Love Without Borders
Chapter Fifteen
I am still and the stillness has not killed me yet.
That is the first surprise. The first of what I suspect will be many, each one worse than the last, because the grey has a talent for handing me the things I was certain would end me and then standing back to observe that they have not. My legs have quit. My counting has quit. The singing died hours or centuries ago, and the jokes died after that, and the pacing died after that, and the shuffle died after that, and now I am vertical and motionless in a place that has no horizon and no clock and no closing time, and I am still here. I am still me. The stillness has swallowed everything I used to fill it with and has not swallowed me, and the not-swallowing is the worst possible outcome, because the swallowing would have been a kind of proof. Would have confirmed the theory. Would have let me say, finally and forever, See, I was right, being still was death, and now I am dead of it, and the running was correct.
The running was not correct. The running was a decade of wrong turns taken at the speed of survival, and the survival was not survival but a slower kind of drowning, and the drowning was not accidental but chosen, because chosen drowning in noise and motion and chemical numbness felt less fatal than the alternative, which was: this. Standing in the open with nothing between me and the quiet. Standing in the open with no walls and no flask and no phone and no crowd pressing against me like a second skin. Standing in the open with the nearness.
The nearness is here. The nearness has been here. The nearness was here when I was running and here when I was counting and here when I was singing the chorus with the wrong words and here when I was telling jokes to the empty grey and here when I was pacing twenty steps and turning and twenty steps and turning and here when the pacing collapsed into the shuffle and here when the shuffle collapsed into this, this standing, this absence of motion, this condition I have not inhabited voluntarily since I was fourteen years old and discovered, in the back row of Ms. Reinhardt’s biology class, that being present in my own body was more weight than my body could hold.
The nearness does not comment on my stopping. The nearness does not say finally or about time or I knew you’d wear out. The nearness does not gloat. The nearness does not lean in. The nearness simply continues, steady and warm and everywhere, the way sunlight continues when a person stops running and sits down in a field, neither following nor retreating, just there, the same temperature it always was, the same presence on the skin, indifferent to whether the skin was in motion or at rest.
Except the nearness is not indifferent. That is the thing I keep circling. The nearness is not a weather system. The nearness is not ambient. The nearness has in it the quality of attention, of directed awareness, of someone in the room who is not merely present but present at me, turned toward me with the focus of a person who has been waiting and is glad the waiting is shifting into something else. The nearness is personal. It has been personal since the Threshold, since the light that found the girl in the basement and was glad, since the gladness that upended the system and sent me bolting into the grey because the grey, at least, did not demand that I revise my understanding of who I am.
Except it did. The grey has demanded nothing and revised everything. The grey has done what ten years of running was designed to prevent: it has left me alone with myself, and the self I am alone with is not the self I was running from.
Or it is the self I was running from, and the self I was running from is not what I thought.
The girl in the basement is pressing against the door.
I can feel her. I could always feel her, even through the noise, even through the chemicals, even through the concerts and the crowds and the three a.m. bars and the six a.m. showers where I stood under the water with my forehead against the tile and waited for the hangover to become bearable, which usually took about forty minutes, which was forty minutes of stillness I could tolerate only because the pain was loud enough to count as noise. Even through all of that, I could feel her. A pressure behind the sternum. A weight in the ribs. A low, constant hum beneath every other frequency in my life, like the hum of a refrigerator you stop hearing until the power goes out and the silence reveals what the hum was covering, which was: everything.
She is pressing against the door, and the door is thinner than it was.
I locked her down there when I was fourteen. This is the fact I return to because the returning is what the grey permits and because the fact is the foundation, the first stone, the original engineering decision from which the entire architecture of my avoidance was constructed. I was fourteen. I was sitting in the back row. Ms. Reinhardt was explaining cell division, the clean, logical splitting of one self into two selves, each carrying the whole code. And something about the image, the idea of a thing containing everything it needs to replicate itself, broke open a door in me that I did not know existed, and behind the door was the full, unedited, uncompressed weight of being a person. Not a sad person. Not an anxious person. Not a person with problems. A person. The raw, bewildering, unsupported fact of existing in a body in a world that does not explain itself and does not owe you an explanation and does not care whether the weight of your own aliveness is more than your nervous system can process at fourteen, in a plastic chair, under fluorescent lights, in October.
