the things you now know about lightning.

Here is what you know now that you didn't know eight hours ago:  

When you are on the beach, collecting shells with your kids in the rain, and thunder rolls, you should run.   

Here's a better one:  

When you are on the beach, collecting shells with your kids in the rain, and thunder rolls, and their hair (and yours) stands on end, you should not laugh and take photos.

Here's what it means when your hair stands on end during a thunderstorm:  

You are most likely about to be hit by lightning.

In the last two weeks, lightning has come up again and again in conversation.  Why?  

It is your birthday dinner at your parents place.  Your nephew shows up in the middle.  Rowing practice was cancelled due to threat of thunderstorms.  Why?  The kids want to know.  Why?

Because of lightning, he says.  He explains about the metal boat.  How the lightning would seek him on the water, in his metal boat.  Grandad explains about conduction.   

The Bun worries about it later.  What if? What if? WHAT IF?

It's not going to happen, you say.  It's like winning the lottery.  Your odds are so remote.

I'm scared now, he says.

Don't be, you say.

You meant it to be reassuring.  Then the weather makes you a liar.

Every year, the middle weekend of June means a small holiday.  A particular hotel, a specific routine.  On the first day: checking in, swimming in the pool, a walk on the beach.  The second is mini golf, bumper boats, the park.  The third is the water park, building the island and waiting for the tide to come up.  On the fourth: check-out, Smitty's, the arcade, the other beach.  

This year, everything went wrong.  

This year, it was an exercise in you keeping your panic at bay, which was a bit like corralling cats into a carrier.  Just keep it together, you whispered to yourself.  Suck it up.

The hotel pool was closed for health reasons.  The hotel network was down, so no movies in bed.  The hotel elevator was taken out of service, with you on the 8th floor.   The Bun's foot was sliced open on a broken shell.  He fell and sprained his ankle on the other foot.  The Birdy coughed and pretended not to be sick.  The tides worked in reverse, coming in when you wanted them out, going out when you needed them to come in to make your island.

You ate ice cream.  The crows ate the french fries in vinegar.   You stayed up too late.  You found sand dollars, shells, and things that were funny.

The big beach is the last big adventure.  You take donuts and frozen drinks, buckets and shovels.   The sun skitters behind a black cloud.   It starts to rain.

But there are shells to be found.  It's a tradition, after all. 

The thunder claps and The Birdy says, "We are brave, aren't we Mummy?  We don't care if we get WET."

Yes, we are, my darling girl.  We are so brave.  We are the bravest.

Sure, you say.  We'll dry off in the car.

When The Birdy's hair started to rise, you all laughed.  You took a picture.  It pulled free of her braid and reached up towards the thunderhead.

"Look at her HAIR!" said The Bun.  "LOOK at it."

"Look at YOURS," she said.  

They bent over, laughing.  "Look at MUMMY!"  

You have the longest hair, not tied back.  You could feel it waving over your head like antennae.  Of course it looked funny.  You made a face.  They howled with laughter.

Theirs was static, you had thought, from the playground slide.  

You stopped laughing.

You weren't on the playground slide.

Which, regardless, was made of metal not plastic.

Then something electrical snaked up your legs, a feeling, like dread sneaking in the wrong way.  The hair on your arms prickled sharply.

"We have to get back to the car," you said.  Panic got out of its carrier.  The Bun wanted to find one specific kind of shell.  You willed yourself to not throw up.  Or scream.  What you felt like doing was screaming.  What you knew you should do was...

Well, you had no idea.

You weren't even sure that this wasn't just panic.  The old fashioned kind, feline and predictable.

"NOW," you said.  "MY CAMERA IS GETTING WET."  Which is the first, most immediate thing you could thing of that wouldn't scare them to death but might motivate them to move.

You didn't say "RUN".  

Why didn't you say "RUN"?  

You will sit on the couch much later, asking yourself this.

You knew it wasn't right, what was happening.

But you didn't say it.

It's because you weren't sure.  Not 100%.  

All you knew was that your hair should not be doing this and neither should theirs.   And a warning bell was going off somewhere deep in the recesses of the places where instinct hides.

