You and Indiana and I

(Genre: Lyric Essay)

A few days before I was to leave New York, to drive across the country, to build a new home somewhere in the mountains of California, I sat around the butcher block table in the center of Natalie and Kara’s basement apartment in Brooklyn. I asked Natalie what was worth seeing in Columbus, Ohio. “Skip it,” she said, “go to Cincinnati,” her girlfriend added, slumped on a stool beside her. I had no interest in Cincinnati, the town the pair was from. It must have shown on my face. “Columbus has great thrift stores,” Natalie offered optimistically. Still, I had only asked about Columbus as it was the only major city on my route from New York to Bloomington, Indiana where I would reunite with you.

A few days later, as I made my way across the border of West Virginia and Ohio, a cicada hit my windshield; its body instantly no more than a large smear of exoskeleton and guts obstructing my view. I thought of Natalie then and how she spoke of the cicadas in Ohio from her youth. She once recalled to me the feeling of their bodies beneath her feet as a girl, the same guts rising up between her toes, how their buzz signaled a return to school, how they died in slow cycles like civilizations.

It was midnight by the time I entered the outskirts of Columbus. I pulled off the highway and parked in the closest parking lot. Three neon X’s buzzed in the sign above an adult bookstore across the gravel lot. I tried to find comfort and sleep, curled across the front seats of my Jeep. Sometime in the night the temperature dropped to an all time low for Ohio in September.

As I slept, knotted and uncomfortable, my mind drew connections between my location and my memories, my emotions and my associations. This is how we do. I dreamt of driving through the cold air, my headlights cutting through the frigid fog. Ahead of me, growing closer in the beams of light, stood Natalie and Kara. They were bickering on a cold highway. Me, behind the wheel, squinting as I made out their familiar shapes, the color of their hair. Drawing so close I could see the fear expand in the whites of their eyes as I crashed into them.

I awoke with two gasps, one for each of them. I found myself there in the front of the Jeep, cold beneath my quilt, the cicada still smeared upon the windshield.

I sat in the Jeep with my eyes adjusting to the light, my lungs to the cold. It was just after six in the morning and I turned the key in the ignition and threw my blankets and pillows in the passenger seat beside me. I was something like seven hours away from Bloomington, Indiana where you had started graduate school the day before. The parking lot of the adult bookstore where I stopped was now filled with 18-wheelers, two of them at my either side. I backed out as though through a long hallway and drove west, half asleep. I made it there around noon, found the main gates to your campus and sent a text that read: I’m lying in the grass by the corners of Indiana and 2^nd Streets. Get in touch when you’re around, I wrote, hoping to sound undemanding. You replied that you'd there in ten. And I smiled.

Anticipating our reunion this immediately became painful. It came to mind that I might not be able to distinguish you from the other passersby. I wondered if we might be unrecognizable after only a few years and what that could mean. I felt a soft panic – a nervous twinge. It was the same dull and aching pain I’d endured throughout the two or three years since I met you. It stemmed from my blind and persisting love. It was irrelevant where we were, how long since we’d spoken, how soon we’d see each other. In these years since we met, I have experienced an ignorant love for you. I can say this now without embarrassment. A love like an always pressing thumb upon the chest. When I thought of you a firm print was left over my sternum. It felt a lower temperature than my own and unrelenting. It was ignorable if needed, but nonetheless consistent regardless of our inconsistent correspondence or the ebb and flow of my personal circumstance.

You know how it was. We were always apart. We were always cryptic and scattered in what we said and how we said it to each other. And always, for me, a cold thumb-print. And then, there I was. Sitting on your college campus and waiting for you. I suddenly remembered a letter I had wrote to you maybe six months before asking that you not contact me again, that it was nothing but painful for me, and child’s play for you. I’m not sure how I’d forgotten writing it. It was laughable that I had intentions of seeming undemanding, calm, unnerved. I looked up from the grass where I sat and for you drawing near, the thumb colder, harder than ever.

I scanned the passersby from the grass and anticipated. Around me were students carrying books, wearing their university sweatshirts, walking swiftly. I saw myself from their perspective. They probably assumed I was a student as well, if they even noticed me sitting there. But I was not a student at your school. I was not wearing your school colors and carried no books. I was wearing jeans and boots, a yellow knitted cap and a green t-shirt that exposed my tattoos; new since I had seen you last. I didn’t look like I belonged in classes here, or drinking at a beer pong tables. Still, I could pass for a student in age and in indifference. I laid back and covered my eyes from the Indiana sun with my bare arm until I heard a familiar call of a hawk and saw your shadow bounding towards me. You were undeniably recognizable. And so I shifted my indifference.

