i am still pretty much at a loss for words since chiphi2x's letter, but being speechless is exactly when you should just write. It's my inability to speak that invented my need to write, after all.
four AM in my little town's supermarket parking lot, I'm alone on a bus full of high school kids. I'm about fourteen, and it's the winter of '72-'73. That's the age when I got hard-on's for no reason, especially when I was sleepy. It also was the age when the world began a more sophisticated dialog with me, for which I was not prepared. But then again, I'd already been through much and unprepared, so crashing clumsily into new social disasters would be a piece of cake for me.
I slouch in an aisle seat--this is not a school bus, but a motorcoach--with my leg up and my ski boot, its buckles jangling loose, perching on the edge of an armrest across the aisle. I think it looks, well... cool, and inviting in a kinda sexual way, which is the way I think I am supposed to look--around girls. But if a guy so much as notices me, I will instantly revert to the role of an insecure, akward, terrified adolescent. That's who I am.
I am waiting for the trip to begin. Sleepy parents chat with each other and with the children of their friends, as the skis and other baggage are loaded into the bays under the bus. These tomb-like shiney metal compartments are filled with warm, yellow light, and before getting on the bus, I thought, I'd like to ride in there, instead.
But I pushed my terror down, back into the well (where many parts of me have gone), and I boarded the bus.
this scene has been recurring in my mind since yesterday. Since that letter. It was a ski trip throughout which I managed to remain in complete and total anguished isolation. But I don't remember skiing. And that's funny, because I love to ski more than almost anything else. All I can recall is sitting in that seat on the crowded bus, at four in the morning. Alone.
The internet is not the perfect confidant, as I surmised. What I tell does not disappear down an infinite well of modem static, disposed of like a sacrifice to the techno-gods. You hear. It's a terrifying and unfathomably precious realization: you touch, and I feel; I reach, and you are there. You are real, and I have no idea where to begin with that.
Or do I? At the seat of our terrors lies the truest lessons of our lives, I think. I can approach them now by not running, not hiding, and letting whatever it is I fear, happen. I have been screaming from the bottom of this well for a long time. Just now, it seems, someone may be straining to hear. Now is no time to fall silent.
|
|
|
|
updated |