"HURRY," you said.   In your mad voice, which is your most powerful tool in your Mummy-arsenal.  "RIGHT NOW OR SO HELP ME."   

"Right now?"  they said, mid-laugh.   Their hands hovering in the cloud of hair above them.

"RIGHT NOW," you said.  "OR I'LL TAKE EVERYTHING AWAY."

"Everything?" they hesitated.

"Please?" you said.

It took forever or ten minutes.  

You made it to the car.

The Bun spilled his drink.

The thunder crashed so intensely, you could feel it in your jaw.

You texted your ex.  "What does it mean," you type.  "When your hair stands up in a thunderstorm?"

"GET INSIDE," he texted back.  "NOW."

You stepped on the gas like you were making a getaway.  Which of course you were.  

You did.

And how lucky are you, anyway?

Several miles down the road, you call your mum.  "Well, maybe you should buy a lottery ticket," she says.

"I think I just used up all the luck," you say, your heart still pounding like something battling to break free, hammering on your sternum like it's a door that may still open.

Not today, you tell it.  Today, we had a miracle.

"Who was the goddess of lightning?" your mum asks.

"I don't know," you say.  "I have no idea.  Why?" 

"I don't know," she says.  "It just seemed important."

When you get home, finally, hours later, you Google it.  Goddess of lightning.

 (Astrape, in case you ever need to know.  Who has ever heard of Astrape?)

But now you are on the internet, and even though you don't really want to, you type:  Hair standing up thunderstorm.  

That's when you find the picture of the two boys, laughing, their hair standing up.  Right before the lightning struck them and killed them.

Then, going through your own pictures, you find the one of The Birdy, laughing, hair everywhere.

And you feel sick.   Of course, you feel sick.  

Your knees still buzzing strangely, from adrenalin or electricity.

The things you now know about lightning: 

The Goddess of Lightning is Astrape.

If your hair stands on end, you better move fast.   Get inside.   

If you can't get inside, crouch down on the balls of your feet with your feet close together. Keep your hands on your knees and lower your head. Get as low as possible without touching your hands or knees to the ground.(From the New York State Department of Health website.)

And sometimes -- rarely, but sometimes -- lightning lets you get away.

Be grateful, for that.

 

some thoughts about hummingbirds.

What's amazing is hummingbirds, their tiny perfection.  So think about those when you're struggling to think of something in the category of Things That Are Amazing.  

That's free advice.  I shouldn't be giving out advice, but I always do.  Other people's issues are always easier to break down and repair.  

Well, certainly you have a rash, but that is because you have just recently brushed by poison ivy while wearing shorts.  Try this cortisone cream. 

See?

Easy.

You aren't complicated, like I am.  

Swearsies.

Here's my question:  Why am I suddenly afraid of the long corridor behind the main entrance of the hospital?  

No reason.  The place is crawling with doctors.  Should something outlandish occur, hundreds of brilliant medical minds will repair me.

Outlandish?

No, I don't know either.  It's just a long corridor that seems to demand fear or the purchase of a donut.   There's a donut stand.  Why do they sell donuts in a hospital?  It seems counterintuitive.  

Donuts are only occasionally as good as they look.  No one ever has said, "This donut is AMAZING."

Or maybe they have.

Not about the ones they sell in the hospital though.

Will this coccoon produce a butterfly?  Will maggots eat my caterpillars?   Will you still be mad after school?   

I don't know, my sunshine-y little she-devil.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.  Maybe not.  Nothing is really answerable.  But think about a hummingbird.  Hummingbirds are amazing.  Be amazed.  

Mummy, stop being weird.  At school we read a book where the mummy didn't like yelling so she said that instead of yelling she was going to say "my darling girl".   Like, "Put on your shoes, my darling girl." Instead of getting mad.  Are you still mad?  Stop being mad at me.  I don't want you to be mad at me.

Would that I could stop being weird, my darling girl.  I'm not mad.  Not anymore.  Look, a hummingbird.

MUMMY.

What?

Stop it.

OK, my darling girl.

Don't forget to be amazed, even if other things are going on, such as an unreasonable fear of dropping your children off at school in case you ... 

