Love Without Borders
Chapter Eleven
I count my steps because counting is doing, and doing is not thinking, and thinking is the enemy. One, two, three, four. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right. The grey does not change beneath me but the counting holds, a small, warm engine of purpose in a place that has given me no purpose at all, and I hook myself to it the way I have hooked myself to a thousand small engines before this one: the beat of a song, the scroll of a phone, the rhythm of a drink poured and lifted and swallowed, the rush of a crowd pressing in from every side until I could not tell where my body ended and the noise began.
Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty.
I lose count. I start over. This is fine. Starting over is something I know how to do. I have started over on so many mornings, in so many bathrooms, in front of so many mirrors that showed a face I did not want to claim. The starting-over is its own skill, maybe the only skill I have ever mastered: the ability to wake up in a place I do not recognize and construct, from nothing, from less than nothing, from the wreckage of whatever the night produced, a version of Quinn who can walk through a door and smile at a stranger and pretend that the inside matches the outside.
One, two, three, four.
The grey absorbs my steps without comment. No echo. No footfall. No sound of sole against surface, because there is no sole and, as far as I can tell, no surface, only the sensation of walking, of effort, of motion happening somewhere beneath my awareness while the grey extends in every direction like a sky turned inside out, the color of nothing, the temperature of nothing, the sound of nothing, which is the worst part, the absolute worst part, worse than the cold that is not quite cold and the light that is not quite light and the absence of any landmark or wall or edge I could use to measure whether the walking is going anywhere at all.
The silence is the worst part because the silence is where I live when I am not careful.
I have said this before. I said it in the back seat of Micah’s car on the last night of my life, which is a sentence I never expected to think and am not prepared to examine, so I will not examine it, I will file it away in the box where I keep the other sentences I am not prepared to examine, the box inside the box inside the room I do not enter, and I will keep walking, one two three four, because walking is not examining and counting is not thinking and if I can only keep moving I will not have to sit down with the fact that I am dead and in a grey place with no phone and no flask and no music and no crowd and no single thing between me and the sound of my own blood doing laps in my veins.
If I even have veins. If I even have blood. I seem to have something. A body or the memory of a body, hands that open and close when I tell them to, feet that keep producing the sensation of steps even though the steps cover no distance, a chest that rises and falls with a breath I do not need but cannot stop taking. The body is here. The body is mine, the same body I spent twenty-four years trying to leave through every exit I could find. The body I filled with bourbon and weed and whatever Caleb sold out of his backpack sophomore year. The body I drowned in bass at concerts and buried under strangers at parties and ran ragged through sleepless weekends that blurred together like headlights on a wet road, all speed and streak and nothing solid enough to hold.
That body. This body. Still here. Still insisting on existing.
I walk faster. The grey does not care.
Here is what I know about the grey, which is not much, which is almost nothing, which is exactly as much as the grey has chosen to reveal, which is: nothing. It has no walls. It has no ceiling. It has no floor in any meaningful sense, only a flatness that extends in all directions and offers no friction and no feedback and no indication that I am anywhere at all, rather than suspended in the middle of a vast, colorless, soundless bowl from which all the air has been let out. The grey is not dark and not light. It is not warm and not cold. It is not hostile and not welcoming. It simply is, in the way that a held breath simply is, a pause between one thing and the next, and the pause has been going on for what feels like a very long time, though time is another thing this place does not offer, along with horizons, directions, distances, and reasons to believe that walking will ever lead me to a wall I can put my back against.
I have tried to find a wall. I have walked in what I believe is a straight line, though without landmarks I cannot confirm this, for what might have been hours or might have been days. The grey gave me nothing. No edge, no boundary, no place where the grey stopped and something else began. I changed direction. I walked at an angle to my original line, or what I thought was an angle, because angles require reference points and reference points require objects and objects are the one thing this place has decided not to provide. I tried running. The running worked, in that my legs moved faster, but the result was the same: grey in front of me, grey behind me, grey on every side, an infinite, patient, featureless expanse that received my urgency without interest and gave me nothing to bump against.
There are no walls here. This is important. Walls are things I understand. Walls are geography, are boundaries, are the bones of a room, and a room is a thing that can be filled. I have been filling rooms my whole life. A room with walls can hold a party. A room with walls can contain music. A room with walls has a door, and a door is an exit, and an exit is a direction, and a direction is the first ingredient in the only recipe I know, which is: leave. Go somewhere. Go anywhere. Be in motion. Be elsewhere. Be the girl who just left and not the girl who is still here, because the girl who is still here is the one who has to sit with herself, and sitting with myself is the thing I cannot do, the thing the whole elaborate machinery of my life was built to prevent.
But there are no walls. No rooms. No doors. No exits. No elsewhere to be in. The grey is not a room. The grey is the absence of rooms. It is the blank space before anyone draws the floor plan, before anyone hangs the lights or plugs in the speakers or opens the bar. And without a room to fill I am just a person standing in the open, exposed on every side, with nothing between me and the quiet.