Our visit was as it should have been, I can infer now. I’m not sure how you saw it, but it made sense to me. We were stony and silent. We were over-talkative and interrupted each other excitedly. I painted your kitchen and made you dinner. We drank wine and smoked joints on your porch. I walked your dog while you did the readings for your classes. And as light sank from the windows and the night tided in, we played music and lit candles. Beside you the pressing thumb subsided and was distracted by your actuality – the tone of your voice, your posture, the furrow of your brow. All of it made up for the years and miles between us that disallowed for any real meaning, any real emotion. The distance, the vaguity of our correspondence was what let me feel a persisting tightening of my chest at thoughts of you and our time together.

“Where should I sleep?” I asked after our first day.

“The couch is pretty comfortable.” You simply replied.

I thought suddenly of you years ago, a stranger, asking me if I wanted to stay, to not go back to New York where my job and life were waiting and instead, to stay. To drive from Los Angeles to Northern California. To stay.

“The couch is pretty comfortable.” I didn’t respond, just stepped out the door and went to my Jeep to retrieve my bags. To exhale into the Indiana night.

There was a time when we slept face to face in the back of your van on cold mountain tops, our inhales and exhales in opposite, the passing back and forth of a fragile object.

There was a time when you removed my wool cap in your sleep and your breath warmed the back of my bare head.

There was a time that I thought I could love you through everything – the ebb and flow.

But the couch was pretty comfortable, you said. The couch in your rented fixer-upper with the kitchen I’d just painted – the couch was pretty comfortable, I tried to conceive.

Somehow I hadn’t expected this and yet had not expected much more. And so I slept on the couch, which as it turns out was not very comfortable. You slept in your room with the door open to my eyes. I can’t say exactly what I dreamed our how I slept or how I felt when I awoke the next morning and hiked the back trails beside a creek – only that there was a time and it had passed. I spent one more night and awoke feeling the same thumb, now colder than my own body, and understood the pull to leave. On my last night there though, you shared with me a letter you had received before we had met.

You tossed it to me while I sat on the couch, ready to sleep. It was addressed to you from an unnamed address in Arizona. I pulled the creased pages and unfolded it to find pictures of a woman and her family – her husband and young son. They looked familiar and I began to understand, to remember the story you had told me as we drove through the mountains of northern California. You had discovered in this letter that you had an older sister who your parents had decided to put up for adoption before you and your siblings were born, when they were young and unable to conceive their own future.

The woman, now in her mid-thirties wrote to you to tell of her being, of her adoption, and of the years of her adulthood during which she felt a pressing desire to find her biological siblings whom she’d never met, but loved. I read the letter in full, somehow feeling parallel to the lines printed on each page. She pleaded with you to understand that she merely wanted a relationship with the family she never knew, but whom she belonged to. I read and came to understand the circumstances – that of your parents, that of a woman who felt a blind and unyielding love for a stranger, and your experience, you – who received these three pages in the mail and came to understand the same.

The next morning it was clear I needed to leave and with age I’ve learned not to question the things that are unspoken but nonetheless undeniable and so I packed my bags and said a brief goodbye. I told you to look me up in California if you ever passed through.

I drove through Indiana in a cold silence, windows down, the sun tanning my outstretched arm. I was a day ahead of schedule and wasn’t expected in Kansas for two days. Sometime near sundown I pulled off the highway and onto a side road in Missouri. The side road quickly became a dirt road with pale gray gravel that left a cloud of dust behind me. The trees along the road were dusted in the same pale gray, a black and white relief of the green beneath. I found my way to the end of the road when it hit the Missouri River. A signed hung on a clapboard building reading Catfish Katy’s Kamp Grounds. I drove through a field of soybeans and found a small stretch of the Missouri that was lined with mowed lawns and littered with fire circles and site numbers. I was the lone camper at the campgrounds minus the campsite host. One small trailer sat locked with a small barking dog within and an air-conditioner on high. I knocked to no answer and so I made my way down the mowed banks of the river, parked my Jeep and pitched tent. I scaled the inclined and muddy banks of the river in my bare feet, collecting driftwood for a fire. I piled them high in the fire circle of my site and sat, guitar on lap and waited for the dark to come.