What?  

I don't know.

Think about it.  Be your own therapist.

OK.

OK, fine.

Look, I'm not even afraid of fainting, not really.  It's uncomfortable, but so what?  A lot of things are uncomfortable, such as dental surgery or stepping on Lego.   

So why the big fear?  Death?

No, not even.  I'm not afraid of death.  Sure, I'm sad if I think about my children being motherless.  But afraid?

Nope.

Besides, you know, people don't just DIE, not unprovoked, not often.  So why be so arrogant as to believe that it will be ME who is the exception?  I am not exceptional.  I am just a regular person, of a regular height and weight, in regular health, who sometimes gets desperately ...needy.  And broken-ish. 

We all get needy.  And broken-ish.

Not half.

You're OK, actually.

I know.

Hummingbirds may be anxious, too.  They may be flying around, panicking.  Where is the sugar?  Where is it?  Where?  

They may very well be questioning their own amazing-ness.

No one can know that for sure what the hummingbird's mental health is like, except for the hummingbird whisperers.  I'm sure there are some.  People with special skills are now developing subsets of their special skills to the point where, yes, hummingbird whispering is probably a thing.

A thing that likely doesn't pay well.

I don't really want to google it and spoil the idea that it exists, impoverished hummingbird whisperers tucking their business cards into flowering fuschia baskets around the neighbourhood.

Will this beetle eat my caterpillar?  

I don't know.  Probably not.  The caterpillar is bigger.

Will this caterpillar eat this beetle?

I don't know.  Probably not.   Don't get too attached, just in case.

Can I have another candy?

No.

What can I do then?

Let's just sit here.  Let's just sit in the sun and look at the hummingbirds as they eat from the flowers, look at how they are happy.

Are they happy?

Yes, let's just say they are.  Why not?  We don't know any different.

I am as happy as a hummingbird, Mummy.  

Are you, sweetie?  That's good.  Me, too.

Don't call me sweetie.  Call me "my darling girl."

OK, my darling girl.

Hummingbird Pauses at the Trumpet Vine

       

Who doesn’t love
roses, and who
doesn’t love the lilies
of the black ponds

floating like flocks
of tiny swans, 
and of course, the flaming
trumpet vine

where the hummingbird comes
like a small green angel, to soak
his dark tongue
in happiness -

and who doesn’t want 
to live with the brisk 
motor of his heart
singing

like a Schubert
and his eyes
working and working like those days of rapture, 
by Van Gogh in Arles? 

Look! for most of the world
is waiting
or remembering -
most of the world is time

when we’re not here, 
not born yet, or died -
a slow fire
under the earth with all
our dumb wild blind cousins
who also
can’t even remember anymore
their own happiness -

Look! and then we will be
like the pale cool
stones, that last almost 
forever.

- Mary Oliver

there is no reason to panic.

Panic is supposed to be your history, not your present.  It's a story that you tell sometimes, to help someone.  When you talk about yourself, then, it's like you are talking about someone else, which makes it easier, of course.

It was a long time ago.  

Forever.

And there were mitigating circumstances, reasons for you to be, if not afraid, then maybe at least justified in claiming to be "spread too thin":  a dying grandmother who spoke little English, multiple jobs, full-time school, an expensive apartment in a city you both loathed and couldn't afford, a failing grade in physicis, a best friend on the outs, a boyfriend in the mob.

In the mob.  

Remind yourself.

Back then, breathing in short gasps seemed like a normal happening.  Being unable to get out of bed one day seemed pretty inevitable.

But then you were OK.

Over the years, you took your small self and begin building up layers of similar selves around it, hoping to strike upon the one that was the REAL you and who was not, in unpredictable waves, terrified.   Like Russian dolls, matryoshka -- the smallest one hand drawn, a stick-version of the child that was you made of popsicle sticks and books and a small, glowing light; the largest then the most elaborate, overworked, made of thin glass overlaid with gems and twirling paint, each detail a labor of love.

Until, of course, it cracked.

These things happen when suddenly you become given to fainting, like a Victorian spinster in a tight corset, reaching for her opiates.

"Some people do," said the doctor.

