Dust

8/13/17

Sometimes I write bittersweet things. Is there anything more beautiful than that edge between joy and pain? Here's a little snippet from a work-in-progress novel. 

***

It’s been months.

Days pass where I hardly think of you at all.

Days pass where I am buried and smothering in you.

I don’t know which is better.

There was a time that I wanted every trace of you away from me, because the shards you left sticking out of my skin were bleeding and painful. I picked you out with tweezers. I threw the bits and pieces of you into the air and watched them soar.

And now I bleed less but I remember less. I can hardly remember the way that your chocolate eyes crinkled and your hair grayed—just a little—at the temples. Your face is all blurry, like a moonlight lake reflection of you, not Actual You. I’m not sure what your voice sounds like anymore.

Sounded like.

Remember when you started talking about me in the past tense? I do remember that.

I’m not sorry that I met you. Months ago, when I was bleeding, I was sorry. But now I can see that if I wouldn’t have known you, there are so many other things I wouldn’t have known, some of them so precious to me that I wouldn’t be willing to give them back, not for anything. Not even if I could.

And so even though maybe you ruined my life a little bit, I have no choice but to welcome in my grudging gratitude for you.

I don’t know what to wish for you. When I think of you, you’re smiling. Happy. Looking at your new lover like she is made of magic, your light reflected in her eyes. On my very best days, I think of this and send you warmth, and kindness, and “I’m so glad, I want this for you, you deserve happiness” -type intentions.

And on my lesser days, I wish thoughts of me would steal over you and soak into your body like heavy August damp.

Maybe in years, when so many days have passed that I’ve lost track, and the memories are faded and yellow and brittle with age, this will all mean nothing.

But even then, in some recess of my heart you will stay. You held yourself out to me with cupped hands, and I drank you in. You’ll be with me even as memories turn to dust and scatter in the wind.

I suppose I hope you are being you. Wherever you are. 

To the friends who saw Me and liked me anyway

On one of the last days of my undergraduate career, one of my best friends wrote this in my graduation card. “When I met you, I didn’t like you. I was a fool.”

Youch.

But it only took me about thirty seconds to completely understand what she meant. Why she’d felt that way. 

You see, I wasn’t the easiest person to get to know, in my younger years. It was weird: I was SO excited to go to college. I’d thought I would reinvent myself, create a new identity. I was all outward confidence and gusto, and if anyone would have asked, I’d have told them I was planning to take UNL by the balls.

Yet I didn’t know myself at all. There was all of this stuff happening on the inside of me that I couldn’t see.

I entered my freshman year convinced that I’d already made all the close friends I was ever going to make, EVER. I thought that only people who’d known me my whole life, since the beginning, would really care for me. In other words, I didn’t see myself as likable. It was more like I saw people as tolerating me—and not because they wanted to, but because they’d had to.

That (unconscious) attitude followed me around UNL for my first two years. I was closed off, reserved. I didn’t put much time or effort into making new friends. I poured every ounce of energy into academics, the one thing I knew I did well. I’m pretty sure I came off as a quieter, less spirited Hermione—the 11-year old Hermione living in the 19-year old me. (I even had really poofy hair. Hermione central!)

Yet even though I had no idea how to find it or build it, there was a big and growing part of me that craved community. Belongingness. So I applied to be a Resident Assistant for UNL. I’m forever grateful to the late (and wonderful) Sheryl Haug, the woman who chose me to be a part of her staff at Cather Hall. She saw something in me and gave me a chance. Without her, I’d probably still be Grangering it up, able to tackle serious math theorems but unable to make friends. 

I got a chance to meet my future fellow coworkers the Spring of my sophomore year. I had super unchecked anxiety at the meet-up, and this came out of me as rigidity. Shut-down mode. And it didn’t matter, because these people weren’t going to like me much, anyway.

Though not a lot of real info got over my walls during that first encounter, there was this one guy who stood out, who I thought about long after the day had passed. He was everything I wasn’t yet everything I was. He was blunt, sarcastic, uninhibited. I was none of those things. Yet he also seemed to love Moulin Rouge and kids and music—like me. He scared the bejesus out of me and I dreaded seeing him in the fall. And, because life is life, he was the very first person I saw when I rolled up to move into Cather Hall the following August. We saw each other, and he—who wears all of his emotions on his face—gave me a lackluster hi, obviously not thrilled to see me. And I spoke through my teeth to my dad, “I don’t think I’m going to get along with that one.”

Our whole staff went on a retreat together, immediately, the same day we all moved in. It was a weekend full of ice breakers, trust falls, ropes courses-- you know, all that bonding crap. But I'll be damned if it didn't work. I let down my guard and started to let people see who I actually was. And they didn’t hate me. And that guy, the one who scared the shit out of me? He quickly became one of the best friends I ever had. (His name is Brett Hall and he is a stand up guy.)

My RA staff friends became lifelines to the self I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be stiff and scared of my own shadow. I wanted to be fun and silly and brave. I wanted to laugh a lot. I wanted to believe that I was a likable person, even if I’m not everyone’s type. These friends taught me that I could be...well, me.  And they brought me Razzles and ate Thanksgiving dinner in my room with me and drug me to Tarentino movies I'd never go to otherwise and drank Parrot Bay with me and bitched about hall government with me and hugged me when my great-grandma died and covered my socials for me when I was too depressed to handle them. They were always there. (Literally. I lived, worked, ate, and went to class with these people.)

For a long time I’ve known what these guys did for me. I’ve talked about it in graduate school classes, and with my clients. I even pseudo-used this life experience as inspiration for my dissertation, which focused on social adjustment to college for rural students. I don’t know if I ever really thanked them, though.

So, to all of my Cather Staff peeps: thank you, thank you, for seeing all of my weird quirks and liking me anyway. I don’t know where I’d be today if it hadn’t been for you.

You will all be my friends 4 Life.