A nice walk isn’t it? The city is nice and chilly, and the moon’s never been clearer. Nights like these I remember when it was just me and another, Jayne. Walking along the streets and shivering beneath the cold. But we didn’t care, because it reminded us we were alive and we were grateful to be alive. We’d walk past the people all connected to their own stories and feel a comfort in being connected to our own, hundreds of strangers passing by each other to night classes and family dinners, each and every one isolated during that walk in their own mediations. I miss those nights, so I’m grateful you are taking this walk to me.
It was nice! Really nice at first, but I wanted more, and she wanted to keep things the same. Both of us feared the ulterior, the possibility of a deafening end. Some way or another we did survive for a time in that space, trading back and forth pictures and drawings of dogs and fireflies. We had been alone so long we thought we could do no harm. To have such an exhilarating comfort of someone we felt safe to talk to. Did we feel safe though? Sometimes we didn’t, sometimes we felt that saying to much or not enough would kill the flower and conversations became a tight rope of adjusting and fine tuning the weight and volume of words.
She began to feel angry, she began to feel afraid, the pressures of other things in her life crept into the narrative, making her feel as if they had been connected all along. Everyone knew everyone and everyone was an enemy. Everyone was trying to take away her friends and her joy.
Her mind would invent reasons for her to be the victim in this horror movie. She had been the final girl her entire life so clearly this recent rejection was another asshole in a long chain of abusers who had hounded her since birth and kept her away from the fire whenever she tried to get warm.
There were periods when she would feel better. When the light of accountability and self reflection shone through the dark clouds. She would go “I understand! This is what I did wrong, and I don’t hate them anymore, I understand why I’m no longer allowed around them, I’m going to move on and make new friends” she would fall asleep with her mind at ease.
It was a draining thing, to feel so completely angry and alone and battle against your thoughts, with debt and homelessness creeping in she began to lash out further, with my hand helping to guide the blade and reaffirm her belief that hate is a just act when it’s at someone who cut you off. Eventually she would withdraw, unwelcome from everywhere, an emotional felon barred from fifty sites and forums and alone in her small house with nothing but me in her head.
When we first got kicked to the curb it took a while to raise her face to the sun again. When she did, she really did try at first to reflect on events. To go: oh, this is why it happened, it was my fault. But things quickly went downhill as the cycle of thoughts turned around and around inside her head.
She grew angrier, she grew sadder, eventually the land died and nothing grew at all. Shying away in her room waiting for eviction day, days slipping out of her clenched fingers, she would ultimately create a theory of why she had been mistreated and it was because of them. It was because of them, she thought, because she had only been trying to be nice and connect and protect her new friendship but the others had been stupid and blunt and selfish and not bothered to check in on her situation or help her find safety or even learn how to find safety on her own. She theorized and then knew as immediately as it had appeared in her thoughts that this was true and that the reason others disliked her was not for the fabled behavior of stalking and saying shit about them behind their backs but because there was something different about her everyone else could see that made them compelled to enact cruelties upon her and yes they were cruelties for how could anyone see someone who had suffered as much as she had up until now and then decide to not answer her messages on schedule or make time for her. How could anyone be so cruel unless they were some secret other that craved to enact violence on her for her condition and if they were a secret other and the world accepted that other violence against her (violence defined as the act of separation and putting one’s foot down, of saying “please leave me alone”) then the world must be made up entirely of a other that was not secret and instead in plain view and she was an aberration in the toolbox that had been used to construct a reality built on connections between people who could climb over each other to get to shake the hand of the person on top.
SO IF THE REJECTION OF COMMUNITY FROM STRANGERS SHE HAD NOT KNOWN THE FACES OF MEANT THAT SHE WAS MARKED WITH THE MARK OF PROBLEM AND THIS COULD NOT BE ALLOWED INTO THE SACRED GARDEN OF COMMUNICATION WITH THE PEOPLE YOU WANT TO GARDEN WITH THEN THE MARK MUST BE JUST BUT NOT IN ALL LEVELS BUT IN A FORM THAT WENT SO HIGH BEFORE STOPPING AT THE PRECIPICE OF MORALITY SO THUS ONLY COULD THIS MARK BE JUST WITHIN A SYSTEM THAT COULD BE MARKED AGAINST FOR ITS MANY FAILURES AND THUS ALL THE PEOPLE IN IT TOO MUST BE UNJUST AND LICKING THEIR LIPS AT THE THOUGHT OF DINING ON HER AND HURTING HER JUST THE SAME WAY HER MOTHER AND PEERS HAD PREYED UPON HER AND THIS SHE DECIDED MEANT ANY ACTION OF DISCOMFORT OR SEPARATION TAKEN TOWARDS HER MUST BE UNJUST IN INTENT FROM DEMONS WEARING THE FACES OF PEOPLE WHO SHE HAD TRUSTED AND HAD PUT ALL HER EFFORT AND MORALITY INTO AND LEANED ON LIKE A CRUTCH UNTIL THEY BUCKLED UNDER THE WEIGHT. AND IF SUCH WAS THE CASE THEN ALL OF THEM MUST BE REPRESENTATIVES AND TOOLS OF AN ACTIVE SYSTEM OF VIOLENCE AND THUS THERE COULD BE NO OTHER REASON FOR THEM TO SAY.