You couldn't explain to him how a couple of faints were going to undo you, if you let it.  

You couldn't tell him about the fissure that was forming.

You didn't mention about how you just suddenly realized that it could happen again.  

And then it did, because it is the kind of magic that appears when you fear that it will.  

But you are OK.  Remind yourself:  You are still here.  Breathing regularly.  Only occasionally tunelling down the shaking halls of impending doom, wondering what the hell is going on here NOW?

You walk over a bridge-overpass with your ex on shaking legs.  You, your dog, your ex, and your Old Friend Panic.  You think "old friend panic" and you laugh because it isn't funny at all and even though the bridge has rails, you are 100% certain that you will die there, on that bridge, rendering everything else moot.  

You make yourself walk, even though you would rather take your chances darting through the traffic on the highway below.

You take each step, one at a time.

And it's fine.  Of course, it's fine.

What did you expect would happen?  Really?  

When you were twenty-one and stopped getting out of bed, your sister took a ferry to your bedside, forced you up, and took you for a walk to the place where cruise ships dock.  You will always remember how tiny you both were next to the ships, and how you held out your hand to show her how your thumb twitched violently of its own volition.  She helped you pack, drop out of school, sell your textbooks.  

Even the idea of a cruise now makes you want to cry, the looming white hull leaning towards you, blocking the light.

You moved home and stayed there for six months, during which time you did not leave. And if you did, the galloping cantering whinnying fear came with you, reminding you that you were batshit crazy.  I am in the mall, and I am insane, you would think.  I am at the library and I can't breathe.   I am going swimming?  Are you kidding?  Crazy people do not swim.

So you took some drugs, and then spent months withdrawing from them, the rage about the difficulty of withdrawing from them somehow buoying you through the less-than-exciting climax, the turning point where you just simply stopped being scared of everything.  Sure, you were scared of some things, but not ALL THE THINGS.  Which was better. 

And in this way, years went past.

Years and years.

When you weren't afraid, you did things freely and easily, you moved about the world unweighed by nagging reminders about your own vulnerabilities.

Enough years that you began to believe that the outermost Russian doll was now more like an armadillo, tough and leathery and impossible to chew through.

And then the random fainting and you realized the armadillo layer wasn't as firmly attached as you'd believed, in fact, it wasn't there at all.   The armadillo itself ran off into the desert where it died, or didn't, who cares?  It's an armadillo, and you -- YOU -- are glass, cracked and exposed, suddenly deeply genuinely and entirely afraid.

Again.

You spend a few days holding still, waiting for it to pass, so it decides to visit you at night instead.

Knock-knock...

Who's there?

FEAR OF EVERYTHING. 

Fight or flight, they say.  But what do "they" know?  Do they know what it's really like?  Because even you, who know what it is like, cannot describe what it is like unless it is actually happening. 

You know there is almost no fight left.

Instead, you start just flat-out telling people, "I'm having a problem with panic."  

"Oh," they say.  "Me too."  Or "I'm sorry.  Let me know if I can help."

No one is alone, least of all you.  

Last time, you were alone.

You feel sad for that earlier doll-version of you, the crude wooden one who was so concerned about ACTING NORMAL that you forgot how to ask for help.

And you congratulate the broken-glass, former-armadillo you for saying, "Hello, I need some help here now.  At least for a while." 

So that's what you are doing, leaning on people who will accept being leaned on.  Walking over the bridges, arms hooked through theirs, trying to feel your complicated feelings without letting them propel you over the guardrail and into the traffic.  You aren't going to die.  Not just yet, anyway.   You aren't exactly flying, either, but your legs are moving and so are you. 

The next layer of your doll, you decide, will be marble.   Cold and solid and impenetrable.  Pristine, perfect, still.   Elegant, beautiful.  A swirling green grain, like nothing more than moss on stone in the rain, the fresh smell of green forests permeating the stale sharp scent of your vertiginous crackling fear.  

Soon, soon.

You believe in "soon". 

How are you, my lovelies?   

I'm fine, actually.  I really am.  

Mostly. 

And so thankful for all the help.  

life lines.

