The Deep End

There is some kind of monster inside me. When it sees people I love in pain and restlessness, it jumps from the cavernous recesses behind the wall of mood stabilizing medications into the front part of my person, knives out, ready to fight. It's nice I guess that I have a monster inside me that loves the people I love, but it doesn't seem all that productive that it needs to consume me in the process of aching for them.

The past few days have been strange. There are some tragedies I know about and others I can only guess about, and some people who are telling me what they are feeling and others who are keeping everything behind lock and key.

Last night I got a phone call from someone I love very much who is having an existential crisis of sorts about the hopeless mess that this world is in, and we with it: how we keep lights on and burn gas because we are the exceptions to the rule. How he sees young people optimistically picking up cans in the name of Living Green and sees in them the haggard faces of Vietnam vets, who were told that if they went and fought in that war everything would be ok. We are enlisting ourselves in this war, he says, just as hopeless, and just as likely to give us all PTSD and make us wish we had been more radical when it really mattered. He says to me the most beautiful, anguished thing about the current state of affairs: "We have this baby, and there's been an accident, and it's barely breathing, it can't breathe. We need to get it to the hospital. We need to stop everything that we are doing for a goddamn second, and it doesn't matter if we live or die or how happy or healthy we are, we need to get the baby to the hospital, now, before there is no future and no life left in it." This level of anguish leaves me breathless. He's right. He's right and he doesn't know what to do about it, is panicking about it, and I don't know what to do about it either and am panicking for the baby and for his panic and also for my own multiple transgressions.

He asks me how I'm feeling and what I'm doing and I tell him that I'm feeling good and doing fine and that I love living here, but that I also feel like I need to be living on the edge of things again, living and breathing a constant barrage of new things. There have been two parts of my life that have been like this, so far: living in Amsterdam, and living in my own head last fall, panic-ridden and striving to uncover why and to heal years of damage. Living in Amsterdam is something I want to do again, and soon, but it isn't and will not be the same kind of edge-living as it was when I didn't know it and threw myself wholly into its angelic ups and downs. Living in my head, panic-ridden, is what I am doing right this very instant, thrown into an empathic vortex of feeling, but it is not something I am doing usually, or wish upon my life ever again. I explain this to him and he says "That sounds like a rubber band twisted up, but I get it."

That sounds like a rubber band twisted up, but I get it.

I have been planning to leave from Christmas, but I think I need to make this operation different, less specific, more guerilla, more sustainable. I think I need to get out of here now, soon, before the sense-memories of last fall's disintegration and slow rebuild eat me alive. I think I need to be edge-living again ASAP. I will burn out and come home again by December or January, I'm almost certain - it will only be a few months. But it needs to happen. I tell this to Ellen and she says "But can you just keep doing this forever? Running away from this?" The answer is logically no but perhaps actually yes - I am young, I am supposed to be reckless, I have much of my own internal borderland/boundaries left to explore and push at. I know not to get into a financial hole, to have money saved and money at home, to make sure there is always a way out, and not to blindly trust strangers and not to go places by myself at night and to shield the screen and keypad of the ATM with my hand, and I know how to move from place to place alone with a facade of confidence that I do not necessarily possess, and I know that to pretend not to be afraid is to not be afraid.

I will go, and soon.