Penny Post #30: Dead Ends
From West to East and back again.
The metal that my wrists rest on while I write this chills my skin.
Bumps on every inch of exposed skin. Raised in alert. Braced against the thing that is to go wrong.
When you are the first to arrive and the last to leave, work feels flattened. You can’t remember what happens in-between, you can only explain away your headache, tear-stained cheeks, and fetal position when home. There is not enough Kiera in the world to fulfill the expectations of those I serve from nine to six. They will always want more from what they’ve already taken. Kiera disappears in a cloud of smoke when he arrives at the window in an avalanche of discontent and disfunction. When he asks what she has done. When he rages without knowing how hard she works to help him. When he condemns her to self-doubt, isolation, and vision fogged with salt and pain.
There’s something about the way life calls out to you when you least expect it. It beckons you closer, whispers in your ear, and leaves you reeling in the aftermath of discovering that the life you lead now is not the one you were meant for.
This is the story of when a Northeastern girl walks into a western bar on a Carnival cruise ship and orders a pint of yearning.
I was excited to travel East mostly because I was excited to take a week off of work. I love the mission & I adore the people, but one mistake from me (a non-clinician, not yet fully formed brain, deeply empathetic yet prone to fault soul) means a patient’s self-harm, relapse, or worse: suicide.
The pressure has mounted and I was ready to crest another height.
As you know by now, airports produce my best writing. Someone asked me recently the one place I feel most myself. To everyone’s surprise - including my own - I said thirty thousand feet in the clouds.
At first, my brain populated with images of porch rocking chairs and picnic blankets overlooking sunsets and endless oceans that remind us of our collective insignificance and yet what I landed on (no pun intended) was a big chunk of metal floating through the sky.
The too-small seats with no leg room.
The strangers whom you haphazardly climb over to go to the bathroom.
The stale pretzels that accompany what the pilot initially claimed would be “mild turbulence”.
For me, there’s something about how my ears pop as I ascend far above the world leaving everything else behind. I spend time up here doing what I wish I had time for on Earth.
I read.
I write.
I dream.
I didn’t buy a boarding pass for the critical voice that accompanies me down below. I sink into a trance, hypnotized by the dim cabin light and carried by the 747’s strange metallic hum.
I’m on airplane mode too.
A mid-Autumn drive from the concrete jungle of New York into the spacey siren that is Connecticut awakes me. I miss things I didn’t know one could: cinder blocks on highways, the baby blue of the CT license plate, the disgruntled NYPD as they face the startling inhibition of New York drivers. I also miss things that have grown strange to me in the passage of time: my mother’s tight, desperate hugs, the vibrancy of the leaves in the October sun, the comfort of golden retriever fur that finds its way onto every piece of clothing you own.
In my time away, the East coast has come awash in romantic light.
My heart calls out to this place that I’ve abandoned time and time again: a siren’s song carried by the whistle of suburban slumber and a father’s distance voice.
There’s something about the west that is dimmed by the desert, by the weed, by the always warm.
The dormant parts of myself that wrestle with words born of childhood dust are stirred awake.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Carnival Venezia takes Cameron and I far into the Atlantic Ocean where a different kind of reflection takes place. While out at sea, I’m simultaneously repulsed & riveted by the indulgence of my fellow passengers.
People walk slowly on a Carnival ship. In fact, they crawl from one bar to another. It’s unfathomable to me the lengths people go to drink & equally unfathomable the lengths the crew go to provide the next pour. It’s as if the passengers on this ship have been here their whole lives: they find the same seat at the same bar with the same drink they enjoyed a liquid stupor in before. Perhaps my cynicism comes from the fact that a mindless middle aged man spilled my just-paid-for strawberry daiquiri (my own negligent indulgence) all over my favorite white skirt. I spend two days and many fluid ounces of Oxyclean to erase my sins & his.
Instead of being thirty thousand feet above the world you’ve known, you pray not to sink into the seventy percent of it that is largely unknown. Yet there is still an insularity, an “ignorance is bliss” mindset that accompanies you on your voyage. You feel the waves with the slight sway of the boat, yet they only serve to remind you that all responsibility has long since drowned.
We disembark.
Unlike the excitement and relief I felt boarding the plane from San Diego, I feel something mysteriously different: dread.
I have the acute sense that there is something wrong. That my destination is not my true end, that I’m going in the wrong direction. It is an eerie feeling to know that the path you chose is simply a dead end.
Two roads diverge in a yellow wood…yet knowing how way leads unto way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
My yellow wood.
There is a point when you start to wonder how many more cards you might be dealt before the dealer decides to end this cruel game that you’ve been set up to lose.
There is a point when you wonder how much more you’re capable of holding.
There is a point when you beg to not know how much more you’re capable of holding.
I feel the slowing of my breath, of my thoughts, of my feet as they carry me from the office to my car. I don’t really know where I’m going but I do know that I’ve missed the sunset and the janitorial staff locked all the doors and life looks a lot different from out here.
It is just a blur of brake lights and darkness before I arrive home, awaiting disaster. There is nothing immediately awry so I undress and wrap my shivering body in a blanket. I can barely keep my eyes open as I search my mind for a memory of locking my door.
I find it and finally I let myself rest.
I write the last period and don’t remember to notice that the metal my wrists rest on has warmed.
Until next time,
Kiera