I keep walking. I talk to myself because talking is noise and noise is insulation. I say things. Stupid things, the kinds of things I would say to Micah to make him sigh, or to Naomi to make her almost-laugh, or to a stranger at a bar to keep the conversation alive long enough that the stranger does not notice I have nothing to say. I narrate the grey. I describe it out loud. I say, “Okay, Quinn, this is a grey place with no walls and no floor and no phone and you look great, by the way, very ghostly chic, ten out of ten would haunt.”
The joke dies in the air. The grey swallows it without a smile. The words go out of me and do not come back, not as echoes, not as rebounds, not as anything at all, and the swallowing is worse than silence because it is active, it is the grey consuming my noise the way black holes consume light, taking everything I throw at it and offering no friction, no response, no surface for my voice to bounce off and come home changed.
I try singing. My voice works. It sounds strange in the grey, thin and bare, the way a voice sounds in an empty parking garage at four in the morning when the acoustics are wrong and the reverb has gone home. I sing the song from the concert, the last one, the one with the bass line that rattled my teeth, the one Quinn-from-before-the-dying danced to with her arms over her head and her eyes closed and the whole crushing beautiful anonymity of the crowd pressing against her like a second skin. I sing the chorus. I do not know all the words. I never know all the words. The words were never the point. The point was always the volume, the vibration in the sternum, the feeling of being inside a sound so large that my own sound disappeared into it and I could pretend, for three hours, that I was not a person with a history but a body in a wave, anonymous and loud and free.
The singing comes out small. The grey does not amplify. There is no bass. No vibration. No crowd to press against. Just my voice, stripped of everything that made it bearable, doing what voices do when there is nothing around them to absorb the vulnerability of the sound: cracking. Wavering. Becoming, against my will, honest.
I stop singing.
The problem with the grey is that it is empty in exactly the wrong way. If it were empty like a desert I could cross it. A desert has horizon, has sky, has the suggestion of a direction even if the direction is just away. If it were empty like a dark room I could orient myself by touch, could feel along the walls until I found a switch or a doorknob or at least the corner where two surfaces meet, because a corner is a location and a location is knowledge and knowledge is power, which is something someone said to me once, maybe a therapist, maybe a poster on the wall of a guidance counselor’s office, back when I was sixteen and still being sent to people who sat across from me with notebooks and waited for me to say the thing I would not say.
But the grey is not empty like a desert or a dark room. The grey is empty like the inside of my own head at three in the morning when the substance has worn off and the music has stopped and the person beside me has fallen asleep and I am lying in a bed that may or may not be mine, staring at a ceiling I cannot see, and the thoughts begin. The grey is that emptiness. The emptiness that has no geography. The emptiness that is not a space but a condition, the condition of being alone with yourself after every distraction has been confiscated.
This is what the grey has done. It has confiscated my distractions.
I take inventory because inventory is something to do. I have no phone. I have no flask. I have no earbuds, no bag, no wallet, no keys, no gum, no the-thing-in-the-zippered-pocket-that-I-keep-for-emergencies. I have no jacket to zip and unzip, no hair tie to fiddle with, no nails to bite. My body is wearing something, clothes of a kind, though I could not describe them and do not care to, because the clothes are not the point, the absence is the point: the absence of every prop, tool, device, substance, and surface that I have arranged around myself like a fortress for the last ten years of my life.
Ten years. I was fourteen when it started. The math has always been simple. Fourteen to twenty-four. A decade of filling every silence, numbing every nerve, drowning every quiet moment in whatever was at hand. The machinery of avoidance does not need complicated engineering. It needs only fuel. Alcohol. Noise. Motion. People. Screens. Anything that keeps the room occupied, that prevents the moment of stillness in which the thoughts find you and the feelings catch up and the girl in the basement wakes and puts her face against the locked door and asks to come out.
I have not let her out. Not once. Not in ten years. Not for any of the therapists my mother sent me to, those patient, well-meaning people with their diplomas and their tissues and their careful, open-ended questions designed to coax the locked thing into the open. Quinn, can you tell me about the restlessness? Quinn, what do you think you’re running from? Quinn, when you say you’re afraid of being still, what do you think would happen if you were?
I know what would happen. She would come out. The girl in the basement. The one I locked down there when I was fourteen because she felt too much and the feeling was going to kill me, or at least make me into someone who could not function, and functioning was all I had, the bare minimum of being-in-the-world that kept my mother from putting me in a program and kept my friends from having the conversation and kept me from becoming the girl people talk about in lowered voices at reunions: Did you hear about Quinn? Yeah, she’s in some place now. I think it was bad.
