ocean

It’s 7:30 AM and my alarm won’t ring until 8:00. I just fell asleep four hours ago and I’m not ready for the day to start. The apartment is freezing and I dig deeper into the covers.

Outside, delivery trucks are making rounds to coffee shops, and last night’s empty bottles from Pearlz and McCrady’s are being dumped into garbage trucks, making the morning sound like breaking chandeliers. Inside, one of my roommates is in the living room, listening to a church service online, speakers at full volume, the music too loud and too clappy for falling back to sleep.

I want to yell, to ask him to please turn it down, but the possibility of sleep has already passed. A quick search for a clean towel reminds me I need to wash laundry today, so I skip the shower altogether. My room is a walk-in refrigerator. By the time I’ve dressed, my roommate’s radio squelches, calling him back in to work. The laptop closes, the door opens and shuts, his feet pound down the stairs, leaving the apartment quiet and new.

********

The day has gotten worse. United Way told our company two weeks ago that we couldn’t continue our work in any of the schools they help fund until we buy insurance. They also put a hold on our funding until we start back in the schools, which leaves us with no money, no way of buying insurance, and a frustrating Tuesday off work.

I decided to drive to a café across the bridge to catch up on some reading. The bridge is magnificent, spanning the Cooper River, gaining enough altitude in its two and a half mile stretch to allow cargo ships passage underneath and sun-burned tourists walking in the pedestrian lane a view of downtown’s steepled skyline.

My truck struggles to make it to the top. I just replaced everything there is to replace, and still I’m passed by crowded school busses. Shifting down to third helps but makes the engine sound angry, like I won’t let it take a nap, threatening to explode.

My phone rang. I looked at the caller i.d. to see if it was any news about the insurance. It was a friend I meet every few weeks for a late-night beer, probably calling to see if I wanted to meet up in the next couple of days. Conversations have to be shouted if I’m driving over thirty because of the noise from the wind forcing its way through the gap in the top between the windshield and the roof, so I waited until I pulled in the parking lot to call him back.

He could tell I wasn’t in a great mood, and I told him I just felt exhausted, tired from dealing with funding problems at work, and upset about waking up to a loud roommate.

“Was he banging around in the kitchen?” he asked.

“He was listening to a church service, really loud. And singing.”

When I said that I could hear the bitterness in my tone, like it wasn’t him making noise that upset me so much, but the way he was making noise, the reason. My friend could hear it too, and I imagined him in my room, waking up to a roommate worshiping at the top of his lungs, joining in the song and the moment before he even pushed off the covers.

It took a while for either of us to speak.

“John, I’m scared you’re losing your faith.”

********

In the café, a group of twelve – eleven women and one man – sit crowded around a table large enough for eight, brainstorming an art show to benefit Planned Parenthood. They’re discussing venues and lighting, drawing logos, debating calling the event “Re-nude” or “Re-newed”. The argument is lively, the two words thrown around with the emphasis stressed on different syllables, passed from mouth to mouth like communion. One woman asks if Charleston is too conservative a city to have artists painting portraits of live nude models while ticket-holders drink wine and hold plates of hors d’oeuvres. I stared at my book, flipping pages, my headphones in my ear to hide my eavesdropping.

********

Later that afternoon, I went to a movie by myself, feeling a bit like a failure, like I imagined people who catch a matinee by themselves on Tuesdays often feel. There were only three other people in the theater. One of them walked in five minutes into the show and sat three seats away, like we were friends, but not that kind.

The whole thing – the empty theater, the bag of Twizzlers, the feeling that I should be doing something more important – kept taunting me, telling me I needed more than this, making me want a cubicle with a better – or at least steadier – paycheck. What made everything worse was that the movie really sucked. All I wanted was a distraction, but it didn’t hold my attention at all. Every few minutes I pulled my phone out of my picket to check the time, wondering when the movie would end and if I would feel better or worse if I stayed until the end. I tried to cover the screen every time I looked, but after the third time the guy sitting beside me moved anyway, shaking his head, and sat two rows in front of me, where the blue glow wouldn’t bother him.

********

When the movie finished, it was already dark outside. I wasn’t ready to go home, so I drove over the connector toward the islands just off the coast. To the right I could see the bridge in the distance, the blue-white lights illuminating the suspension cables, such a beautifully arrogant contrast to the cobblestone streets it leads to. I live just on the other side, less than ten miles away, and I still I can’t remember the last time I drove out here to watch the ocean.

I parked on the wide shoulder of the road, facing away from the water, and opened the door, the air cooler and thinner than I expected. I climbed into the bed of the truck and sat down, with my back against the cab and my legs stretched out in front of me. Headlights from the left grew bigger, then passed, and I followed them around the bend until; they disappeared. The dew that had collected on the outside of the cab started seeping through my thin cotton jacket, dampening my shirt and back.