An SUV pulled into the site beside me. Awoken from my own contemplative silence I watched as a woman sat inside the vehicle with volume on high and cried. Soon thereafter she opened her door and dipped down the banks of the river behind the trees. I returned to my silence until I heard her scream. One and then another. I stood to reveal a view between the trees of a woman clutching her journals covered in mud and tears streaking her face.

I offered her a towel and while she wiped the mud from her legs she noticed the plates of my Jeep and asked, “New York?”

“Yeah, I’m headed for California?” I said as a question.

“I’m sorry?” she asked.

“I’m moving to California.” I said, this time more assured of my direction.

“Wow, huh. Wow. Well, I just came down here with my beer and my journals and I just came down to sit and write. I left my girls at their father’s house and just came down here to sit and write and the next thing I know I’m falling in the mud and so I throw my beer, I throw my beer to get a free hand and I grab on to these roots and they all break off and I’m like you guys are weak. Weak!” She was speaking in a tone somewhere just between crying and laughter, almost hysterical.

“So this is it?” She paused and asked, gesturing at my Jeep stuffed with duffle bags and pillows.

“You just quit your job and decided to move out West and go for it?”

“More or less,” I answered with a smile.

“What?” she said, leaning forward, “I’m sorry, I’m really hard of hearing.” It seemed a strange characteristic to me; somehow improbable that a beautiful woman should have such a flaw.

She asked if she could join me by my unlit fire. I obliged and she went back to her SUV to retrieve her beer. We sat and talked, she more than I. She explained that her husband, a local real-estate developer and millionaire had nabbed her with his charms when she was only eighteen. She was pregnant only a few months later, married, and kept pregnant for the next five years. She had four daughters who she loved, but seemed to hate her more by the day since she divorced their father. She had discovered upon breaking into his office one late night that he had been advertising himself quite shamelessly for sex on numerous websites.

I was quiet mostly. I had expected to be alone and up until her arrival, had felt as I did pulling away from your house – that there had been a time and it had passed, that this day didn’t seem a time, but the absence of the one that had passed. Perplexed, somewhat sullen, and contemplative. But suddenly that seemed an impossibility. The woman saw me a handsome man with a guitar. She told me this quite forwardly. I saw myself from her perspective – a romanticized version of myself, independent, free, and utterly present.

She spoke of her love of music, how it was the only thing she truly had. Yes, there were her daughters, but they seemed so outside of her and growing foreign. Music, she listened to it constantly, and though her husband never let her go to college or take lessons, she had bought a guitar and taught herself to play. She asked me to play something, said she wasn’t good enough to play herself just yet, but demanded I play something for her.

I, now slightly drunk on the wine, and lost in her stories and the way she saw me, had no hesitation. I played her all the songs I knew and with each one, she drew nearer on the picnic table beside me, eventually her hand holding my knee as I sang. And after the last song, she moved in and put her mouth on mine. I kissed her back. I strangely, perhaps drunkenly, saw us from your perspective. I pushed that thought back and continued with her. She left sometime in the night. I woke up and realizing she was gone, lifted my phone and sent you a text message to tell you I had just made love to a woman beside the Missouri River.

I didn’t know what to do when I woke the next morning, my head pounding, my eyes red and angry at the hour and the brightness of the sun. I remembered the night, cringed, and looked at my phone to see what I had said to you via my drunken text message. I cringed again.

As I fled the state of Missouri and drove on towards Kansas, I tried to understand what had happened, how these days had led to the present. How, after wanting so bad to be in your bed, if not to make love then to just feel your arms as we slept, did I find myself in the arms of a stranger, a woman? A woman who wanted me to be someone I was not, who saw me as she needed – let me embody the freedom she wanted for herself. I thought of your sister of how she needed you to be. We see people as we need them to be.  It is a rare case that we love others truly as they are, but more actually, as we want so badly for them to be.

This time has long since passed, since we met and slept in the mountains, since we reunited in Indiana, since I made love to a woman in Missouri. I’m older now, building my home. I am far away. We speak now and then. And since then I have not stopped loving you blindly, but stopped feeling pain in doing so. I love you as I need to. When I have to need to reminisce. When I have need to remind myself that I am capable of doing so. You are who I need you to be. I have resolved my affair in Missouri a sort of dream of associations. Your sister, her love, how she saw you, how I saw you. In the Missouri night, in the company of a stranger, I let them entangle and held a woman tightly. I saw her as I needed, I let her be something she was not – but who reflected my personal circumstance, my ebb and flow. This is how we do. And so, I’m writing to tell you – that since Indiana, that cold, pressing thumb has lifted but that I will always keep my ignorant love of you.