It was bad. It was always bad. The badness was the point, was the engine, was the fuel source for the running. Because the only thing worse than feeling everything is feeling nothing, and the only thing worse than feeling nothing is the moment between the two, the gap where the numbness lifts and the rawness has not yet returned and you are, for one terrible instant, aware of the architecture of your own avoidance, the scaffolding and the false walls and the soundproofing you have installed between yourself and your own interior, and the awareness is unbearable because it means the whole structure is a choice, which means you could choose differently, which means you are responsible, and responsibility is a room with no exit, and a room with no exit is the one thing Quinn cannot survive.
So I run.
I am running now. Here, in the grey. My feet are moving, or the memory of feet is producing the memory of motion, and the motion is not fast and not slow and covers no distance at all, but it is motion, and motion is not stillness, and not-stillness is the only rule I have left.
I think about the house on Garfield Street.
I do not mean to. Thinking about the house is thinking about Naomi and Micah, and thinking about Naomi and Micah is thinking about people who loved me without requiring me to be legible, and thinking about being loved is too close to thinking about being known, and being known is the door I will not open because behind that door is the girl and behind the girl is the question and behind the question is the answer, and the answer might be that I was loved all along and wasted it, and the wasting is a grief I have no container for.
But the grey does not care what I mean to think about. The grey strips the interference the way a river strips paint: slowly, patiently, without effort. In the silence, without the phone and the music and the flask and the crowd, the memories surface. They come the way they used to come at four in the morning when the last party was over and the apartment was empty and I was lying on a couch that smelled like someone else’s shampoo, too tired to build the wall and too awake to sleep.
The kitchen on Garfield Street. The particular smell of it: burnt toast and coffee grounds and the pine air freshener that Micah’s old car passed on to the kitchen counter when Quinn (I mean me, I mean this Quinn, the one who is walking in the grey and trying not to think) brought it inside as a joke and Naomi refused to throw it out because Naomi does not throw out anything that belongs to someone she has decided to keep, and she had decided to keep us, all three of us, the broken set, the chosen family that happened when three people with three different wounds rented three adjacent rooms and discovered that the unspoken agreement not to ask was worth more than any conversation could have been.
I miss them. The missing hits me the way a wave hits you when your back is turned, all at once and from a direction you were not watching, and for a moment I am not walking in the grey at all but standing at the kitchen counter at Garfield Street on a Tuesday morning with Naomi reading the news on her phone and Micah doing the crossword in ink because he is the kind of person who does crosswords in ink, the kind of person who is so certain of his own mind that he does not need the option to erase, and the three of us are not talking, just being in the same room, three separate silences that touch at the edges without requiring explanation, and the touching is enough.
It was enough. It was the closest I have ever come to sitting still. Not because the room was quiet, though it was, those mornings, quieter than I could tolerate for long. But because the quiet in that kitchen was not the dangerous kind. It was not the quiet of four a.m. alone. It was the quiet of company, of people who had seen the edges of my mess and not retreated, and in that company the girl in the basement could press her face to the locked door and hear voices on the other side and know that the house was not empty, that someone was out there, that the loneliness was not total.
I never told them. Either of them. What the girl in the basement looks like. What she carries. Why she is locked down there, and why the lock is the most important structure in my life, more important than the flask and the noise and all the other tools of oblivion. I never said the words. Not because I did not trust them. I trusted Micah more than I have trusted any person alive, which is not saying much, because the amount of trust I have been able to give anyone alive would fit in a thimble with room left for a marble. I trusted Naomi in the particular way you trust someone who has her own locked basement and does not pretend otherwise. I trusted the house. I trusted the mornings and the burnt toast and the crossword in ink. And I still could not say the thing, because saying it would mean sitting still in a room with another person and letting the door open, and the door opening would mean being seen, and being seen is the thing, the original thing, the foundational terror that everything else is built on top of.
Being seen. That is what I am running from. Not the drinking. Not the pills. Not the period I do not talk about. Those are methods, not motives. They are the tools of the running, not the reason for it. The reason is simpler and worse: I am terrified, at the molecular level, in the bone, in the blood, in whatever part of a person holds the first and oldest fears, of being seen. Of being looked at directly. Of having someone peer past the performance, past the laughing and the dancing and the too-loud voice and the too-fast talking, and find the thing underneath, the still, small, crouching thing that has been waiting in the dark since I was fourteen years old, and ask it what it wants.
Because what if it wants to be loved? And what if the wanting is visible? And what if the visibility invites someone in, and the someone comes in, and they see the whole of it, the mess and the fear and the years of numbness piled up like laundry in a room no one visits, and they look at all of it, and they leave?
Everyone leaves.
Not Micah. Not Naomi. They did not leave. They stayed. They stayed through the Walmart parking lot and the missing shoes and the mascara and the week in March when I vanished and Micah drove forty-five minutes to find me and brought me home and made toast and did not ask. They stayed and they stayed and the staying was the miracle, the only miracle I believe in, and even the staying was not enough to make me open the door, because what if the staying had limits, and what if the door was the limit, and what if behind the door was the thing that would finally be too much, and the staying would end, and I would be alone in the room with the girl and no one on the other side?