The kids have started reading palms because of a book we read at bed time.  The book shows a picture of a hand:  life line, heart line, head line, happiness line and the line that indicates if you are likely to be eaten by hyenas.  The kids have a hard time finding any of their lines, except the hyena one.  

Apparently, their days are numbered.  

We lie awake at night and listen for cackling laughter.

I show them how to listen to their pulses, fingers pressed into their wrists near the "stringy bone".  Their hearts race on, ahead of mine, which lollops along behind them, slowly slowly.

On Saturday, something happened -- something -- and it lolloped lolloped lolloped into the long pause that precedes a faint.   The ambulances came, and the fire truck.   At one point, there were six men over six feet tall, bent over in my tiny, low-ceiinged bedroom, asking me questions.   Sweat poured out of me.  The kids huddled on my pillows and stared.  It was quite exciting, for them, I think.    

Or maybe that's what I wanted to think.  "Exciting".  Not "scary".  Not "the scariest thing they'd ever seen".  

I was upset that they might be upset, my upsetedness then upsetting them even more.

And I was embarrassed.  

Fainting sounds so Victorian and literary, but really it's ugly-sweaty and ominous, like the scene before the one where the girl in the bikini is eaten by the shark.

The kids were scared, of course.  I scared them.

But I'm fine.

"Sometimes, people faint," the doctor said.  "You have very low blood pressure.  Eat more salt."

There is a little girl in my son's grade two class who is aghast about everything he eats.  

"CHEESE STRINGS?" she exclaims.  "YOU CAN'T EAT THOSE!  Those are ... SALTY!"  

Her angst about his cheese strings is genuine.  I think she thinks she is saving him from ... well, who knows what?  I imagine that in her household, salt is demonized (probably accidentally).  Maybe her parents have reason to avoid it.  Or maybe they -- like most of us -- just feel so much pressure to eat "right":  fresh fruit, fresh vegetables -- eat a rainbow! -- organic everything, no packaged foods, make it perfect so their lives will be perfect, so people will think WE are perfect, so we don't make any mistakes, so everything is OK, so the kids grow up with every cell in balance, and everything we could do, done.

As it happens, my son and I both have perilously low blood pressure and salt is one of the things that keeps us from keeling over regularly.  

I think about the girl and her fear of salt.  I think about what we do to them, these tiny versions of ourselves, who absorb our fears and mirror them, magnified in ways that only kids can magnify things.  "Salt is bad for you," we say, and in their minds, the salt becomes an impossible craggy monster, arms akimbo, reaching for them in the night.

I feel a bit sorry for the girl, afraid of salt.  And my son, afraid of most other things.  I feel sorry for her, but at the same time, I'm so annoyed.

"Tell her to eat her own lunch," I sigh.  "Tell her to look away if it bothers her so much."

He stops eating cheese strings.  They come home in his lunch bag, flattened and sad.

My son is going fishing today for the first time.  He's worried.  (I'm allergic to fish.)  He's scared he's going to have to EAT fish.  And then what?

Well, I say.  YOU can actually eat fish.  Fish is good for you.  You SHOULD eat fish.  Omega-3 fatty acids!  They'll make you smart.

I don't really do that, he says.  Eat fish.  

I think about how we give our kids so much:  toys and love and food and shelter and all our fears, wrapped up like beautiful gifts in fancy foil paper, the ribbon piled up on top like a wild rainbow of love.   

My son is scared of fish.

My son is scared of my death, which he sees as imminent.  So much danger!   Fish everywhere, not to mention fainting.

The ambulances didn't help, of course.  

We try so hard.  We teach them how to be kind, how to be brave, how to do math, how to spell, how to climb mountains.

We teach them how to be afraid.

Don't worry, I want to say, everything is going to be fine.

But then, if it isn't, am I a liar?  

Yes.

I'm very prone to believing things that ought to not be believable:  Palm reading.  The Ouija board.  Superstions.  The luck inherent in certain numbers.   Karma.   

