fluorescence

I never sleep. The three of us have opposite schedules, and I have no walls. My loft is also their home office.

Nick bought a two-bedroom condo for him and his fiancé. Then he called off the wedding. His best friend, Geoff, moved into the spare room and they offered me the loft.
“But I hate that part of Charleston,” I said.
“I’ll only charge you $200 a month,” said Nick.
“How about this: Instead of me living there I’ll give you $200 a month, buy you a shovel, and let you beat the hell out me. It’s probably just as enjoyable.”
“Come on, man,” he pleaded. “It’s cheap. Month to month.”
“Fine.”

Geoff was in the kitchen, 11:30 pm, boiling eggs. Nick was sitting in a chair in front of his new movie-screen-size TV. I was above them, wishing for walls.
“Hey Geoff,” said Nick, “if you could go back in time, where would you go?”
“Mumble mumble mumble something or other,” said Geoff.
“Yea, that would be cool.”
Oh God, please don’t let them ask me.
“John, are you awake?”
Silence, then: “Kind of.”
“What about you? Where would you go?”
To right before you asked that stupid question so I could tell you not to. “I don’t know.” That’s my standard answer to most of Nick’s questions.

“Would you go back and not marry Caroline?”
I lay on my mattress, my mattress with no bed frame, and my dark-adjusted-eyes looked around. Is this what my life is now? A mound of clean clothes beside me, separated from the pile of dirty clothes by a shirt that I am not sure of which stack to put it in. Records are scattered on the floor.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I loved her. I probably always will.”
The blinking light on Nick’s computer was a welcome distraction.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said, his voice coming from below, breaking my concentration. “Well, would you go back and not do whatever you did that drove her to have an affair?”
What the hell?!! My dive from the loft took Nick by surprise. I landed on him, my knee driving into his stomach, but the sound of his breath forced out was not enough. I started swinging, landing three punches before he could lift his arms. His blood on my fist was warm, thicker than I thought it would be, red, although it stained the carpet black. “Who the hell do you think you are?” I shouted. I lifted him from the chair and threw him into his TV, cracking the screen. I could tell he was confused, but I kept on beating him. “All those times you were an asshole to your ex-fiancé, was that her fault or yours?” I wanted to shout, but my fist and my feet were my voice and it felt so damn good to punch, to kick. “You still use her for a booty call, then you tell her you wish you’d never met her, and you have the nerve to ask me that?!” my knee screamed, cracking against his head. He fought back, not out of rage, but survival, grabbing the spade from the mantle and driving it into my thigh. A red stain began to grow, spreading down the leg of my jeans, I thought I smelled lemon, then gasoline, and my vision was clouded but I didn’t stop I didn’t stop I will never effing stop I kept on beating him and beating him and beating him and

“I’m trying to sleep,” I said. My voice, quiet, detached, tried to make it past the half-wall of my loft and to his chair. Nothing in my life makes any sense, I thought.

****

It’s the Wednesday night leadership meetings, the fourteen people crowded around a dining room table big enough for ten, the whowantsmoretea and the saveroomfordesert and the somebodytakehalfofthis that I miss so much. Christen cleared the table because that’s how she showed she loved, coffee orders were taken, served, sipped, cups clattering, spilling, laughter, five conversations, everyone involved in each. That was the august of my belief.

But now I’m in Charleston. Yeah, it’s nicer than Columbia. Yeah, the weather. The beach. King Street and old homes and history. Yeah. I know. But it’s taken three years to find something that compares to Wednesday night dinners, a greater cause, a family moving forward, and getting there has been a struggle. Time full of false starts and misplaced hope.

There was grad school (two attempts). I picked the top programs in the country. I scored in the 9th percentile on the math section. They weren’t impressed. There was the job where I climbed the sides of hotels and scraped old stucco off, so new stucco could be put on. Manual labor is good for the soul, I told myself in October. Only for a few months, I said in March.

****

I had coffee with some friends while visiting San Francisco a few weeks ago and they were asking all these questions about this non-profit called SideWalk Chalk I started with a friend, about how great it has been and how fast it’s taken off.

“There’s this one kid, Khari,” I told them, “but some weeks he wants it to be pronounced ‘Car-ee’ and some weeks he wants it to be ‘Ka-haree’ and then he always asks which one I think it should be. He’s definitely one of my favorites.”

“You have favorites?”

