Loneliness

Loneliness is the disease that everyone lives with but not everyone knows they have. I've heard it described as an ache, and though this seems too simplistic, too cliche, I can't help but agree.

I feel it most, not when I am recently rejected or otherwise hurt, but when I am caught unaware, assured in my connection to a world I think loves me. It is when I sit by myself, in happy contemplation of my vital part in the lives of others, that I realize I am not vital and that the world would go on much the same whether I die now or whether I stick around for another sixty years.

The problem, I think, is not in myself, though a trained psychologist might say differently. Rather, I think the problem comes from the very heart of the world, the way things are, the nature of existence itself.

The problem with our existence is that, in a long term and even short term sense, it doesn't matter as much as we think it does. We spend our lives searching for an overarching meaning for us, not the world as a whole, but us. We want to know our stories matter and what we want to see are the details of that significance right down to the very moments in which "life happens." Unfortunately, many of us in this search for our own purpose think it necessary to forget how short our lives are. We also forget how interconnected they are with the larger story, a bigger course and significance.

And this is why we are lonely, why I am lonely. My relationships never give me the significance I desire, I need, in order to exist. As an individual, I don't mean enough to other people to be worth something in the long run, to have lived a story that mattered.

And so it is when I am most secure that I am most lonely, because I realize that no matter how good it gets, connectedness to others in this life can't make me matter or last any longer than if I lived in a cave. Unless I look at my connectedness with others not as something centered on myself, but as centered on something outside myself, outside this world, outside the small sphere I know as "existence."

I would dare to say that everyone, if in a different capacity than me, has felt this same pain. This is the miracle of loneliness, that we've all felt the archetypal ache. The fact that we've all felt it must mean that there's something meant to ease the pain, somewhere, somehow. Otherwise, why would we still describe it as an ache? If everyone has it, why do we not consider it to be a normal thing, if we consider it at all? Instead, we recognize it and it hurts and we go about our own ways of covering or numbing or cutting it out of ourselves. We do something about it. We live.

Might I be so radical as to argue that there is a way, or not a way but a place, to live where the end of the road, if not the journey itself, sees an end to the loneliness. I wrote this to myself, and it ends with an address to myself: does that place exist? Yes. In the truest sense of existence there can be. Good news for me, loneliness: you have a purpose. You are my best friend because you cause me to search for the something missing beyond my solitary self, beyond this solitary world. You cause me to live beyond my own existence.

Phoenix

The restaurant was French Cajun, New Orleans inspired. Spicy. I could smell the spiciness wafting from between the double doors of the kitchen, carried on the cold drafts of air blown in by new customers entering the lobby. The customers themselves were not spicy, at least not in the way people our age would understand it. I wondered at why so many white-haired patrons had chosen such a colorful, flavorful place for a night out.

“Everyone in here has at least twenty years on us,” you said.

I laughed. Of course we were thinking the same thing. “I wonder why that is. It’s not too overpriced to be a twenty-somethings date place.”

“It must just be the food then. That doesn’t make much more sense of it though.”

We sat in silence, observing as each new blast of cold air brought a tottering couple, leaning on each other’s arms. Sometimes families would come with their elderly parents and then the feeble would be leaning on young, impatient shoulders. I thought the old people always looked happier leaning on their just-as-shaky spouse. Maybe they could find joy knowing it was a mutual support, that they were carrying just as much as they were being carried.

You moved one finger from your armrest to gently stroke the back of my hand where it rested, conspicuously, only inches from yours. Usually, our hands are constantly entwined, without thought or even much sentimentality. I know, though you probably haven’t noticed, that when our hands are that close but not touching, our hearts are feeling an internal disconnect. But it was just my heart then, I think. You moved the rest of your fingers and laced them with mine on my armrest, not waiting for me to come to you. As usual. I felt like more penance of distance should be served before such an acceptance, more ceremony given to my forgiveness. I knew you felt there was no other place for your hand to be, nothing filling the six inches of empty space between our uncomfortable waiting area chairs. You were not thinking of me at all.

“I’m still sorry,” I said. I turned my eyes away from the lobby to search your face, guess your thoughts like I love to do because I can always surprise you with how much I know about you, things you don’t know about yourself.

“I know,” is all you said. Not bitter. Just focused on the present. Not thinking about me at all. Not considering the reasons why you should be afraid. I wished then and now it was that easy for me to do the same.

“It’s just a coffee pot,” I said, “If someone gets it for us, someone gets it for us. I shouldn’t have gotten angry. It wasn’t worth it.”

You turned and smiled. “I forgive you, Julie.” And then you went back to watching the room.