When I was a young adult, I had my palm read.   My life line is criss-crossed heavily on one end, then has two smooth lines extending across the flesh of my hand, ending again in criss-crossing.  The palm-reader said this meant I would struggle with my health for a number of years, then have smooth sailing for a good long time, before I again began to struggle and die.  The "smooth sailing" part stuck with me.  Every time something happens now, I think, Oh, I guess that is the end of the smooth sailing.

They can't all be accurate, says my logical brain.  But still...  

The Ouija board said I would have 13 children and die at 63 after marrying someone whose initials were BS.   It turned out that my marriage was kind of BS, so maybe there is something to be said for Ouija boards, after all.  

I only had two kids.

And the sailing really never has been particularly smooth.

love and other painful collisions.

For some reason, I've been thinking about old boyfriends. 

And not in the way that you (they?) might think that I'm thinking about them.  

Mostly I'm just thinking about love and its randomness and strangeness and general grotesquery and how good cool sheets feel against your feet on summer nights.  

Saying you are thinking about love is much like saying, "Oh, I'm just thinking about quantum physics and how it relates to that drop of dew on the dead needles of the Christmas tree I threw out behind the fence." It's too much to think about really and half the time, no one knows what they are talking about, least of all me.   

Don't cry.

This one really isn't sad.

 

None of the boyfriends I mention here were serious.  (I won't talk about the serious ones because I know they read this blog.  Or at least, I sometimes assume they do, and then I feel weird, wondering what they are thinking.  Assuming that they are mostly thinking, "Well, bullet dodged.")

There is no chance whatsoever that any of these three men read this blog, so we are in safe territory.

If they do read this blog, they ought to pretend they don't if we happen to bump into each other at Thrifty's buying quinoa and endamame salad.  (I'm hungry, and Thrifty's makes a good quinoa and endamame salad, which is why I mentioned that.  Besides which, eating quinoa and endamame makes me feel like a better person than I actually am, which is actually just a contrary-sort of person who is really terrible at love.)

So.

I gave a boy a mento.  

That's how we met.  (We were in an economics class together, but I hadn't really noticed him.  I'm the kind of person who either overly notices other people or completely blanks them.  There is no middle ground.)  The economics boy was my waiter at Milestones during a period when I was obsessed with veggie burgers and didn't realize yet that I was allergic to them.  I gave him a mento and he told me he was in my economics class and asked me out.  I think he was the first person who asked me out while sober in such a straight-forward way.  

He was the manager.  I associate him strongly with cilantro.  So much so that even now when I eat cilantro, I think about him.  (Back then, they cooked everything with cilantro, which was considered very trendy, if a herb can actually be considered trendy.)  He was Dutch and very kind and much too old and serious for his actual years.   He wore a tie unironically.  He grew up to look like Colin Firth, I know this from Google.  Google is useful when it comes to old boyfriends.

It ended because of a club called Chocolate Milk where my friends and I would go dancing on Thursdays.  It was a gay club and we thought we were exceptionally cool to be straight girls going to gay dance clubs.  He liked the club a lot and for a while, I thought that was the problem, that he was gay, but then I caught him trying to befriend my best friend in a way that was more than friendly.  I always knew, with him, that the other shoe was going to drop.  Because he'd been sober when he noticed me, he was obviously broken in some insidious way.  I'd known it all along!  I was sophisticated, enjoyed cilantro and gay dance clubs, so I didn't need him!  I don't think I cried when we broke up.  I don't really remember. 

I am excellent at forgetting. Forgetting is a skill that should be more embraced than it actually is, I think.

The cute Morman boy had a pet cow growing up who he later slaughtered and ate.  He was exceptionally good at Jeopardy but I am not a believer and he was a really terrible cook.  Whenever he spoke, I couldn't shake the idea that although he seemed sweet, he would happily turn on (and consume) his best friend.  He'd said that she'd been the best pet ever.  He trained her to do tricks.  I don't know how you can teach a cow tricks and then eat her, I just don't.  He's probably reading this.   Well, what can I do?  He shouldn't have eaten the cow.  

He ate the cow.

I couldn't possibly have loved him, knowing that.  But I was enraptured by his ability to play trivia games without ever making a mistake and the absolute certainty by which he lived his life.  He seemed like a good choice, if only I could get past the beef thing and the gulf between our religious beliefs, which could not have been more vast.  