“I know, I’m not supposed to, but still. And his brother, Mate’o. I like Mate’o, too. They’re totally different. They look just alike but don’t even live together. Khari’s the sweetest kid ever it’s all yessir nosir thankyou but Mate’o has been suspended on average one day a week. He used to never do any of his work the teachers assigned him. He would never write, never do anything, then we took a photographer to the school and got her to take pictures of the kids and helped them all write stories, and put them in a book and now Mate’o is so excited and he goes home every day almost and comes back with a new stor-“

“John, your eyes are going crazy.”

“I know. They do that when I’m excited.”

I told them about the other 100 amazing kids we get to work with every week and showed them the book the kids published because I always have a copy you’d swear my hands were empty but now there’s a book in them, I know, I know, I’ve just never been prouder of anyone than I am of them.

The whole time I was talking to them I was thinking that the thing that really feels right about SideWalk, the thing I don’t like to talk about out loud for fear of ruining it, is the volunteers we get to work with and the leadership meetings, ten of us crowded around a table big enough for six, the laughter, the refills, dreams realized and celebrated. We’re a family, Christians, Athiests, it doesn’t matter.

Charles with his blackberry that has all the information on anyone that ever lived in Charleston and holycrap how does he know so many people and Trish and Amy are talking about the next fundraiser idea while Heather waits until everyone is done talking and then says one sentence that makes perfect sense and sums up everyone’s great ideas and makes it work and I look over at Nicole and Mary Alice and they’re pouring more wine there’s so much wine here so much wine here so much wine. Jana and I look at each other and smile and finally something, something, one thing, finally, makes sense.

I wondered if it will happen again. Icarus and his wings of wax.

One of my San Francisco friends asked me if I felt like I was 100% healed from all the crap I went through before I moved to Charleston. I didn’t know how to answer.

The truth is, I don’t even know what that means. Does it just mean there are no more gaping wounds, or that there are no more maudlin moments when I hear something about the friends I used to have then, or does 100% healing mean you can’t even see the scar?

****

I sold my car this year, and when I cleaned out my glove box, I found my wedding ring.

****

Fuck it. I don’t even think about her every week anymore. But I don’t want to forget, if that’s what being healed means. I don’t want it to not hurt at all when I think about Christen and Nate and my friends that dropped me, because I like the person that hurt has made me.

Most of the time.

I like that I care for the despondent and don’t just say I do. I like that I lose sleep over some kid I just met because I know his home life sucks and his father thinks he’s the second coming of Jesus. I like that a lot of the homeless here know my name and I know theirs.

I don’t like the hard time I have with church, and those that make it up, or Christianity in general. I don’t like the anxiety I get when I hear someone say, “God is blessing the work you’re doing.” I’ve heard that before.

Icarus and his wings of wax.

When I wake up in the morning and the air is cool and my covers are laying on the floor and a lump has formed in my throat because they still haven’t fixed the heat I remind myself I’m not an atheist.
I’m not an atheist. I’m not. I’m not.
It used to be all of me that believed. Some days it’s just my chest.

It’s not that I don’t want to. Really. I do. It’s just that the whole thing wears me out. The relationship that’s turned into religion, the sign up for this event and this event and this one. I’m tired of ulterior motives, of institutional agendas buried just beneath, of sycophants and the political priests that revel in their words. I’m tired of church.

I still love Jesus. But if one more person tells me to read the Shack I don’t know what I will do but I swear it will involve -- I tried. I made it halfway through but there was an adverb in the first sentence and every sentence that followed and the whole thing just seemed so kitsch why do people listen to Wynona Judd tell them what to read anyway? but if I said that something, something, some thing about the half I read didn’t make me feel like things would be alright, I would be a liar, because it did.

I want to be in that place. We all do. I know I was born with the desire for belief, with the need for a relationship with God, and the innate longing that only He can fill. It would make it a lot easier though if Christians were any different from other people.
Fingers can (should) be pointed at me too.

****

I flew home to Buffalo for Christmas. My girlfriend went with me. Our plane sat on the tarmac for 40 minutes before the return flight. Something about the baggage door coming open unexpectedly. And then there was the announcement for turbulence, the keepyourseatbeltsfastened and the thisshouldclearupsoon over the intercom. There were air pockets and the mixing of warm and cool. My girlfriend had a panic attack.

But these wings are aluminum, I thought.

****

Airplanes: No part of them is able to fly, but we make them do it anyway. None of it makes any sense to me. I just love the feeling.

****

The first girl I dated after my divorce was a pilot. Some nights I would hike up to the top of the bridge and watch the planes coming in over the city, and wait for hers. “Good pilots don’t land,” she would tell me. “They tempt the earth to rise.”