I could not risk it. So I kept the door locked and I kept the flask full and I kept the music loud, and Micah and Naomi and I shared a kitchen and a bathroom and the particular mercy of people who do not ask, and it was enough. It was not everything. But it was enough.
And now it is gone. The house is gone. The kitchen is gone. The mornings are gone. Micah and Naomi are somewhere in this grey, or maybe they are nowhere, maybe they are gone in a way that the word gone is not big enough to hold, and I am walking in a place with no walls and no music and no flask and no phone and no Micah with his crossword and no Naomi with her steady, angular vigilance, and the memories are surfacing because there is nothing else to surface in, no noise to drown them in, no motion fast enough to outrun them, and the grey, which I thought was empty, is full of me, the whole accumulated, unexamined, carefully avoided weight of being Quinn.
I try humming. Humming worked in the car. Humming was a wall I could build with nothing but breath and teeth and the particular frequency of a bass line lodged in the memory like a splinter. I hum the song from the concert, the last concert, the concert that was happening in my life three hours or three centuries ago, and the humming comes out thin and strange in the grey but it is something, it is a sound, it is noise of a kind, and I hold on to it the way a drowning person holds on to a plank.
The humming fills about one inch of the silence. The silence is a mile wide.
I hum louder. I add words. I sing the chorus, or what I remember of the chorus, which is mostly vowels and a few consonants in the wrong order, because I never knew the lyrics, because lyrics are information and information requires attention and attention is a form of stillness and stillness is death, or it was, before death turned out to be something other than I expected, before death turned out to be a grey country with no walls and a silence too large for my voice to fill and a body that will not stop producing the sensation of breathing even though breathing is no longer, as far as I can tell, required.
I sing for what might be minutes or might be hours. The grey does not mark time. It does not say that was twenty minutes or that was a day or the concert was four hundred years ago and you are still humming the chorus. The grey holds no clocks. The grey is the absence of clocks, which means the singing has no endpoint and no measure, and without a measure the singing becomes a loop, the same chorus over and over, the words decaying with each repetition until the words are not words anymore but sounds, pure sound, vowels and breath and the vibration of something that used to be a song and is now just Quinn trying to keep the silence at arm’s length.
The singing does not work. It worked when there was a car around me and a steering column vibrating with bass and a friend’s amused glance in the rearview mirror. It does not work here. Here, the singing is not insulation. It is exposure. Every note goes out into the grey naked and thin and comes back to me as evidence that I am the only sound in a place that has no other sound, which means I am alone, and being alone in silence is the condition I have spent my entire life engineering my way out of.
I stop singing. The silence rushes back. It does not rush, exactly. It was always here. It just lets me notice it again, the way a lake lets you notice its depth when you stop splashing.
I start talking. Not singing. Talking. I talk to the grey the way I talk at parties, fast, too fast, filling every gap before the gap can fill itself, because a gap in the conversation is an opening and an opening is an invitation for someone to ask a question and a question is a key and a key might open the door and behind the door is the girl and behind the girl is the whole vast unspoken archive of Quinn.
“So this is death,” I say. “This is the big reveal. Very minimalist. Very conceptual. Very budget-conscious.” The words go out into the grey and die without echo. “I have to say, I expected more. Fire, maybe. Or at least a pamphlet. Welcome to the afterlife, here is your complimentary fog and your complete lack of amenities.”
Nobody laughs. There is nobody here to laugh. This is, of course, the point. This is the geometry of my particular punishment, if this is a punishment, though I do not know who is punishing me or for what, because punishment requires a judge and a crime and a courtroom, and I have committed no crime that I know of unless the crime is being twenty-four and broken and afraid of sitting still, which seems like a harsh sentencing guideline even for a universe that has already killed me in a car accident on a wet road on a Sunday night in November.
I keep talking. I talk about the concert. I describe it to the grey, or to myself, or to whoever is not listening: the venue, the crowd, the way the floor shook when the bass hit, the sweat and the heat and the press of bodies and the beautiful, beautiful anonymity of being nobody in a sea of nobodies, all of us moving to the same beat, all of us too loud and too close and too alive to be lonely.
I describe the drive home. Micah’s car. The pine air freshener that stopped working in September. Naomi in the passenger seat, angular and watchful. The rain on the windshield. The music I turned up because the concert was fading and the quiet was pressing in and I needed another wall between me and the thinking.
I describe the accident. Or I try. The accident does not come in order. It comes in pieces, the way all my worst memories come, as shrapnel rather than sequence. The sound first, metal against metal against something harder than both, the sound of a world coming apart at the joints. Then the impact, which was not a single event but a cascade, a chain reaction of forces I could not track and my body could not absorb. Then the cold. Then the pain. Then the moment when the pain stopped mattering because something larger was happening, something I could feel but could not name, a widening, an opening, as though time were a room that had been too small and someone had knocked out the walls.
