Hey.
Let me tell you a story.
Early September, 2012. About a week after my father died, and I'm flying to Vegas for my brother's wedding. Bought a ticket at the last minute. Sitting in the back row in the window seat, and a couple joins me for the middle and aisle row. The man has slightly frosted blond tips, wears thick, garish sunglasses inside the plane - never takes them off - and speaks only once during the six hour flight to complain how he's never flown anything other than business class in his life until now.
He's not the story.
Fuck him.
The story is his companion. Her name is Amanda; she's a paralegal and very tan for the East Coast. Even after her skin cancer scare (which left her with a five inch scar across her right arm), she's got an eager, friendly quality about her. We chat almost the entire flight while her male companion sleeps, and as she drinks more and more throughout the trip, she begins to over share. Tells me that this excursion is a third date for a whirlwind romance between her and the slightly snoring gentleman to her left. She really thinks he's the one. Even started joking to him about the two of them getting married. She even looked up wedding package rates.
But she's only kidding.
She's a kidder.
But she says she's not getting any younger, she's 26, and she wants that true, abiding love so badly. She knows he'll grow to love her just as much as she loves him. It has to work. He's from Israel, she's Jewish. He comes from money. It's right.
And despite my foul, foul mood, I'm really trying to help her. I keep gently saying, Amanda, you have it to take it as it comes, give it time. If he's right, you'll know. But her raw need will not be mollified.
Plane lands, I wish her well. Meet up with my brother and my sister-in-law. Tell them what happens, and get a little snarky about it, as I'm prone to do. Puzzles me how someone can be so deluded and self-destructive and corroded by wanting so desperately to be loved, by anyone.
Did my time in Oregon, made it back to New York City.
And I thought about that whole experience with Amanda. What should have been obvious then only came to light after I did my grieving and I put some time behind it all.
I'm just as broken as her.
Nothing in my life fills me with a hot, burning torrent of self-loathing as much as me trying to be like the normals and date or love or just put myself out there, stripped of all the distracting tricks and games I make with my voice or words or music or whatever is fuck is considered art.
Because the raw, unadorned me is clumsy and boorish and offensive and ugly and nauseating and doesn't want any of the selfless, nice things people are supposed to want like families and property values and pets and marriage and settling.
I want to make things. Lots of things.
I want the person whom I love and who loves me to make things too.
I want them to be smarter than me and funny and strong.
I want them to find some unit of value within me. To think I am beautiful, even though I am not.
I want them to kick my ass.
I want them to never hate me .I've been hated in this life, and only in those times have I wished for death.
I want them to like what I make, and I want to love and support the making they do.
That's it.
But that's not what this life has afforded me.
Not a question of deserve. Because we don't deserve a damn thing.
One more story.
1994. November . I was in a Masonic youth group, and one of the required functions that happened ever so often were group dances with the girls from another Masonic youth group. I loathed these, but I had to go. I was the one of the key leaders of our group. I didn't enjoy them because I danced like a cat on fire. I didn't enjoy them because as awkward and shy as I am now, I was even worse as a child. Wearing black turtlenecks with thick, dirty glasses and terrible, misshapen teeth.
We arrived at the dance (held in a town several hours away), and the other members of the group hit the dance floor. I had brought a copy of Studs Terkel's amazing collection of interviews: WORKING. While the music played, I buried my nose in the book and held my breath to calm my nerves. Around the first hour, one of the chaperones noticed me, grabbed my book, and told me I'd get it back once the event was over. And why don't I just go out there and ask a nice girl to dance?
Unprotected, I stood there, tears flooding my eyes. The first chance I could, I stepped outside, took off my glasses and began to sob.
She startled me when she whispered, You ok? I snapped back to face the voice (without my glasses, my vision is atrocious), and she laughed softly.
And we talked for about half an hour. About school and our respective Masonic youth groups. And it was the first real conversation I'd had with an adolescent girl ever.
And just as intense as it was, it ended. She left. I sat there for about ten minutes, feeling good and right.
But then I realized I never asked what her name was.
I put my glasses back on, walked back into the cafeteria where the dance was. But by then, it had ended, and everyone was milling back to their respective cars. And, since I didn't have my glasses on, I had no clue what this wonderful woman looked like.
And I never found out who she was.
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