Again, my sense of payment had not been satisfied. I wanted a discussion, an argument, in which you proved to me that we needed a sixty dollar coffeemaker with a built-in water filter on our wedding registry instead of a regular, thirty dollar coffeemaker because the more expensive option really was the better one. I wanted you to battle me, humiliate me into submission, because at least then I could say I suffered for and learned from my brutal treatment of you. I wanted you to master me and my pettiness because I had proven yet again that I could not control it myself. But you had already passed beyond me.

Sometimes I wonder how you know when I’ve refused to let go of something. Maybe my eyes give it away, or maybe the wrinkle between my eyebrows. Maybe it was my hand, slackening its grip on yours.

You squeezed my hand twice and tried to meet my eyes. “What are you thinking about?”

I didn’t answer you immediately. I wanted to get to the heart of it, to eradicate the emptiness in my stomach once and for all by speaking it out loud into the life of the room. In the interlude, another old couple passed us, a man gently helping his wife with her coat.

“Are you never afraid?” I asked. I was afraid of your answer.

“About what?”

“About this. About us. Not working. Aren’t you ever afraid of everything falling apart?”

You squinted your eyes, which I know means that you’re considering your response carefully. I was relieved you were taking me seriously, not just brushing past the question like I knew I might have if you had asked me the same thing. I would have tried to laugh and given you the easy “I love you forever no matter what” answer, but it wouldn’t have satisfied, just like you wouldn’t have been able to pacify me with that answer either. I couldn’t accept such an easy love for the same reason I couldn’t accept such an easy forgiveness: it didn’t acknowledge the very real necessity of fear.

“No,” you said, “I’m not afraid of that at all.”

The fear covered my head like a black veil at my own funereal. You had left me alone to suffer in my doubts, thinking that I was the only one who really knew the danger, the only one who could see that if anyone was to end us, it would be me. All I wanted you to do was to take my place as the jailer of my self-made prison so I could rest for a while and just be the prisoner instead of jailer, builder, and prisoner, always, all at the same time.

“No, I’m not afraid of us ending,” you said. “I’m not afraid of you.” Of course you knew the real question I was asking. “But I am afraid of myself.”

“You too?” Sudden hope feels almost as painful as despair, or maybe the ache is caused by despair retreating, screaming on its way out.

“I’m not afraid of you, Julie. The only thing I have to be afraid of is myself.”

I’m glad the hostess called your name then. Otherwise I would have had to say something, and words would have been like small children chasing a bird, pulling out all the feathers of fragile beauty, destroying while trying to own what they are ruining.

We sat down at a small booth for two. You leaned across the table and pulled me close so you could whisper your secret thoughts in my ear, glinting behind your mischievous eyes. I thought you might give me a treasure from the deepest part of your heart, tell me the key to ridding me of my fear forever. I leaned in close for you to rescue me.

“So, before when I was standing in the hall outside the bathrooms waiting for you, there was a chest of drawers there and I wondered what a restaurant would keep in a chest of drawers. It’s not like you would keep the same stuff in it that you would in a house. So I looked in and found rubber gloves.” You shook with suppressed laughter and your whisper got even lower. “And I took a pair.”

Not the key I was expecting, but something close. I saw the flash of feathers as it flew, shaking ashes from its wings.

Grace (a prayer that I did not intend to be about writing)

I’m writing here because if I can’t write here where else can I write?  Here more than anywhere else I can have the freedom and courage to speak.  You are my Father.  I don’t have to be afraid of you not understanding.

There are so many words in the world, so many ways to begin things.  All I want is to speak, but it seems like the scariest thing to do, probably because it is the one thing I know you made me for beyond loving.  That would make the fear of failure even more acute.  I think and I see and I breathe and I touch.  Give me voice and freedom to speak.  This is my offering and no, it will never be perfect enough for anyone’s ears, but still I speak to you who gave lips and eyes and ears and fingers and heart.

My heart is for you.  But how do I speak that?  I get caught up in things too big to handle because I cannot narrow my focus with you in my sights, with you on my mind and my heart.  There is, plain and simply, too much to say.  “Of the making of many books there is no end.”  Why should I add my voice to the throng?  Endless words.  But I want them to say something.

What do I want?  My pursuit of this speaking seems to match up with my pursuit of holiness.  The thing I most desire is the thing I’m most afraid to pursue.  But in the process of working with my fear of failing at both, presumably to fix myself before I can begin my journey, I find I have been pursuing both and that they are finding substance within my fear.  Like now.  I write about my fear of writing and I am writing.  I pray about my fear that I will never see holiness and I feel holiness imparted to me in my weary brokenness.  Perhaps we can only receive when we are most afraid of not receiving and ask anyway, knowing there is no other option.  Perhaps this is grace.