I felt everything at once. Not emotions in the categorizable, therapist-friendly sense. Not anger or sadness or fear, though all three were in it. The fact of feeling. The capacity itself. The realization that I was a container for sensation and that the container had no lid and no valve and no off switch, and the sensations were going to keep coming whether I wanted them or not, and the wanting or not-wanting was itself a sensation, and the regress was infinite, and the infinity was a room with no walls, and the room with no walls was me.
I locked her down there because the alternative was to sit in that plastic chair and feel all of it, forever, with no way to turn the volume down. I locked her down there and I found the flask. The flask was my first wall. Not a real flask; the first one was a water bottle filled from my friend Dara’s mother’s liquor cabinet, peppermint schnapps diluted with Sprite until it tasted like mouthwash, which I drank in the parking lot of the movie theater while Dara smoked a cigarette she had stolen from her stepfather and talked about a boy she liked and did not ask why I was drinking peppermint schnapps at three in the afternoon on a Saturday, because Dara was fifteen and fifteen does not ask why, fifteen accepts, fifteen is grateful for the company of another person who is willing to do the wrong thing at the wrong time without requiring a justification.
The schnapps was a wall. The wall held. I found more walls. Louder music. Faster parties. Longer nights. Crowded rooms where the press of other bodies against mine was a kind of insulation, a warmth that did not require me to feel my own warmth, a noise that did not require me to hear my own noise. I built the walls higher and thicker and louder and the girl in the basement stayed behind them, pressing, always pressing, and I could feel the pressing the way you feel a bruise through clothing, a dull reminder that something underneath is hurt, but the clothing is thick enough and the pressing is quiet enough and the music is loud enough that you can, if you are disciplined, if you are committed, if you are willing to treat the avoidance as a full-time occupation, ignore it.
I ignored it for ten years. Fourteen to twenty-four. A decade of walls.
The walls are gone. The grey took them. The grey took the flask and the phone and the earbuds and the crowd and the bar and the Spotify playlist and the three a.m. options that kept me vertical and numb in a city that never closed. The grey took 412 Garfield and the kitchen where Micah did the crossword and Naomi made coffee with the focus of a person defusing a bomb. The grey took everything and left me with the one thing the walls were built to contain.
The girl is pressing against the door. The door is thin. And the nearness, the warm, patient, relentless nearness that has been here since the beginning, is on the other side of the door too, or around the door, or through the door, as though the door is not a barrier the nearness recognizes. The nearness has always been closer to the girl than I have. The nearness found her at the Threshold. The nearness went past every lock I had installed and found her and was glad. And I ran, because the gladness was a revision I could not afford, and the revision was: what if the girl in the basement is not the monster I believed she was?
The pressing is louder now. Not louder in volume, because volume is a concept that belongs to the world of sound systems and concert venues and bars with subwoofers in the floor, and the grey has no sound systems. Louder in presence. The girl is more here than she was. The lock is thinner than it was. The decade I spent reinforcing it is no longer available to me as building material, because the decade happened in a body that had access to substances and noise, and the body is gone or changed or translated into whatever this standing-in-the-grey condition is, and without the body’s tools the lock is just a thought, and thoughts, in this place, do not hold the way they held when they could be drowned in vodka and bass.
I try one more time to move.
The trying is pathetic and I know it is pathetic and the knowing does not stop me, because the knowing has never stopped me, because self-awareness without willingness is just a better-lit prison. I know why I run. I have always known why I run. The therapists, those patient, boundaried people with their degrees and their tissues and their careful open-ended questions, they thought the knowing was the breakthrough. Quinn, can you tell me what you think you’re running from? Yes. I can tell you. I have been able to tell you since I was sixteen. I am running from the feeling of being alive. I am running from the weight of my own interiority. I am running from the girl in the basement who feels everything and has no off switch and will, if I let her out, fill the room with so much unprocessed, undiluted, unmanaged sensation that I will not be able to function. The knowing was never the problem. The knowing was the easiest part. The hard part was the stopping, and the stopping was the one thing no amount of knowing could make me do, because the stopping required not knowledge but willingness, and willingness is a muscle I have never used, and muscles you have never used do not respond to commands. They atrophy. They forget their own purpose. They become theoretical, categories in a textbook, things that other people, braver people, people who were not sitting in the back row when the weight fell, are able to flex.
