I Like Every Minute of the Day
Sometimes loneliness hits me like a hammer; I'll want to fall to the ground and start gnawing at the concrete. Other times, it's more like that uncomfortable, kind of nervous feeling you get when you're forced to breathe through your nose. Other times it just makes me sad in a regular way. But it never feels like nothing. It's always a project.
I give my pockets a quick pat before I open my front door to head out. Keys jingle, iPod and earbuds snap to attention, wallet grumbles; just to be safe, the wallet gets a quick once-over too. There's my debit card, my community college ID, and eight dollars in singles. Sliding it back into my pocket, my ass gets a pat to see if my phone is there. It is. I flip it open to see if she's texted me anything (no).
"Bye mom!" I holler over my shoulder. "I'll be back in a bit."
"How long's a bit?"
Surprisingly, I struggle with this; it'll probably just be a few hours, but I don't want to jinx it. "Just a few hours. Don't worry if it's longer than that though."
"OK."
Mom's nonchalance about my future whereabouts catches me off guard before I remember I'm 20 and as such my business is my own, legally and morally. I give a last shout of "see you later" before I leave.
The walk to the bus is not far but it is annoying. It's only four blocks away but there's one unkind dog on either side of the through road, and each is on a different block, which means I can never be totally relaxed. I get to the bus stop, sharing it with a woolen man holding three bags of cans. When the bus comes I slide a dollar into the little machine and scan for an open area. In front there are two old ladies talking and one of them responds to other's gossip with a droning creak that might be a laugh. In the back there's a corps of teens, hooting and squawking; I don't know any of them. In a seat just up the bus' steps there's a bald man in a jean jacket with his lips pursed, looking at nothing. I sit on the other side of the bus from him and pull my iPod out; only after I've settled on Bowie can I settle in my seat.
We met on OkCupid, which is something I haven't told any of my friends. "Met" might not be the right word, actually; that's where we became aware of each other and started having conversations. We like a lot of the same stuff--classic rock, Japanese movies and Symbolist painters in particular. She's got curly black hair and a crooked front tooth, and she wears a red beanie in warm weather. She's got an ankh tattoo on her elbow, which she says she knows is cliche but it was inspired by Death from "The Sandman" so it's less lame than it seems (I told her I didn't think it was lame either way). We've been talking for a couple of weeks and she finally has this Saturday off, so we figured now would be as good a time as any to actually meet up in person.
Someone sits next to me right as Station to Station hits its second half and I take this strangely personally. I hope this individual doesn't notice how I bristle at them because I acknowledge that my reaction is not reasonable. My bristling becomes a little more acceptable, though, once he touches me on the shoulder and asks what I'm listening to. I mumble the name of the song in question.
"Bowie?!" the gentleman exclaims. I nod in the affirmative and he begins to talk about how underrated he thinks the Industrial era is in his discography. The guy presents in a way my mom might call "hardscrabble," with a bushy beard and big loose clothes that have at least a decade's worth of stains spattered irregularly across them; I'm both a little surprised at his level of Thin White Duke fandom and also a bit ashamed over said surprise. We could have a good conversation or even maybe be good friends if this girl wasn't looming so large in my mind, but she is, and as such I don't really want to talk to the guy. I eke out some bits of trivia in between his rambles before he departs after just a few stops, giving me a hail and hearty farewell as he descends the steps and the doors whoosh closed.
I check my phone again even though I haven't felt any vibrations from it. No new messages. My head's getting a hot rumble that I should text her again to see if she still wants to meet at her town's park like we talked about, or if she wants to go straight to a little cafe or gallery or something. But to me that's abject Psycho Shit, checking in on settled plans to maybe make new plans. My own mind doesn't even need those worries cluttering it up so why should I impose my fretting on her?
This is my first stop and I hop off. It's a ten-minute walk to the next bus stop, from which the next bus will take me to the next town. This area is mostly strip malls but sometimes just strips. It's boulders of hairdressers, crumbling sports bars and struggling fast food chains looming aside long concrete paths of nothing. It's not a scary place to be but it's also never happy, even when the sun is bearing down on it like it is today. When I get to the bus stop it's pervaded by fat middle schoolers yelping and snickering over in-jokes and (I think) school gossip. They remind me a lot of friends that I don't talk to much anymore, and I stand well apart so as to not get roped into any of their japes.
Despite the loudness of those kids, this next bus ride is a lot lonelier than the previous one. Even the highway is relatively empty, with few cars on the road to add color to the green/brown hills and valleys. It was still just late-morning, too, so there wasn't even that compelling melancholy of sunset to give it any sort of poetic luster. This stretch of highway is like something God or the Department of Transportation might have set down carelessly and then never came back to decorate.
