The Storm
We had a hurricane a couple months ago—you might have heard about it. Turned out to be a bit of a non-event, this hurricane. At least in New York. But the day-or-so leading up to it? Total shit-storm.
Originally, I had plans to spend Hurricane Night with friends in Brooklyn, but as the hullabaloo about taped windows and bottled water and “go bags” grew in intensity, my friends began to vacillate: Maybe we should all stay put. Maybe we should hunker down. The difference between my friends and me, however, was that they were all hunkering down with someone else, whilst I was hunkering alone.
I grew up in a desert town. In the desert, big rain means Big Scary—roads flood, mud slides, rocks fall. At school, when it began to rain, we would all rush from our desks, pressing our noses against the windows to watch while our teachers shouted for us to “move away!” so we wouldn’t get struck by lightning.
Something else about the town I grew up in: it’s conservative. Though there are plenty of exceptions (I can show you pictures on Facebook), girls were expected to marry young so as to have a plethora of highly fertile years in which to produce many, many babies. Upon telling the parents of friends that I planned to go away to college, I was more than once asked if I was going for my MRS, and because I assumed this meant a master’s degree in some sort of science (Research? Radio? Rocks?), I answered cheerily, “No, English Literature!”
Marriage. This was what we were all supposed to want, what we were all supposed to strive for—so long as one of us had a penis and the other a vagina (go to my hometown and popular bumper stickers will inform you that Marriage = Stick Figure With a Skirt + Stick Figure Without a Skirt). Marriage is natural. Orderly. God’s will. And if that isn’t enough to convince all good boys and girls to sign on the dotted line, there’s always the threat of dying alone.
Do you want to die alone?
I have never understood this question as an argument for matrimony. I mean, barring some sort of Titanic situation, we’re all going to die alone. The better question, it seems, would be, Do you want to live alone? And, for me at least, the answer has always been, Kind of.
I’m an only child—other people’s messes disturb me almost as much as other people’s cleanliness. I like eating my own food, listening to my own music, keeping my own hours.
But there are times when living alone is tremendously inconvenient: Light bulbs need changing, jars need opening. Sometimes (Gloria Steinem, forgive me), I find myself leaping onto my desk at the sight of a small dead mouse or large live cockroach while a shrill, hysterical voice shrieks inside my head, ‘Where the fuck is my fucking husband!’
And, of course, there’s the occasional hurricane.
The day before the hurricane felt like an ordinary day, mostly because I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. But when I stopped to buy dinner, the grocery store was packed. I waited in line with my bag of broccoli, while all around people pushed carts full of canned soup and bottled water. The man ahead of me was swiping his credit card when his wife called out to him from behind, her arms overflowing with Luna Bars. “I just paid!” he yelled back to her. “If you want those bars, you can wait in line yourself!” Meanwhile, a man behind me shouted into his cell phone: “Milk! That’s what you said, so that’s what I got. If you wanted skim milk, you should have fucking asked for it!”
Somewhere inside myself, I began to feel small and fragile. A hurricane was coming, and I had no one to scream at.
I’ve felt this way before, of course—I suspect most people have. Earlier in the summer, when there was all that talk of Rapture by all those crazy people, I’ll admit I got a little nervous. Let’s be clear: I don’t believe in Raptures. But I do believe in crazy people, and while I was not at all afraid that Jesus might appear on the Upper East Side dressed in armor and shooting lightning bolts from his fingertips, I did worry that some nut-job might think, ‘Let’s get this Rapture started!’ and open fire in the Barnes and Noble while I shopped for Moleskine notepads and a vegan cupcake cookbook.
It goes without saying that nothing of significance happened on Rapture Day, unless you count the very bizarre occurrence in which, about fifteen minutes before midnight, the street outside my apartment filled with steam. I’m not talking about small gusts of light condensation, but thick, billowing clouds that concealed the street below and the buildings all around. I tried to remember signs of the apocalypse from ye old Sunday School days—some stuff about horses and a black sun and a red moon and… hell steam? Was there anything in there about hell steam?