Then the light.
I stop talking.
The light. The light. I do not want to think about the light, which means I am thinking about the light, because that is how the grey works, that is its one trick, its only talent: the thing you do not want to think about is the thing the silence delivers to your door like a package you did not order and cannot return.
The light came in the dying. It came after the pain stopped and the cold stopped and the car stopped mattering and the road stopped mattering and the rain stopped mattering and everything I had ever used to orient myself in the world fell away like scenery being struck after the final act. And in the absence of scenery, in the bare, stripped space behind the set, there was light. Not the light of headlamps or hospitals or the blue-white flicker of a phone screen at three in the morning. A different kind. A light that had weight and warmth and presence, a light that was not lighting a room but was the room, was the space itself, and the space was alive and the aliveness was personal and the personal was specific and the specific was: it knew me.
Not the me who dances. Not the me who drinks. Not the me who laughs too loud at parties and leaves before anyone can ask where she is going. The other me. The underneath me. The one in the basement. The light went past every lock I had ever installed and every wall I had ever built and every layer of noise and motion and numbness I had layered over the soft, frightened center of myself, and it found her. The girl on the bathroom floor at three in the morning. The girl who feels everything when the numbness lifts. The girl I locked away because I believed, with the unshakeable conviction of a fourteen-year-old who has just learned how dangerous it is to feel, that if anyone ever found her they would leave.
The light found her. And the light did not leave.
The light was glad. That is the word. Not relieved, not satisfied, not accomplished. Glad, the way a person is glad when someone they have been looking for walks through the door, the way a parent is glad when a child comes home. The gladness was not a concept. It was a temperature. It was a pressure. It was a physical thing, a warmth against my face, a weight in my chest that was not the weight of grief or shame or the accumulated tonnage of things I have never said but something else, something lighter, something that pressed in from the outside instead of pressing down from the inside, and the difference was the most frightening thing I have ever felt, because the difference meant the light was not like everything else that has ever tried to see me.
Everything else that has ever tried to see me has had an exit strategy. The therapists had their fifty minutes and their professional boundaries. The friends had their tolerance thresholds. My mother had her programs and her interventions and her carefully researched facilities, which were the language she spoke because the language of I am afraid for you was too raw for a woman who had learned, from her own mother, that raw things get you hurt. Everyone who looked had a limit. A distance beyond which the looking would stop and the retreat would begin. I knew this. I could feel it in every interaction, the invisible line past which the other person would decide that Quinn was too much, too messy, too broken, too demanding of a patience they had not budgeted for.
The light had no line. The light had no limit. The light looked past the performance and found the girl and was glad, not in the careful, boundaried way of a person managing their exposure to someone else’s damage, but in the total, reckless, unreserved way of someone who wanted the whole of it, the mess and the fear and the locked basement and everything in it, and was not going to back away regardless of what the looking revealed.
And I ran.
I ran because the gladness was worse than the leaving. The leaving I know how to survive. I have protocols for the leaving. I have scripts and exits and backup plans. I know how to be the girl who gets left, because the girl who gets left is the girl who was right all along: see, I told you, I told you no one stays, I told you the seeing was the end, and now you know, and now we can go back to the running, which is painful and exhausting and slowly destroying me but at least has the virtue of being familiar.
But the gladness. The gladness I have no protocol for. The gladness upends the entire system. If the light is glad to find the girl in the basement, then the girl in the basement is not the monster I believed she was. And if she is not a monster, then the locking was wrong. And if the locking was wrong, then the running was wrong. And if the running was wrong, then the last ten years of my life, the drinking and the noise and the motion and the numbness and the whole elaborate, exhausting architecture of avoidance, were not survival but waste, a decade spent fortifying a wall against a love that was never going to hurt me, and that possibility is so large and so devastating that my body did what it has always done when the truth gets too close: it turned and it bolted and it chose the grey over the gladness because the grey, at least, does not ask me to revise my understanding of who I am.
Except the grey is not cooperating. The grey is not the relief I expected. The grey is not the nothing I chose it for. The grey is a box with no lid and no walls, which means it is not a box at all but an openness, and the openness is filled with me, and me is the thing I was trying to get away from.