Maybe it's neurosis from the empty highway but I decide to text her again. I say
Hey just seeing if you still wanted to meet at the park or if you knew a cool coffee shop or something nearby that you might wanna go to just to get right to it. Either way is still fine with me! :)
Dear God. "Get right to it." What might she think that could mean? And why did I want to introduce a new part of the plan in the first place? I decided it was Psycho Shit previously, so why did I just make the conscious choice to do some Psycho Shit?
The emoticon. Horrible! Horrible!
I get self-conscious when I feel I've made a terrible mistake. It's hard to describe; my face doesn't change but my cheekbones feel like there's a crane trying to lift them off my face, and I feel these buzzes in my jaw like there are bugs trying to fly out of it. I gotta get control of this because if even a little bit of it starts to show on my person the teens are gonna notice and even if they don't really do or say anything I'm gonna know they noticed and that's gonna make it all even worse. I'm near the end of Station to Station which means "Wild is the Wind" is playing and that does help me keep it together a little bit. Ultimately after what's probably only a few excruciating minutes of panic I manage to get off the vehicle without anyone seeming to notice my freakout.
That physical discomfort can't stay as a totally inward response forever though, so when I'm on the sidewalk I glance around to make sure the coast is clear before I bop myself on the temple. Not super hard, but hard enough so that I can feel and hear it. That sounds like self-abuse but I've always found it weirdly calming. I guess almost anything can be both. Once I cool down a little, once it settles into my head that this girl is probably not going to cancel a date a couple hours in advance over receiving a slightly awkward text, I pick another album to listen to--His Band and the Street Choir by Van Morrison is what I land on--and I start walking to the train station.
This girl! It's crazy. I don't think it's fair that I can get this hung up on words and a picture. She obviously has more than one pic on her profile but I find that the profile pic is the one that tends to stick with you even if it's not actually their funniest or sexiest or most well-composed picture. In hers she's got a red beanie on, she's wearing plastic yellow glasses and wrangling a small dog onto a picnic blanket. She's in the middle of a laugh that looks like a bark. Her name's Marcia and when I hear her name in my head this is the picture I see.
I know a lot of artists say that the best kind of [x] is the type that you don't notice--the best editing, the best brushstroke, the best session musician, etc. Whoever planned this town--this town which is a suburb, this suburb which is a town--must have designed it to the same standard, but if so I’m not sure that maxim holds true for architecture or commerce. Everything is grey, but not in the service of dread or melancholy--it's a lighter, friendlier grey that seems to want to express a welcoming of different colors as opposed to a forbidding of them. You can see this in the shop logos for little ramen spots and consumer electronic boutiques, or the way metallic car colors seem to pop a little more against the subdued, uniform shade of the streets and buildings. It's like a city in a Pokémon game, where there's almost no pretense that each edifice hasn't been plopped in place for some specific, almost always commercial, purpose.
The short walk through this synthetically quaint downtown doesn't take very long--which I'm thankful for, since the transfers are really starting to add up in terms of both time and money--and soon enough I'm at the transit station. I fiddle with the digital kiosk and pray to God I've put in the right amount of money and gotten the correct "tier" of ticket, before heading to the above-ground platform to wait. There are no teens here; at this midday hour it seems like the only people who need use of the train are lone travelers like myself. Van Morrison keeps me company with the last 15 minutes of his album before the train roars into position and, upon entering, I find myself lifted over the landscape.
Within a couple of minutes I'm in a different county, although it doesn't look so different from where I'd come from if the view from the window is to be believed. I'm thinking about how I've really not spent much time outside of my hometown and if Marcia might have a totally different view of the world than I do, being from the Big City and all. I'd have to ask her what brought her to the decidedly more mid-sized city she now lives in and in which we would be meeting in person. I’ve seen a lot of profiles wherein girls indicate they're from the Big City but that they now live in these small-to-medium cities pocked around the region; the stereotype is that people flee little places to go to the big ones but that isn't really what I've noticed myself if all, or even most, of these gals are to be believed.
I reach the last city--the city in which she lives--which means there are no more buses to take and no more trains to ride. I might have time for one more travel album while I make my way to the park. I pick John Wesley Harding--I'm not a big Bob Dylan fan to be completely honest, but Marcia mentioned that this was her favorite of his and so I want to give it a fair shake even though I tend to think his voice is goofy and his lyrics hop between being either way too on-the-nose when they're socially conscious or else pointlessly obtuse when he's being abstract. That's not a hill I'm willing to die on on a first date, though.
I'm struck by the same shiny grey hues and streetside exhortations to stop what I'm doing to have some boba; this one bourgeois elder hunching over his phone while he walks his dog, I think this man might've raced me here from the last train station and won somehow. How many places are a little like each other in the exact same ways, and how far do you have to go to get away from them? How far did Marcia think she was traveling, I wonder?