Finally, I did the only thing I could think to do: I phoned my mother. “I’m sorry to call so late,” I told her, “but I worried this might be the apocalypse.”
“Don’t apologize,” she yawned. “If there’s an apocalypse, I want you to call. Even if it’s late.”
Eventually, the steam moved on. I still don’t know what it was or why it was outside my apartment, but I think it’s safe to say that it was not Rapture-related, and it gave my mother and me some time to talk about a documentary on juice fasts we’d both recently watched.
Sometimes, though, the Big Scary doesn’t simply blow in unannounced. Sometimes, you see it coming. And the Big Scary looming on the horizon is all the more terrifying if you’re walking toward it by yourself.
A little over ten years ago, I was just getting ready to move to Montana to start the MFA program. Though I’d spent the previous four years dreaming about grad school, preparing for grad school, praying I would get into grad school, now that I was packing up my college apartment to actually leave for grad school, I was starting to panic. I’d heard horror stories of MFA programs, of cutthroat competition and public rankings, of people breaking down during workshop and running from the room sobbing. I was afraid I wasn’t tough enough, wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t good enough. I was afraid that I’d gotten in because of some kind of registration error that everyone else would know about but be too polite to tell me. I was afraid that I would go there and I would fail.
One night, several weeks before I was set to move, I confessed all this to my college boyfriend. We were sitting in the break room at the bookstore where we both worked when I finally said the words aloud: “I don’t want to go.”
He looked at me for a minute, then took me by the hand, leading me past the payphone and the restrooms, into the fiction section where, in the middle of the K’s, he pointed—here, he told me, was the place where, some day, my book would be. Even now, I struggle to think of a kinder, more lovely gesture anyone has ever made to me. And standing there in the fiction aisle, I surprised myself almost as much as I surprised him when I said, “Come with me.”
We didn’t last a month, that kind, lovely boy and I. We’d been a perfectly perfunctory college couple, but a long haul was never in the cards for us. He moved with me to Montana, and then he moved on. After he was gone, I would come home from school and lie on the futon we had bought together, staring at the ceiling. Though I knew in my viscera that we had made the right choice parting ways, my loneliness during that time felt like a death sentence. There was no one to talk to, no one to laugh with, no one who knew my secrets and had promised not to tell.
It felt like there would never be anyone ever again.
My mother (another apocalypse; another phone call) was the one who told me during that ceiling-staring time that I could decide to be alone for the rest of my life, to commit myself to solitude and to the idea that I would never love or be loved again, and even so, it wouldn’t be the case. Life, she said, did simply not allow that.
I couldn’t know it then, but I’d already met the people who would begin to fill the empty space I felt inside myself: the child I’d watched playing at a picnic who would become one of the great treasures of my life; her father, who would so alter my sense of the world and my place within it that I would spend two years writing a novel in an attempt to sort it out; the girl from school I’d met in the post office who would, nearly a decade later, take me in when I believed I had no place else to go, the one who, when my novel sold, would drive several hours through a snowstorm so that on the happiest night of my life, I wouldn’t be alone.
The hurricane hit around 3:00 in the morning, and with no one to shoe me away, I stood in my window and watched. If you’ve seen a big rainstorm, then you’ve seen everything I saw that night, but if you grew up in the desert, you’d have thought it was pretty cool anyway. The next day, the clouds parted and people walked around beneath the dappled sunlight with a sort of embarrassed giddiness, a collective, “Weren’t we silly to be so afraid?”
That’s how it usually goes with the Big Scary. The things we’re most afraid of are rarely the ones that end up taking the biggest bite out of us. I have—even in the not-so-distant past—made very foolish choices during attempts to evade solitude, which is how I’ve learned, how I continue to learn, that the loneliness you feel while in a room by yourself is nothing compared to the loneliness you feel while trying to avoid it. The loneliness of being with the wrong person—the one who was never meant to move across the country with you; the one you love but cannot live with; the one who, no matter how you try or what you do, just doesn’t love you back—that kind of loneliness is terminal. Everything else is just weather.