I also can't remember how that ended.  I am almost certain, in that case, I felt nothing.

I'm not sure why I even mentioned him.  I think I was trying to go in some sort of order, in case you are fact checking.

The bouncer was someone with whom I had the kind of chemistry that altered the fact that he was not my type, was clearly bad news, had bad skin, and did not pass my best friend's standardized test for boys-I-should-date, which I didn't realize until much later meant boys-who-preferred-her.  I don't know why I mention the bouncer because we did not date.  

Ever.  

After months of intense flirting -- flirting is the wrong word here (and always makes me think of hummingbirds) -- one night after the club closed, I went with him and his bouncer friends to a Chinese restaurant where they served us beer in a teapot.  This was to be the start of something, it was understood.  We thought we were very outre drinking beer in tiny china cups meant for tea.  (This outre-ness is a common theme of those years for me.  The actual enjoyment of a thing mattered much less than the appearance and relative coolness of the thing being enjoyed (or not enjoyed, as the case may be.))  He ate a burger with onions and his friends teased him about the onions and about me.  I can remember what I was wearing, which was a long floral dress, motorcycle boots, and a leather jacket, borrowed from my best friend.  I was impressed by a person who would go to a Chinese restaurant and order a burger.  

These were not my people -- I was rarely without my best friend and when I was, I felt unmoored -- yet there I was, without her (although in her clothes), with the sweaty palmed, acne-faced bouncer.  It's not even that his hands were sweaty, it's that his skin had an odd quality to it.   Both papery and wet.   He apologized about the onions and said he'd meet me at home, he had to go back to his place first. I was nervous but happy.  Then something happened.  I don't know what it was.  I do know that when he showed up, I pretended not to be home.  He threw things at my window and I lay on my bed and cried.  I listened to the things making contact with the glass and realized that I would never let him in.  It was summer.  It was really hot, but I had closed and locked the windows before he arrived as though he might scale up the side of the building and come inside.   I lay in the clean sheets and moved my feet around to the cool spots and listened to my own pulse.   He threw things for quite a while.  Not chairs or anything big, but probably rocks, although I don't know where they would have come from.  Maybe it was coins.  People always have coins, but who has stones?  I never saw him again after that until recently when he (or his doppleganger) reappeared as a policeman who gave me a ticket for talking to my mum on my cell phone while I was driving.  I didn't know that I knew it was him until much much later, at which point it was too late.  

It makes no sense to me why I can remember that night but not one of at least 15 break ups I had both before and after that.

That's life. Mostly, things don't make sense. 

All this was meant to lead me somewhere, but it didn't.  These weren't even real relationships.  They were pre-relationships.  They were some place and time where I existed before I'd ever actually been in love or knew anything about heartbreak and life.

I still don't know much about love, actually, now that I think of it, but I've had more practice, although now when someone says "I love you", my kneejerk reaction is to say, "No, you don't." Which sounds less insulting than, "Don't be ridiculous!" which is what I used to say back when I was a mature sophisticate who knew how to dance at gay bars and sip beer out of Chinese tea cups. 

I think my point is that there are always people that through the years, no matter when you see them, you are drawn to them.  And not in a romance-novel type of subtle "We were drawn together like magnets!  Squee!  Cue fireworks!" but more in the kind of force field of things colliding that have to collide, you can't stop them, where you have to actually step back because otherwise you will crash into each other so hard, bones and hearts (probably yours) will be smashed apart, jaggedly tearing through the skin of everything you are pretending to be.

It's mostly best to avoid those people (friending them on Facebook is not a good call, for example), in case you were looking for advice here, which I doubt you were.  Either avoid them or celebrate them because they at least remind you that you can have feelings like these, even if they are for the wrong people at the wrong time in the wrong places. 

I mean, we all make our choices.

I feel strange now, like all these people from my past are suddenly going to Google me and find this and read too much into it, and then I'll have to blush and look away, or just hold very still and pretend to not be at home.

I think next time I teach a class, I'll say, "Write something you'd be embarrassed if anyone ever read."  

You should try it, too.  

Why not?