Post-Its from the Edge

Edge of reason, edge of the universe, edge of sanity; poised on the edge of a knife, as it were, as we always are.

It happens so fast. A minute ago, I was living in Bali; hot rains poured down my face and neck, and I held Olivia's hand as we pounded the steaming gravel with our bare feet. Just a second ago, I was on a plane home from Texas, and something called the Grand Canyon yawned across the land below. I pressed my face to the window, despite the hundreds of faces who had probably done it before me; like me, wanting to see if they could muss the un-foggable with their foggy, germ breath. The flight attendant told me to please place my seat in its full upright position, which was weird, because I never put it back in the first place. I adjusted. The plane adjusted. When my ears popped, I could hear my music more clearly. I do this weird thing whenever I wear earphones, which is to periodically take them out of my ears and assess whether the music is audible to the people around me...so there I was, causally pulling in and out of my ears, caring but not caring whether someone will care that I was listening to Anais Mitchell at a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet.

The lady sitting next to me thought I couldn't see her reading over my shoulder, these letters as they spilled from my fingertips, but I did. I wrote a sentence to her, a cryptic message without the bottle, wanting to know if she react. She didn't. She did, however, open her mouth and begin speaking to her husband in Chinese, and I felt like an idiot.

It had been a long day. I woke up in Texas to Thunder and Lightning, petulant twins who wouldn't quit their whining until I peeled my head off the pillowcase, pulled my earplugs out of their sockets, and padded over to the window. The lightning purple and the thunder boom hugged one another, flashing in such short succession that I wondered why they didn't just get it over with and crack into the flowerpot outside my door. That's the funny thing about watching lightning. You know the odds are slim, but secretly, every time it strikes across the sky, you know it has to be hitting somewhere--and part of you marvels at the fact that this time, just this time, it wasn't you. I pulled my things together and drank a VitaMineral smoothie, choking down the graininess in a vain attempt to make my stomach stop its gymnastics. The planes were all delayed. We climbed into the car and waded out into the San Antonio river-roads, the water rushing up to the knees of our jeep, hinting that the day's travels would be interesting if nothing else.

"I can't promise you happiness," my Uncle Andy told her, many moons ago. "But I can promise you excitement."

I don't remember the exact point when I realized that the situation was serious; it was more of a slow burn, an accumulation of vacant traffic lights and abandoned cars. Each time we barely got through a massive puddle, we laughed nervously and presumed it would be the last one of its kind. By that point, the rain was so hard that I could barely make out the cars on the freeway--just a parade of little red ants. Red. They were going nowhere. We revved our way through the largest puddle yet, and I had the distinct sensation of bobbing. Cars aren't supposed to bob. But I thought bob, and then I thought apples, and I allowed my brain to make its little free-association game for the 45 minutes that we sat there, motionless, on the swampy freeway. We were going nowhere. From the soft-rock station, someone asked, "Alfie... what's it all about, Alfie?" and I had the knee-jerk urge to pull headphones out of my ears, something, anything to feel control for a fraction of an inch of a second. My hands made a fingerball in my lap as I prayed, prayed, prayed. A man got out of the car ahead of ours, and went from window to window with a message: we were going to have to back up. Ha! Haha! There was no getting off this freeway except for the way that we came; pause, rewind. So we did. She did, and I did by looking out the window at the cars as they pulled K turns and U turns and all sorts of alphabet turns, all of us searching for the same word: out.

And we found it. When we finally got off the freeway, the butt of the car having pushed its way back through the flood and out into the road and awayawayaway from the deepest, from the worst of it, I realized what had happened. We pulled into to the airport, knowing full well that there'd be no flying for a good, long while--but still, it was somewhere to be. It was a roof and a sound barrier against the smashing rain. My grammy held me and I laugh-cried as residual adrenaline crackled through my body. "There were angel hands on my hands," she told me. Angel hands. I floated out of the car and through security, mistaking each and every person for my long lost love. The woman in front of me dropped her driver's license and we made pointless conversation, and I would have married her if she had asked me. That's how good, how completely reckless it felt to be alive.

Earlier that week, I had watched Moore, Oklahoma collapse from the seat of FOX news, compliments of my Republican grandfather. He sat in his chair for most of the day, a plastic glass of chablis balancing on the seat of his walker. He yells at the television. He's a stereotype in other ways, too, mostly in the fact that he loves me more than most other people on the planet combined. I sat in the leather chair next to his, photo albums splayed in my lap, scrutinizing their pages for any information I might have missed before; names and faces that mean something different each time they see the light of day. Frozen moments: weddings, reunions, graduations. Babies show up and then stop being babies, or they get more hair, and more babies show up and then it all happens again. I lost hours in those pages, only coming up for air when one of the FOX faces said something especially stupid. I walked to the kitchen now and again, pouring myself glass after glass of cold kombucha. Anticipating the question, I answered. "It's fermented Chinese tea, known for its health properties. It has, um, good bacteria in it. B vitamins. Stuff." He took a breath in that stuck, briefly, in the back of his throat. He gave one of his gnarled fingers a good, hearty tap against the clicker and blinked in that perfect way of his. "I have the weirdest granddaughter," he said. And I knew that I'd love him forever.