I try pacing. Pacing is different from walking because pacing has a pattern, back and forth, back and forth, a rhythm that mimics the rhythm of a caged animal, and there is comfort in the caging if the cage has sides you can bounce off, walls that define the space, edges that tell you where the motion starts and where it turns. I pace. Left, left, left, turn. Right, right, right, turn. The turns are imaginary. There is nothing in the grey to turn against, no wall to pivot from, no marker to indicate that I have reached any boundary at all. I set my own boundaries. I count twenty steps in one direction, then turn and count twenty steps in the other, and the counting is a kind of purpose and the purpose is a kind of noise and the noise is a kind of wall, and I am building the wall out of numbers now because numbers are all I have left.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
Fourteen. I was fourteen when I learned that feeling was dangerous. Not because someone told me. No one told me. My mother did not sit me down and say, Quinn, the feelings will destroy you. My father, who was already gone by then, who left when I was ten with a suitcase and a woman named Charlotte and a forwarding address that turned out to be temporary, did not call to warn me that the feelings were coming. Nobody warned me. The feelings arrived on their own, the way weather arrives, without permission, without announcement, on a Tuesday afternoon in October when I was sitting in the back row of Ms. Reinhardt’s biology class and the room went sideways for no reason I could name.
I do not want to think about this. I am thinking about it anyway, because the grey has confiscated my distractions and the memories are the only furniture in this place, the only objects in the empty room, and the mind, left alone with nothing to process, will process itself, will turn its attention to the stored files, the archived footage, the things it has been too busy and too loud and too numb to examine for a decade.
I was sitting in the back row. The fluorescent light was buzzing. Ms. Reinhardt was talking about cell division, about the way a single cell splits itself into two copies, each one carrying the full code, the whole instruction set, everything needed to build the organism all over again. And something about the image, the idea of a thing dividing itself, of a single self becoming two selves that are each the whole self, broke something open in me that had been holding, and I felt, for the first time in my life, the full weight of being a person. Not the weight of any particular problem. Not the weight of my father leaving or my mother worrying or the social minefield of freshman year. The weight of the fact of existing. The weight of consciousness itself, of being an I that knows it is an I, of carrying a self around inside a body and knowing that the self will never be visible from the outside, and the inside is the only place where the self lives, and the inside is dark and enormous and full of things I had not yet learned to name.
I could not breathe. This is not a metaphor. My lungs seized. The room tilted. My hands went cold and my vision went narrow and the buzzing of the fluorescent light became a roar and I was on the floor, or near the floor, leaning against the wall with my head between my knees while Ms. Reinhardt’s voice came to me from a great distance, asking if I was all right, asking if someone should call the nurse, and I could not answer because answering would have required using a voice that belonged to the self I had just become aware of, and the awareness was not enlightenment, it was ambush, it was the sudden, violent introduction to a terror I had not known was waiting.
They called my mother. My mother came. She held me in the car and asked what happened and I could not tell her because I did not have the language, because the language does not exist, because how do you tell your mother that you are afraid of being a person? That the person inside you is too large and too raw and too real, and the realness is the thing you cannot bear, and you need something, anything, to make the person smaller, to push her back down, to lock her in a room where she will not ambush you in biology class and make you fall off your chair?
I did not find the language. I found the flask instead. Not a flask, at first. A bottle. Vodka, from the cabinet above the refrigerator that my mother kept stocked for the friends who came over on Friday nights to drink wine and talk about the men who had disappointed them. I took the vodka to my room and drank until the person inside me went quiet, and the quiet was not the terrifying quiet of the empty room but the warm, thick, chemical quiet of a body shutting itself down, and in that warm quiet the feeling receded and the fear receded and I slept for twelve hours and woke with a headache and a knowledge that I would use for the next ten years: that the feelings could be managed, that the self could be muted, that the girl who ambushed me in biology class could be locked in a basement and kept there, as long as I kept pouring, kept moving, kept filling every silence before the silence filled me.
I was fourteen. The math is easy.
Nineteen, twenty. Turn.
I pace in the other direction. The grey receives me. The grey always receives me. The grey is the most patient thing I have ever encountered, more patient than Micah, more patient than any therapist, more patient than my mother, who was patient in her way but whose patience had a texture of fear woven through it, the particular patience of a woman who is watching her daughter come apart and does not know which piece to grab first.
The grey’s patience is different. The grey’s patience has no fear in it. The grey simply is, and the being is total, and the totality includes me, and the inclusion is not active and not passive but something else, something I do not have a word for, something that feels like being held without being touched, like being watched without being surveilled, like being in a room with someone who has nowhere else to be and nothing else to do and no agenda beyond the simple, unadorned fact of being here, with me, in the quiet, for as long as the quiet lasts.
I do not like it. I do not like it because the patience of the grey is too close to the patience of the light, and the patience of the light is the thing that undid me at the Threshold, the thing that made the running necessary, the thing I am still, even now, even here, even in the place with no walls and no distance and no exit, trying to outrun.
The nearness.
I have been trying not to write this paragraph. I have been trying not to admit that the nearness is here, that it has been here the whole time, that it was here when I started walking and here when I started counting and here when I started singing and talking and pacing, that it has been present at the edge of every moment in this grey place like a warmth held just out of reach, like a sound pitched just below the frequency of hearing, like someone standing in the next room with the door ajar.