The January sky in Charleston is clear, empty, ink smeared over a waveless ocean. Staring at the Atlantic during the night can make you feel small, the same way sitting in a planetarium alone does, as if at any moment the expanse could forget you existed and your body would stop being a body, would melt into millions of molecules, each one floating off in a different direction. I wished my girlfriend was sitting beside me, our arms crossed in front of our chests and our sides pressing into one another, and thought about how perfect it would be to listen to some music if the radio hadn’t quit working two days before.

Lately, when I’ve been alone, walking around downtown, I’ve thought about all of the people I know and wonder why we’re all so different. I understand that that sounds like a trivial question, like we’re supposed to just accept that we are and move on to solve more important problems – factory farming and finding alternative sources of energy – but I haven’t been able to. It smacks me in the face when I open the door to my apartment and hear my roommates in the kitchen, laughing, making plans, inviting the whole world over for dessert. I stick my head in and say, “Hi,” then walk back to my room, aware that even though we’re friends, I’m the introvert that doesn’t fit in. I thought about it earlier that day, in a bookstore by the café, looking on the shelves and seeing names like Hitler, King, Lincoln, and Bush.

I thought about it then, too, staring into nothing. I thought about how some people understand math and others hear music when they silently read a sentence, how some people are born successful and others never stand a chance, how some believe so easily and others have to question.

That last difference is the one I fought with the most that night, and it made me remember the conversation I’d had earlier where my friend said I was losing my faith. I’m not – I don’t think I ever could – I’m just angry with it.

My book club just finished reading Toni Morrison’s latest, A Mercy, and there is a passage where two of the characters are sitting on a porch. One of them turns to the other and says, “I think God would like us if He knew us.” and when I read that, the book felt like it was breathing, like I was on the porch, like I was having the conversation, and I nodded me head. I don’t tell many people that that’s how I feel, but it is: like He doesn’t know me; worse – that He’s like a girl that grew bored of me; or worse yet – like I’m not one of the ones randomly chosen to be watched over. God seems really far away. I don’t tell people that anymore because when I did they always said, “When God seems far away, we’re the one who moved,” and in my head I punch them in the throat.

That same friend who said he was scared I was losing my faith asked me right after that what I wanted from God.

“What does He have to do?” he asked.

“I just want to feel cared for,” I said, “Like He’s for me. Watching over me.”

“But He is! You ride a motorcycle and haven’t been able to get health insurance for four years, and you’re still here.”

I knew that was true.

“I know. I just wish He made me feel that way.”

A minister friend of mine likes to say, “Feelings schmeelings. Feelings aren’t important. Truth is important.” But he also has a family, and loves them, and whenever he says that I wonder how his wife would feel if he didn’t tell her he loved her, or bring her flowers, or lift their daughter in the air after dinner while they laughed and washed the dishes.

********

The temperature dropped and I sunk deeper into the bed, stared up at the empty sky, then closed my eyes. There’s almost no noise, no city sounds, no nature sounds, only my shoe sliding against the metal bed and the creak of a rusty frame when I shift my weight to find a comfortable position.

It would be nice to sleep in the bed of the truck, not because I wanted to, but because I needed to, because home was more than eight miles away.

I think about it sometimes. About leaving. I’m not naive enough to believe a rural life is easier than an urban one, but lying there, it felt like the struggles that come with the former would be a welcome break. I thought about calling my girlfriend and asking her if she wanted to pack a bag and come with me. Somewhere a storm-heavy Saturday is spent inside a house instead of a closer coffee shop. Where I know fewer people but know them better.

“It would just be nice to have to use an axe,” I would tell her.

I thought back to waking up that morning, and how I was still mad about it, how relationships of any kind – with God or roommates - are really hard for me. Outside of my family, there are only two people in my life I’ve kept up with for more than five years.

I think I’m getting better at them, like some of my friends now - Jana, Nicole, Clell, Ahren – are all people that would drive through several states for a weekend visit long after we’ve all gone our separate ways. I can look at them and say that we are close.

There is a part in the Bible referencing Jesus that says he is a friend that sticks closer than a brother. That’s been hard for me to believe. When I was in the truck I thought about that, trying to really understand what that’s like. I don’t really have a reference point for that; I grew up without a brother, but I do have an older sister, and when I was twenty-five, the day after finding out my wife had been having affairs, I sat on the floor of her bedroom closet, weeping, hiding from my nephews. She walked in and sat down beside me, beside a pile of shoes, and didn’t say anything, but started to cry too.

Maybe it’s like that.

Maybe whether I’m here or there He remains, showing up in inky nights, girlfriend’s kisses, sister’s tears. I wonder when the day will come when I feel Him, when I look back and feel crazy for ever wanting to leave, to run, to walk away. When will I feel the unmistakable grace, where will I be, where will we be, where will we be?