And wake up the next day full of rage and loathing, her mind switching like a stoplight to projection and once again blaming anyone but herself. I helped to pull the switch a little, it’s just in my nature and when someone hurts me I don’t forget, no matter who hurt who first. Separation was a violence to me, reprimanding me was an act of assault.
Her mind would play tricks on her, misremembering events and words, looking deeper into the use of words and finding that one word in a sentence was colder than the others, that the letter lacked the warmth of the rest. Everywhere she went she was held at arms length, quickly she learned that Justice was a concrete meaning and that to make someone unhappy was the first step to social exile.
Every day she would cry out “this is so unfair!” “Somebody help me please I can’t help myself out of this alone!” But everyone knew to steer clear, to be unpleasant to others means to bear the consequences. To be allowed to fall into poverty, debt, homelessness, and gender related violence was the greatest act of Justice within a world of those who had to focus on more important topics like “why it’s counter culture to drink and drive, why should I have to wash my hands” and “to wear a mask is violence, why it’s radical to cheat on my partner”
She lived in a world of Justice and if Justice was to be believed then for the failure of every relationship a case must be formed to determine who is good and who is at fault. And if at fault then the many faced judge wearing your own face deep in the center will determine that your actions where of pure malice and present you with a certificate acknowledging that you are a being of moral failings and that you must sit with this certificate for the rest of your life chasing shadows of the people who want you to stay away and thinking that there is no point in getting better because this certificate that lies in your hands is proof that you are inherently evil and vile and must stay in your assigned seat for the rest of your life.
Maybe I can offer something to you though. I’ve seen you around, poking your nose into badger dens and flailing about confused when your hand comes out bitten. Not judging! Not judging haha. Jayne was the same way? With people, she’d convinced herself she was fine with loneliness but when someone she thought was cool showed interest in her work she felt those cold waters turn to gasoline, and the gasoline clouded her mind. Relationships are intoxicating, but unavoidable. And it was only a matter of time before she opened herself back up, stuck her hand into the unknown to grasp the hand of another. Would you like something else to scratch at?
And in this way she decided that the reason she had been shunned was for an immoral reason and this the expression of a “boundary” was illegitimate and faulty and aimed towards her in violence and that for this she was socially justified to strike back twice and meaner with words even she didn’t believe but that caused just as much harm regardless of intent. She knew that with the expression of retaliation against those who had flung her aside when she bit their hand she could eventually garner back their favor in the form of tears (favor defined as the attention obtained by any means necessary) and although the desire for attention could be labeled as detrimental to prosperity in the 21st century it was nevertheless a stimulant important to the functioning body of a human animal that stood on two legs and held video conferences but regardless was a beast that used to sit in the field and gather to others for comfort and sympathy.
And so Jayne sat there at the bottom of herself chewing on the remains of memories and conversations had long ago waiting for their source to return on hands and knees pleading for new conversations. In her mind she likes to pretend she would reject them and fling them into the many relationships below but truthfully, she knows she would also get on her hands and knees and beg for a future of nothing but uneasy smiles and trying to keep things cozy.
The thought fills her with bile and as the days till her eviction near she lays in bed gleeful for the moment that the pain goes away and that her mind no longer whirls around between thought after thought flipping back and forth between the views she has of a person she will never see again.
“I don’t feel comfortable around you. Please leave me be”
There could be no other reason.
There couldn’t be.
On a day she is forced outside the house to walk and not take up space she stumbles into a teacher she has not seen since high school, and she is told that there are programs for people like her. She tries to mumble out a response of no thank you. But in that moment her desperation is seized, and she begs and pleads for salvation that she feels unworthy of receiving. The teacher, who she vaguely remembers having left town many years ago, explaining away her resignation as due to conflicts of textbook content and morality, smiles. She wears baggy clothing that seems too damp for the summer air, and there is the smell of something Jayne has not smelled for years. Something not of this suburban place no it is ocean water and at that moment she feels peace and she feels the capacity to let down her gaurd around someone who is much too nice in contrast to hazy memories of an old crone raving about books and their purity. Nobody has bothered to smile at Jayne in years, a warm comforting smile. She says she can tell Jayne is lacking community here and tells her that she can stay with her. That there is a community she would like her to meet, one with plenty of capacity to make not only the loneliness go away, but the money and debt collectors go away too.
Jayne takes her hand and they
Maybe in the future, we can take another walk.