It is not chasing me. This is the thing I cannot make fit. Everything that has ever wanted something from me has chased. Boys chased. Dealers chased. My mother’s concern chased, in its own suffocating, well-intentioned way. The therapists chased, with their open-ended questions and their gentle persistence and their fifty-minute hours that were structured, I understood even then, as a form of ambush: sit the girl down, close the door, let the silence do the work, wait for the crack. Even kindness, in my experience, chases. Even love chases. Even the arms that open for you are arms that will close around you, and the closing is the trap, and the trap is the sitting-still, and the sitting-still is the death.
The nearness does not chase. The nearness does not close. The nearness does not press or insist or demand or structure itself as an ambush with a fifty-minute clock and a box of tissues on the side table. The nearness is simply here. It sits in the grey the way a candle sits in a room, not reaching for the corners, just burning, just being warm, and the warmth reaches me as a faint pressure on the skin, if I have skin, a kind of heat that I feel most on the side of my face I keep turned away from it, which is always the left side, or maybe always the right side, it does not matter because the nearness is not on one side, the nearness is everywhere, it is behind me and beside me and above me and under me, it is woven into the grey itself, and the grey is not, I am beginning to understand, the nothing I took it for.
The grey is what the nearness feels like to someone who will not turn around.
I do not turn around. I keep moving. I pick up the pace because the nearness has a quality that frightens me more than all the other qualities put together, more than the patience and the warmth and the non-chasing and the simply-being-here. The nearness has a quality of knowing. Not the knowing of a file or a record or a therapist’s intake form. The knowing of the light. The same knowing. The total, specific, unshakeable knowing that looked past every wall I had built and found the girl in the basement and was glad.
The gladness is in the nearness. Distant, muted, held back by whatever distance I am maintaining with my walking and my counting and my pacing and my refusal to be still, but present. Still present. The gladness has not retracted. The gladness has not been withdrawn as punishment for my running. The gladness is simply here, waiting at the edge of everything, as though my running has not tired it, as though my avoidance has not offended it, as though the whole frantic decade of filling every silence and numbing every nerve and drowning every quiet moment in whatever chemical or sonic or human substance was at hand has not discouraged it even slightly.
This is what I cannot bear. Not the grey. Not the silence. Not the absence of the flask and the phone. The gladness. The surviving gladness. The gladness that will not go away no matter how far I walk or how fast I count or how many jokes I make to the empty air. The gladness that sits in the nearness the way a heartbeat sits in a body, steady and patient and absolutely, immovably there, and the question it poses is the one question I have been running from since I was fourteen years old: What if you stopped? What if you turned around? What if you let yourself be found?
I do not stop. I do not turn around. I let the question sit at the edge of the grey where it has always been sitting and I walk in the other direction, and the direction does not matter because every direction is toward the nearness, and the nearness is not a location but a condition, and the condition is: I am not alone. I have never been alone. The thing I have been running from is not running after me. It is only waiting. And the waiting has no expiration date and no patience limit and no closing time.
I walk faster.
Time passes, or does not pass. The grey has no clock and no sunset and no barista calling last round, no bouncer tapping me on the shoulder to say the venue is closing, no Micah glancing at the clock on the dashboard and saying we should head back. The grey has no endings. This is its cruelty, if it is cruel, or its mercy, if it is kind: the grey gives me nothing to count toward. No closing time. No finish line. No moment when the running will be over because the race has ended, and the race’s ending would free me from the obligation of running and I could stop and sit down and say, with the moral authority of someone who has completed the required distance, Okay, I am done.
The grey offers no done. The grey is ongoing. And the ongoing-ness of it is the thing that is slowly, methodically, with a patience that I am beginning to suspect is not neutral but intentional, wearing me down.
My feet, or whatever is doing the work of feet in this place, are tired. Can you be tired in the grey? The question is academic, which means it is a distraction, which means I grab it with both hands because distractions are scarce here and I will take what I can get. Can a body that is not a body experience fatigue? Can legs that may be memories of legs develop the sensation of having walked too long? Can the machine of avoidance, which has been running without pause for what feels like years and may have been hours and cannot be measured because measurement requires clocks and clocks require time and time is one of the many, many things the grey has decided not to provide, develop the equivalent of engine failure?
It seems so. Something is slowing. Not the grey, which does not change. Not the nearness, which does not change. Something in me. The counting has lost its rhythm. The pacing has lost its shape. The walking has become a shuffle, and the shuffle has become a drift, and the drift is taking me in no direction at all, which means I am not running anymore, which means I am not moving with purpose, which means I am doing the thing I have spent my life avoiding: I am being still.
Not quite still. Not yet. My feet are still lifting and falling, producing the minimal sensation of motion, but the motion is cosmetic now, a gesture rather than a travel, the equivalent of sitting on a bus and bouncing my leg because the bus is doing the moving and the leg is just pretending to participate. I am pretending to run. The pretending is the last wall. And the wall is thin.