My life that week became a festival of wondering what I'd do with my future, what I could possibly say to assure the older generation that they hadn't wasted their time in creating me. Meanwhile, the world outside the window continued to fall apart in large, flaky pieces against the sky: I called Phil in Oklahoma, trying (but failing) not to sound broken when he said he'd barely missed the storm. When I finally made it home, Santa Barbara met me at the door with a brush fire and 4.8 earthquake. A thousand Facebook statuses were born, but none bore any of the information I was searching for. What about a family code? Should we have a family code? What if someone calls and says that you've gotten into an accident, mom, and I need to come get you? What about those girls that were kidnapped for so many years? What about the natural gas leak? What about that, mom? What the fuck am I supposed to do? I drove into the visitor's parking at Vista del Monte, a retirement community where my best friend's grandmother spent her final days. For the last week, she woke in a panic, thinking the world was falling apart; in her mind, there were always fires and earthquakes. "Did I die?" she asked. "No, grandma," he told her. "You're in Santa Barbara, at Vista del Monte." Her perfectly-glossed fingers clamped over his like a mousetrap, holding him there even when her gaze could not. I sat there, my hands in my lap, smiling but not wanting her to think I was staring; hoping that, even if she couldn't register my identity, that she knew I would never want to make her unhappy. I am desperate to please: the whole week in Texas, I wanted to please with the promise of a car, the kind they advertise for on national TV, and a job that looks good at the end of a sentence. But then the TV flipped to a disaster scene, and something else overtook me. "Don't ever get to 87," my grandfather said. He meant it as a joke, but I felt my stomach sink. Will I get the option? It feels sometimes like we're dancing on eggshells, overstaying our welcome on a sold-out stage. I keep picturing one of those hooks from a silent film, the kind that appears at the corner of the frame and yanks the human off the stage. Roses at her feet.

According to the photo albums, I have to have one of three things to be real: a wedding, a baby, or a graduation. One out of three ain't so bad, but I want more. We all want more for ourselves. It's the reason we get out of bed in the morning, despite whatever greets us on our homepage. It's the reason I still touch my finger to a hot plate before picking it up with my bare hand. I still picture a world where anything is possible. When an eyelash lodges on my cheek or the clock reaches 11:11, I make a wish. I catch myself feeling selfish when I wish for anything other than the safety of my planet, for the goodness of the whole; how could I possibly think about myself at a time like this? Doesn't the world need every little bit, even my little wishes, to get by? Then again, maybe it needs me just as badly as I need it. Maybe it needs me to hold my breath as I go through a tunnel, wishing for a first kiss, believing that there is still something to believe in.

I felt that in spades at St. Anthony's Cathedral, five rows back, at the Santa Barbara High School A Cappella concert. I remember what it was like to be up there, dripping under your robes, the music making its way through your mouth like breathing. In, out. I was in the audience, but I remembered; each person up there is the king of their own universe, the epicenter of what feels like The Way Things Will Always Be. Then each one will unpack a box or three, or thirty, in a dorm room that looks like everyone else's; each asymmetrical haircut, so deliberate from the perspective of one who looks out at the audience, will blend in with the collective mohawk that is UC Berkeley. I was overwhelmed with compassion for the singers, those seniors in high school, each one more confident than the last. They have no idea what they're in for. I worry sometimes that I hit my stride in high school; I see photos and, instead of marveling at how far I've come, wonder if my eyebrows will ever look as good as they did when I was seventeen. It was a very good year. Yet no matter what, I always return to this; I look down at my finger and the ring that contains Bali, or remember the epic pain that was freshman year at Scripps, and exhale a deep sigh of relief. Even if I could, I wouldn't go back and do it all again. Even if I had all the wishes in my pocket, all the DeLoreans in the world, I'd never choose to be anywhere except right here.

Because right here, in this room, lives the Wisdom of No Escape. On the freeway in Texas, I sought comfort in the idea that I'd soon be out of the extreme weather--I'd get in a plane and fly far far away, to California, where floods and hurricanes never happen. But they do. They burn up mountains and we call them fires, but in the end, they're the same. They're a reminder that we're only ever here, just this: there aren't enough planes in the universe to stay permanently suspended, thousands of feet above the place where all the bad stuff happens. A gigantic fault line runs up my California coast, and each time I enter a new relationship, we make a silent agreement that someone, eventually, is going to hurt. It's what happens when you care. Dying, I hear, is what happens when you live.

In the car on my last night in Texas, on the way to see a stage adaptation of Picnic, my grandfather was regaling me with his opinion of various world religions. My grammy's hands tightened on the wheel. "Not to be a fatalist," she said, "But say this is the last time you're ever going to see your granddaughter. Do you really want the last thing you say to be something to do with your obstinate politics?" "No," he told her, and laughed. "You're right." So we talked about ___________. It doesn't matter, in the end, what it was. It doesn't really matter what we talked about.

I've done, and continue to do, a variety of stupid things. While shopping in Lazy Acres, I tried to fill a bulk bag with chocolate-covered goji berries... and when they dripped out slowly, one at a time, I gave the thing a hearty thwack until SHOOMP--approximately three pounds of candy exploded into the sack. This provided, what ees it you say? A conflict of interest. I was interested in the candy, but not in the $25 price tag I had inadvertently acquired. So... I left it there. My moral alarm clock started clanging away, but I left the bag of candy in the store; accumulating a year's worth of bad karma, perhaps, but making my way into the sunlit parking lot all the same. The residual fire in the air had illuminated the sky in a flush of reds and yellows, poking out from behind the Santa Ynez mountains in what only can be described as glory. Sure, I knew it was bad; but it looked so pretty. There are natural disasters, and there are deaths. There are goodbyes and hellos, neither of which has a guarantee. But there's beauty in everything. There's really and truly, beauty in everything. Jeremy said something to me in the car, and I only half heard.

"Hold on a sec. I'm distracted by the apocalypse."

And distracted I was. And distracted I am.

But it's only for a moment. Tomorrow, I'll be new.