John Wesley Harding closes out side A by the time I get to the park (I really should've checked how long this stupid thing runs for). The park is on the tiniest bit of an incline, which makes everyone look like they're sitting on little invisible stools. Since I'm actually a smidge early--which I guess is a pretty major credit to how well all these public transportation systems work together--I pull up my own little invisible stool under a big oak tree, and since I didn't think to bring a blanket or anything I complete the illusion by squatting down on my haunches. I send her a text:
Hey I got here a little early, no rush though! Do you want me to run get snacks or anything?
I really hope she won't read that "no rush" remark as being sarcastic, although I also do kind of hope she'll get here soon because I didn't bring a book or anything and there's no way I'm going to eat up any of my remaining data toodling around on my phone. I decide to kill some time people-watching but even that doesn't beget terribly exciting results; there are a few secluded hipster couples, three or four elders wiling the afternoon away, and a small flock of stoners, none of whom look to be doing anything especially notable. This is actually the perfect atmosphere for a date in my opinion: public but a little bit intimate, centralized well enough that there's lots to do nearby if the conversation dries up.
Now all I need is for that date to actually start happening.
John Wesley Harding wraps up sooner than it feels like it should, and while it hasn't changed any of my opinions about Dylan I'm starting to wish his weird little twang was still keeping me company. She's a quarter past the time she said she wanted to meet up and I still haven't heard from her. And now that I think of it I haven't actually heard from her at any point today, and the part of me that's in charge of keeping the other part of me from getting freakassed is receding into the distance, getting further away from where I need it to be as the minutes drift by.
She's a half hour late now and it feels reasonable to text again:
Hey you still wanna meet at [X] Park right?
I am not sure why I texted this because I am nearly certain she doesn't, I am nearly certain she would have responded to any one of my texts, I am nearly certain she would have told me if she was running late, I am nearly certain I am being stood up. My hands are involuntarily clawing at the soil by the tree.
There's nothing sensible left to text so I stand up and pace, horribly. I have no mask of normalcy to wear in situations like this no matter how often I try to find one, no matter how confident I am that this time I'll be ready for the disappointment. I can do almost nothing to keep my thoughts from leaping and clanging around and battering each other except to say that I'm sure she's on the way and won't you feel like a messed up dork for jumping to conclusions like this?
But she's not on the way, which I intuited 15 minutes ago and can now say for certain 45 minutes after that. I'm pressing the top of my scalp to the tree and looking at the dirt; the physical pressure and the scratch of the bark is the only thing that can center me a little bit. I'm saying: you total rube, you completely demonic loser, you've gone and done it again, you've gone and gotten your hopes up in a serious way over a trivial thing where you have no reason to expect anything because you are not owed anything and also you are a clown, you lack qualities, you can't talk, you have a world of people all around you who are totally correct to steer clear of you and you took a vanishingly small chance on someone you don't know, from a corner of the internet that isn't trustworthy, on crashing into the one person who could fit. She isn't that. She isn't and it's your fault.
I feel a hand on my shoulder and tilt my head to look. It's a genderless youth maybe a year or two my junior, wearing an out-of-season hoodie and ripped jeans with a wallet chain. The look of concern on their face is almost as heartbreaking to me as the overall gravity of my current situation. "You okay, playboy?" they ask with an awkward chuckle.
What a word to use on me right now! "Ye...not really." I'm not fooling anyone at the moment, certainly not a savvy teen like this. "I'm getting stood up."
They put their hands on their temples and howl at the sky, in jest but with gravity. "Broooooooooooo!!" This startles me into moving my scalp away from the tree.
They lower their hands. "I'm sorry to hear that. People can really suck shit."
"Yeah."
"There are definitely some dates I’ve had that I wish I'd gotten stood up on, to be honest with you." They chuckle, then once again become as serious as a heart attack. "But it's the principle of the thing!"
"Yeah."
"Me and my friend are having a schmoke" (that's how they pronounced it) "over there if you wanna join us, come vent or whatever."
"I don't think I'd make great company at the moment." I grin, and it's a sincere one to boot. "But I appreciate it. A lot, actually."
"Well, keep your head up." They extend a fist, which I oblige with a bump. "Don't let these douchebags get you down. You'll find someone."
"I hope so."
They slap me on the shoulder. "You know so!" Then they hit me with a "Peace, brother" before heading back to their pal to continue their schmoke.
This whole interaction hasn't changed my feelings exactly, but it has made them less frenzied. I can now create a thought without it sounding like an amp has blown out in my skull. I am still very sad but it's a sadness I know and that I've prepared for, even if I didn't have my tools at the ready for it right when I needed them. I'm able to pick an album for the trudge back to the train station; I go with The Who By Numbers. It's an inconsistent, overlooked album that I happen to love dearly.
I glance for an incoming text message one last time before I begin the second half of my day by heading back home.