I walked into my friend’s classroom just the other day at about two in the afternoon and I sat down at the desk across from him with a great big sigh.
“Michael,” I stated solemnly, “I am experiencing a spiritual crisis.”
To be clear, that’s a pretty shocking expression coming from me. Spirituality has never even been close to defining the essence of who I am. I am opinionated. I am steadfastly loyal. I believe strongly that a good sense of humor is often an indication of a sharp intelligence. I am brimming with joy on the outside while I am questioning everything on the inside, but rarely is spirituality part of what I’m questioning and maybe that explains why Michael looked at me with the same shocked expression he might have worn had I just declared that I was going off the grid to train for a marathon where I had to run up mountains while shoeless.
“Why?” he asked me. He even looked up from his computer, a thing that only happens when he’s really interested or puzzled by something.
“Do you fast for Yom Kippur?” I responded, my question answering his question.
“No,” he said with a short laugh. And then, almost astonished, he asked, “Wait – do you?”
You know those television shows you loved so much when you were little that you haven’t seen in years? I’m not talking about shows like Three’s Company or Roseanne – those have been running in syndication for years and we have all revisited them pretty frequently. In fact, during the time my insomnia was at its most profound (otherwise known as “the time period during which I should have been rewarded for not snapping and going on a blood-drenched killing spree due to lack of sleep”), Three’s Company helped me stay sane. If you have blessedly never experienced such a thing, try to imagine that you are exhausted almost beyond belief but you still can’t sleep and your mind is racing like it’s a possessed windup toy and the entire world around you has literally gone dark and every concern you have ever had has mutated into a gigantic and pressing matter and all of the stress has come to reside in the very front of your mind and right at the moment where you think you cannot possibly stand it for another millisecond, you see that a marathon of Three’s Company or The Fresh Prince of Bel Air is airing on Nick at Nite. That realization is like a sleeping pill, a tranquilizer, and a delightful punch in the head all occurring at exactly the same time and maybe it’ll calm you down enough that you will eventually drift off to the sound of a laugh-track and Jack Tripper’s barely veiled sexual harassments that somehow managed to read back then as charming.
But then there are the shows I haven’t seen a bit of since I was young – really young – and I am saddened to say that many haven’t aged all that well. Take The Facts of Life. I loved The Facts of Life. A show about a bunch of smart girls who were good friends to one another at a boarding school where a dietician who made croissants pumped full of chocolate was their guardian? Sign me the fuck up. Sure, I realized that the show was a little schmaltzy at times. It was the kind of program that sprinkled “very special episodes” throughout a standard season so we could all quietly confront hot-button issues like parents with debilitating illnesses, attempts at date rape, and hair that was feathered beyond height and comprehension, but the rest of the series felt light and fun and it was maybe the only time in my life when I wanted to be blonde so I could have tresses like Blair.
I sat on my terrace the other night with a gigantic mug of Sleepytime herbal tea and tried in vain to ignore the incessant chirping of crickets who I’m convinced were somehow given microphones by Mother Nature before any of us got to vote on such a matter. Pressing my phone tightly to my ear, I pretended I didn’t hear the workings of the vocal cords of bugs and chatted instead with a friend of mine.
“Here’s what I’ve decided I find interesting about your writing,” she said. Her voice was steady just then, careful almost – as though she was still thinking through what she was about to say. “I love how you can write about something that could be construed as depressing, like the passage of time or hiding emotions from other people or from yourself or something like that, but the way you craft your words makes the whole thing come off as thoughtful and introspective but never full-on sad. I really respect that quality.”
“That’s probably the best thing I could hear,” I told her. “Because I do write about exploring conflicted emotions and about trudging through days where it always feels like the world is pitch-fucking-black, but it doesn’t mean that any of it just makes me sad. Sadness is obviously be a component, but it’s never the only component, and I’m really happy to hear that you’re responding the way I guess I hoped people would.”
“I found the Cookie Monster in that room,” he told me as he left my downstairs bathroom. His hands were wet – hopefully from having just washed them – and he rubbed them on his jeans for a second. He looked up at me just then, his face unfamiliar still. In less than forty-five minutes I would end up on top of him and fine, maybe that wasn’t my finest or most hard-to-get hour, but I have to go ahead and admit that it was still a really good hour.
He’d already smiled when he saw that my phone’s case has Cookie Monster’s gigantic black and white bobbly eyes splayed across it and he’d seen the “Got Milk?” ad with the furry monster that was framed and hanging on my kitchen wall.
I rounded the corner that leads to my school this morning and saw a thick layer of fog covering the football field like a coalition of ghosts had chosen to have an early meeting near the fifty-yard line. On any other morning, I might have reacted simply to the aesthetic of it all – I’ve always been perversely drawn to things that appear generically spooky – but today, on this first day of a new school year, all I could see in those foggy shadows was a collection of days and people that have already gone by.
I’m not sure that I will ever be a person for whom beginnings won’t immediately cause me to connote the haunting imagery of endings but it’s not all bad. Gone are the days when I felt anxious and chilly-tummy-terrified before the first day of school. I mean, I actually slept last night without having even one nightmare about arriving at school braless (which actually happened once, but thankfully it was a chilly day). The only part of my first-day outfit that I really put a great deal of thought into was my shoes. (They’re these insane new strappy, studded booties and I love them, though I will probably have to amputate a toe or three by day’s end.) But what remains in the location where I used to store my pre-school anxiety is a level of awareness of how much has changed – and how much I have changed. The changes aren’t necessarily negative though I guess maybe they’re not fully positive either. They just are, and so that means that I better start understanding them.
