The Twist in My Story

When it gets too quiet inside the house and too loud inside my head, I go to the local – the only – coffee shop in town. I pack my notebook and my book into my purse and I walk the cracked, weed-eroded pavement from my mother’s house to the Main Street establishment.  This is the kind of town where I can walk the five blocks from the house to the coffee shop and not pass a single person on the side walk or see a single car on the street. 

I order an iced latte and then I sit by myself in the very back corner.  I read.  I write.  I watch people.  I listen to the harsh, nasal tones of the Southwestern Wisconsin accent.  I never find anything of interest in the conversations I am overhearing.  My interest is in one person talking to another.  My interest is in what I want but cannot have. 

This is the third week in a row of what will eventually be nine weeks in which I will have had no one to interact with but my mother and brother and I wonder if I am driving them crazy or if that is just where I am going.  I no longer know anyone in this town.  All the places I have lived and known friends are now out of reach in one way or another.  I have grown to appreciate my transient nature – my ability to move and to change, my restless happiness – but this fact of being the intrepid outsider, or of being what I’ve been so often told is “different” and “special,” I do not like at all.

This is the point at which I question and resent my life choices.  I have been many places and made some truly good friends along the way but I have very rarely gone back and those friendships get stretched a little thin as I ask them to expand to reach out to in one country or another, this city or that state.  And I have never been very good at making the kind of casual friendships that others seem to acquire so effortlessly – the kind of friendships that fill the space and time between one meaningful interaction and the next.  (Of course, now you can see why.  As every casual friend I’ve ever attempted to have has inevitably said to me right before I decided that I didn’t like them anymore: I think too much.  At least for most people.)

And so here I am, as I so often am.  The outsider and the writer.  I don’t know which came first, myself as a writer or myself as an outsider, but I know that each feeds and antagonizes the other.  As the outsider, I am left with nothing to do but observe and analyze others and myself.  As a writer, I know how to make something worthwhile out of this mere means of passing the time.  I can reflect. I can order past events in such a way as to make them into a story or an essay or a means of making a point.  I can write about moments in which I was not invariably alone in rooms and crowds alike.  I can tell a reader a pretty story about finding myself in love or in London or swimming in the sea.  I can tell a story about how the lights of London’s Soho neighborhood smiled at me and how I had smiled because the man standing next to me looked as happy as I felt.  And I can leave it at that.  I can leave the reader, myself, and the story inside the beautiful moment and I can write it as if none of us ever left it, as if that moment still means to me now what I thought it meant then, as if life is always hyperbolically lovely. 

I can do that.  I have done that.  I do that because, as someone who is so often an outsider, I know the importance of being inside. 

And so, I write as I live.  I throw myself wholeheartedly into any life-affirming, potentially beautiful, hopefully unusual, moment that comes my way.  I strip off all of my clothes and I jump into the sea and I convince my friends to do the same because there is a castle on the shore and wine still on our lips.  And if I love you, I say it, because it’s so rare to be able to mean it that when it truly happens it deserves to be said, not because saying it will necessarily change anything but because it’s true.

For the most part, I think that most of life is nothing more than several long and lonely periods of stasis.  But it is not most of life that is either worthwhile to write about or interesting to hear tell of.  It is the moments and the people that pull me into them until I can no longer think, until I can only feel and move; those are the moments and the people who break the stasis – even if sometimes it breaks my heart.  Those are the moments and the people that matter most.  They are what I write about.  As a writer and an outsider, I know how special it is to find someone who lets me in and thereby lets me out of my head.  They are my favorite part of a story: the twist. 

And now, for a twist, let me break from my habit of writing as if all of life is hyperbolically lovely and let me say that the two different men that I have loved in London were gay and cheating on me, respectively.  In the end it wasn’t pretty.  Let me say that I have met many men who have been initially intrigued by the way I enter a room in a composed frenzy, flip my hair, fly here and there, and talk about syntax the way some girls talk about US Weekly.  They all say, “You’re special. You’re different.  I’ve never met anyone like you.”  And the ones that I’ve gone to the trouble of dating inevitably all say, “You’re too intense.  I just want someone more normal.”  That is ugly irony and nothing makes it pretty, no matter how many lovely moments elapsed between the beginning and the truth. 

Now, sitting here alone in the coffee shop, an outsider looking in on my own life, I wonder if maybe some of those moments that I like to write about were just that: hyperbolically lovely, not entirely real.  And what I want now – what I have in fact wanted for some time – is something real.  I want more of the moments that I have never written about but in which I have felt most at ease – moments of great kisses, humorously bad sex, and good music; moments in which I never felt worried that this particular man who also told me, “I’ve never met anyone like you,” would ever come to say, “You’re too intense.” 

When my friends and I swam naked in the sea we talked about the kind of moments we wanted.  They said they wanted the kind of moment strewn with rose petals and candles; I told them I wanted a moment in a dark corner of a rock’n’roll bar.  And when they said what they wanted in a man, I responded by saying that I wanted someone who would want to lay beside me and experience the feeling of a song. 

And here is the twist: since then I have gotten exactly what I wanted and now I want more of it.  What I want is not exactly a relationship, not exactly a friendship, not exactly a fling.  What I want is a way of being – a way of being myself outside my head.