at which her book stopped being about me, and vice versa, is behind both of us.
This realization reminds me of that day I went back to visit my high school several years after graduation. The place looked largely the same. The buildings were still where the buildings had always been. But most of my favorite teachers had been reassigned or moved on. My friends, obviously, no longer roamed the halls. In their place were kids that looked younger than I remembered, who dressed pretty much the same as I did, and who joked about pretty much the same stuff we used to joke about. However, despite the apparent similarities, these kids were neither me nor my friends. Indeed, most everything that would remind anyone of me was no longer there. Still, life went on without incident. And just as I was ready to conclude that my 4 years here didn’t make a lick of difference in the grand scheme of things, I opened the back closet of room 217 and found, right where I left it, that book of poems by Thomas Dylan, which I had bought some 5 years prior. No one who’s still around would be able to tell you where that book came from. But I knew and it was a secret kept between me and the walls.
Today, I feel a lot like I felt that day when I walked into that building that used to be mine. I feel as though I’ve been put, with some degree of finality, in my proper historical context. And soon, the record books will be re-written, and I will no longer own any significant superlative. But so it goes.
And it is with equal parts nostalgia and mischief that I recall one Thomas Dylan. And how she used to bite her bottom lip. And all the secrets kept between the walls of forgotten buildings as to how these things came to be.