This partly explains why I often can’t write and why I stall in my sanctification.  In both, I only measure my progress by quantity and flow, by degrees of goodness and amount of pages.  But I’m beginning to see that both are gifts given when I stop trying to achieve them, to listen and listen and listen harder.  The more I try, the more white noise invades, and I am overwhelmed.  Your voice is not in the noise, but in the stillness, the absolute silence.  You are not another sound I have to pick out from the chaos.  You are the only place where silence resides.  Peace.  We strive in noise, in sound.  We sit and receive in silence.

This is my writing, then.  I am tired because I consider all the voices, all the styles, all the words that I could speak.  The noise.  But the one word I want can only be found in silence, receiving what I hear and see and touch in that quiet that is me and you and nothing else.

Stillness is the shaping place because it is not the world outside.  Holiness on the outside, the things I can see in myself, come from within the sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, the stillness in chaos, the silence in noise.  Holiness is stillness, and in you it can come to the world.  Received.  In speaking, as in holiness, I am not giving but receiving.  This is grace.   

Waiting for the Train

I avoid eye contact on the train platform as usual as I look for a place to sit among the benches that line the track.  Friday afternoon is busy with other college students going into Chicago for an escape from classes.  They stand in huddled groups, a few in dresses or ties.  Going to the symphony or the opera, probably.  Some carry bags stuffed with picnic blankets and dinner, preparations for an outdoor concert or a few hours at the beach.  I stand with only my purse.  I'll be meeting my Bible study group north of the city.  I just have to bide my limited time as a forlorn figure until the train comes to carry me to friends and food, my refreshing weekly routine of acceptance.

No benches.  The one closest to my chosen sentinel spot holds three people, the nearest occupant with his back turned to me in order to talk with his neighbors.  The white button-up, black slacks and shiny black shoes mark him as a businessman.  Or a missionary, I think.

The words of the woman next to him, the woman blocked from my view, are slurred by a lisp and a nasally tone.  

             "We's just don't know what we're gonna do.  There just ain't no money, you know."  Her voice sounds like she's speaking through a snorkel mask.  A voice that carries over the blending, pleasing monotones of others, that makes you want to stare, but makes you feel bad for doing so.

I dare a glance around the back of the white-shirted man.  The owner of the voice sits, slouched over, in an oversize t-shirt on which the iron-on colors have been faded by too many washings.  Her short red hair is pulled back with a purple scrunchie.  Blue eyes as faded as the t-shirt meet mine just as I look and in the millisecond of connection I see her self-consciousness.  I wonder if she sees mine.

What does a woman like her think of a girl like me?  Maybe she asks the same question of herself, but something tells me that life has taught her the answer in glances like mine, glances she has come to fear.  She stumbles a little, like she wants to begin a sentence but has forgotten what she was going to say.  I apologize by looking away and forgive myself silently.  She has given me my answer.

             Her partner takes over in her pause.  He is older than her, much older it seems, but hard to tell.  The undershirt he's wearing is no longer white but clean, barely covering his large, brown belly.  His frizzed, black hair needs cutting and is fading to gray in patches fanning out over his ears.

 "I mean, I love Jesus, I really do," he says to the man in the black slacks.  

The uneducated accent holds a note of self-justification.  It also holds the simplicity of truth.  The missionary-businessman only nods in encouragement, as if this is what he has been waiting to hear but doesn't really believe it.  Maybe the other man understands this, remembering past conversations with similar businessman-missionaries.  He keeps talking.  I hear in his tone the same lessons of experience I saw in the eyes of the woman, the well-dressed man’s reaction as anticipated and expected as the thoughts the purple-scrunchied woman saw in my momentary glance.

             "I mean, I love God, and I think everything's 'bout love and faith an' all that...I'm working hard to get my life right," the big-bellied man says.

The man in the slacks and white collar keeps on nodding.

             "I love God, and I'm working to get my life straight.  I mean, I love my kids an' I want 'em back...so bad.  I love 'em.  I'm taking classes and working hard.  I want to learn how to be better."  

             I see him gesturing with his hands out of the corner of my eye, leaning forward and backward and forward and backward, like his hands are the hands of a conductor, his body the music.  

 I stare into the sunshine, the green park across the tracks, and listen.  I listen and see his children as he speaks, the three young boys who he wants to raise better than he was raised, but that don't listen to him because they don't respect him.  Their mother, not the red-haired lady, says bad things about him, and they don't listen, don't let him speak.  He doesn't want them to grow up like him.  He wants their respect.   He wants their love to mirror the love he has for them.

             "I hope by me taking these classes they can see how much I love 'em," he says.  His voice is deep, gravelly, adamant.

             The red haired woman nods.  The missionary-businessman nods.  

 "He's a good dad," the woman says, shifting her heavy weight forward onto her worn tennis shoes showing beneath too-short khaki pants.