The silence comes closer. Not closer in the way a predator comes closer, with intent and direction and a narrowing of distance. Closer in the way a tide comes in: slowly, inevitably, covering ground I thought was mine and redefining the shoreline without effort, without malice, without the slightest indication that it cares about my preference for dry land. The silence has been here the whole time, vast and patient and everywhere, and my singing and my talking and my counting were small, brave, futile things, sticks in the sand against a tide that does not know what sticks are.
The silence is in. The silence has me. The music is gone and the flask is gone and the phone is gone and the crowd is gone and the walking is slowing and the counting has stopped and the jokes have died and the songs have failed and I am standing, or something close to standing, in the grey with nothing between me and the quiet, and the quiet is not empty.
The quiet is full of the nearness.
I can feel it everywhere. Not as a wall or a pressure or a hand on my shoulder, but as a temperature, a warmth that is not the warmth of the grey, which has no temperature, but a warmth that comes from outside the grey or beneath the grey or through the grey, the way sunlight comes through a window, transformed by the glass but still unmistakably sun. The warmth is on my skin and in my chest and behind my eyes and under my feet and it is the same warmth I felt at the Threshold, the same warmth I ran from, the warmth of the light that found the girl in the basement and was glad.
The gladness.
It is still here. After all the walking and the counting and the singing and the pacing and the joking and the refusal and the running, the gladness is still here. It has not diminished. It has not been offended by my flight. It has not withdrawn in exasperation or disappointment or the particular exhaustion of someone who has been waiting too long for a response that is never going to come. The gladness is patient. The gladness is permanent. The gladness is as present now as it was at the Threshold, as warm, as specific, as fitted to the shape of my particular wound as though it were designed for exactly this girl, exactly this flight, exactly this decade of numbness and noise.
As though the gladness is not a feeling that the nearness happens to have. As though the gladness is what the nearness is.
I stop walking.
The stopping is not a decision. The stopping is a collapse. My legs, or the memory of my legs, simply quit. The machine that has been running for ten years in one body and for some measureless stretch of time in this grey place runs out of fuel, or out of will, or out of whatever sustains the pretense that motion is protection and distance is safety and filling the room is better than being in the room. I do not sit down, because sitting down would require a surface to sit on, and the grey does not offer surfaces. I simply stop. I am vertical and motionless and the air, if there is air, does not move, and the silence, which has been waiting for this moment with the patience of something that has all of eternity and none of the urgency, settles around me like water around a stone.
I am still.
The stillness is the thing I feared. The stillness is the three a.m. room with no music. The stillness is the bathroom floor. The stillness is the moment between the numbness lifting and the rawness returning, the gap in which the whole architecture of my avoidance becomes visible and I can see the scaffolding for what it is: not a building but a barricade, not a home but a wall, and behind the wall is not the monster I thought but the girl, the original girl, the one who felt too much in biology class and has been locked in the basement ever since, pressing her face to the door, waiting, waiting, waiting to be let out.
The nearness does not step closer. The nearness was already close. The nearness was always close. The distance I thought I was maintaining with my running was not distance at all but noise, the noise I was making with my feet and my voice and my counting, and now that the noise has stopped the nearness has not changed position. It has not moved. I have not been outrunning it. I have been running inside it. The nearness is not behind me. The nearness is the room.
The grey is the room. The nearness is the room. The warmth, the patience, the waiting, the gladness, the knowing, the relentless, non-chasing, non-demanding presence that has been here the whole time, beneath every step and behind every joke and inside every silence I tried to fill, is the room. And I have been running laps inside it.
I am still. The girl in the basement is still. The door is still locked, but the lock is thinner than it was, and the girl is pressing against it, and the pressing is not frantic, not desperate, not the hammering of someone who wants out. The pressing is gentle. The pressing is the pressing of someone who has heard, through the wood of the door, through the years of lock and silence, a sound she recognizes but cannot name. A warmth she feels but cannot source. A gladness that is not hers but is for her, and the for-her is the impossible thing, the unbelievable thing, the thing she has crouched in the dark for a decade waiting to hear and never believing she would hear, and the hearing, now, in the stillness, in the grey, in the place with no walls and no flask and no exit, is the first crack.
Not a surrender. Not yet. Not close to yet. The door is still locked. The girl is still inside. The running has stopped but the refusal has not, and the refusal is older and deeper than the running, and the refusal says: Do not open the door. Do not let them see. The seeing is the end.
But the nearness waits. The nearness, which has seen already, which saw at the Threshold, which looked past every lock and every wall and found her and was glad, waits. It does not knock. It does not call through the wood. It does not jimmy the lock or put its shoulder to the frame. It simply remains, warm and close and patient and full of a gladness that has no conditions and no limits and no exit strategy, and the remaining is the most terrifying and the most tender thing I have ever felt, and I am still, and the grey is still, and the silence is no longer empty but full of something I do not have a name for.
Something that is not chasing me.
Something that has never been chasing me.
Something that is only, only, only waiting.