"I'm trying to be," the man says, almost whispering, not looking at her.  "I mean, I love God, I love Jesus..."

             His voice is drowned out by the ringing bell and the roar of the approaching train.  I hear the missionary-businessman speak for the first time over the thunder, wishing the couple well and goodbye.  

            “It was good talking with you.  I hope everything turns out all right.”  He doesn’t even stop to shake their hands.

They don't board the train with us.  I stare out at them from my lofty vantage on the second level through the smudged glass when I take my seat.  They stare at the blank silver sides of the train, longing for movement, for departure.  Their tired desire molds their expressions into an almost-embarrassment for non-participation, only able to offer internal apologies, excuses, and explanations.  No one else is there to listen. 

It doesn’t seem right to me, sitting at a train station without boarding the train, while people talk and listen and then leave, moving on from the place where everyone moves on while you bide your time.  I turn away from the window and find myself ashamed to be glad that I could get away.  I was just waiting for the train.  I don’t know what they were waiting for. 

             

New Dimensions

The recovery is slow.  Slower than expected, I must admit.  I can read the magnets on my refrigerator now, but for some reason I still can't seem to make out the features of my face in the mirror.  For the first time, I can recognize the distance between the mountain peaks and my neighbor's backyard.  But I fail to understand the directions of street signs without recognizing their shapes and colors. 

A few days ago, I laid down on a table with a donut cushion to stabilize my head.  I couldn't see the nurses when I first entered the room.  They were hidden by the dim light, the blue masks, and my own blindness.  Ten minutes later, I had vision.  Cloudy, like looking through smoke, but I could see.  With my own eyes.

The process wasn't free of fear despite its rapidity.  Fully awake, I had my eyelids taped back and my cornea exposed first to a machine that cut off a perfectly shaped flap, then to the laser that would burn off single layers of corneal skin one at a time.  The whole machine was run by a program, not by my surgeon.  His main job was sealing my cornea flap back onto my eye correctly.

During the surgery, I felt disconnected from my own eyes.  When they are held open and not allowed to blink, being instructed to fixate on a steadily blinking green light, it feels more like a bad dream than being conscious during a medical procedure.  The light becomes your place of unfocusing on what is being done to your eye even as it becomes your sole focus, your one constant, keeping your eyes from wandering and suffering the indiscriminate burn of the laser.  

Though the skill of the surgeon and the advancement of the technology inspired in me an appropriate level of awe, I find that they only attest to the even greater awesomeness of the eye itself.  The cornea is made of skin, living and renewable, like the skin on my arms and fingers and the bottoms of my feet and the inside of my mouth.  But cornea skin is clear.  Skin that I can see through, perfectly.  Even the clear materials of contacts and glasses distort vision to some extent.  It is impossible to make them so clear that they have no affect on vision.  

My contacts, for example, kept me from registering distance.  After climbing a mountain and looking out on the city below, I always felt as if I could pick up the tiny cars and people and put them where I wanted, like museum dioramas of the battle of Gettysburg or ancient Aztec civilizations.  I had to learn to keep appropriate following distances when driving by learning the rate at which cars shrunk and grew when I held back or stopped too near to rear bumpers.  My world was flat because of pieces of plastic glued to my eyes.

And in ten minutes, by burning of all things, the world became real.  Horseback riding a few days after the surgery, I looked over the steep edge beyond the trail and knew, knew for sure and not just in conjecture, that if I fell I would fall a long way.  The horizon became an unfathomable, unreachable distance, not just a line separating air from dirt.  Everything became larger, though it has yet to get clearer.  But it will.  And then clarity will match the new dimensions.

My eyes have been repaired, but this smaller surgery has only served as a reminder of the bigger healing that I am working toward each day.  Layers are being burned away one at a time, not painfully really, though I often tell myself that I should be fearful, that I'm losing pieces of myself.  It doesn't really hurt so much as it is scary.  Scary, that I'm putting myself completely under the mercy of my Surgeon, blind and helpless on the table.  Daily, hourly, each infinitesimal cell of rebellion is being scorched and shriveled for the purpose of clarity and focus. I know the focus is vital.  I have the light, all I have is the light, and I know that allowing my eyes to wander from that point, I risk losing my vision forever.  But I so want to wander, to settle for the mediocre and try to live my life with half vision, half clarity.   Everything feels as if it is being forced open, told to concentrate on a single point, to wait and not move until the cutting away is complete.  If I move before it is finished, I will be scarred.  But the point is secure.  The lighthouse beacon continues to shine strong, blinking intermittently to remind me of His presence.

Burning and cutting done, there will be clarity.  At first everything will be smoky, hazy, unfocused, but then the skin will be restored, the tears wiped away, and the whole universe will turn out to be bigger and more beautiful than anything I could have imagined.