I try to move. My feet do not cooperate. Not because the grey is holding them. The grey has never held me. The grey has never restrained me, never blocked a path, never raised a wall or dropped a barrier or done anything that could be interpreted as confinement. The grey gave me all the room I wanted to run in. The grey gave me infinite room. The problem was never the room. The problem was the discovery that infinite room is not the same as infinite distance, and distance was the thing I needed, and the grey contains room but not distance, which means the grey is a field with no fences and no exits, which means the running was always a kind of pacing, always circular, always looping back to the same place, which is here, which is me, which is the girl, which is the door.
My feet do not cooperate because my feet are done. The engine that drove the running has spent its fuel. The fuel was terror, and the terror is still here, but terror without motion is just a temperature, a heat in the chest and a tightness in the throat, and the heat and the tightness are not moving me because the connection between the terror and the movement has been severed, the way a spark plug can fire without turning the engine if the engine has no gas. I am sparking. I am not moving. The distinction is the whole of my current situation.
I stand in the grey and the grey stands with me, and the standing-with is the problem, has always been the problem, because the grey is not empty. I said it was empty at the beginning, or I believed it was empty, or I wanted it to be empty, because empty would have been a kind of mercy, a blank, a nothing, the oblivion I half-hoped dying would provide, the off switch the universe owed me after twenty-four years of a nervous system that would not stop firing. But the grey is not empty. The grey is full. The grey has in it the nearness, and the nearness is everywhere I am, which means everywhere, which means there is no location in this place that is not already occupied by the warm, patient, specific attention of something that knows me.
Knows me. Not knows about me. Not the knowing of a file or a form or a therapist’s intake notes. The knowing of the light. The same knowing I felt at the Threshold, when the light went past the walls and found her and was glad. The knowing that is total: every wall, every lock, every drink, every crowd, every three a.m. shower with my forehead on the tile, every lie I told to keep the girl in the basement behind the door, every truth I swallowed to keep the truth from being spoken, every silent deal I made with my own survival (I will keep functioning if you keep the volume up, I will keep breathing if you keep the room full, I will keep waking up in the morning if you promise me I will never, never, never have to be still long enough for the feeling to find me). The knowing sees all of it. The knowing holds all of it. And the knowing is not disgusted.
This is the part that does not compute. This is the part my machinery has no protocol for. Disgust is what knowing should produce. Disgust is what I would feel if someone handed me the full, unedited transcript of a decade of avoidance and said here, read this, this is who she actually is when you take away the jokes and the drinks and the dancing and the I’m-fine-really-I’m-fine and the deflection and the noise. I would read it and I would feel the same thing I felt every time the numbness lifted at four in the morning and the bathroom mirror showed me a face without its performance on: a revulsion so total and so specific that the only response available was to look away. To fill the silence. To find the next wall. To put the noise back on and resume the running.
The nearness has read the transcript. The nearness has read the whole thing, cover to cover, every entry, every night, every drink, every cringe, every cowardice. And the nearness is not revolted. The nearness is the same temperature it was before the reading. The nearness is warm. The nearness is glad.
Glad.
The word again. The impossible word. The word that broke the system at the Threshold and broke it again in the long running and is breaking it now in the stillness. The nearness is glad the way a person is glad when a traveler comes home, not glad that the journey was hard or long or marked by wrong turns, but glad that the traveler is here, now, present, arrived, visible, and the gladness has no relation to the quality of the journey. The gladness has no conditions. The gladness is not contingent on the girl having made better choices or spent fewer nights on bathroom floors or locked fewer feelings in fewer basements. The gladness is prior. The gladness was there before the running and before the locking and before Ms. Reinhardt’s biology class and before the schnapps in the parking lot and before my father left with Charlotte and a forwarding address that turned out to be temporary. The gladness is not a response to me. The gladness is a posture toward me. The gladness is the nearness’s face, if the nearness has a face, and the face is turned in my direction and has been turned in my direction since before I had a direction to be turned in.
I try to look away. This is the reflex, the deep one, the one beneath the running and beneath the numbing and beneath the noise. The running was a method. The numbing was a method. The noise was a method. The reflex beneath all three methods is simpler and older: Do not be seen. Do not be known. The seeing will end you.
I learned this before I had words for it. I learned it the way children learn the temperature of a stove, not through instruction but through contact, through the specific, unrepeatable experience of reaching and being burned, and the burn writing itself into the nervous system as a permanent instruction: Do not reach again.
My father reached and left. This is the first lesson. The first entry in the curriculum of Quinn’s education in the danger of being known. My father knew me, or knew the version of me that existed at ten, the small version, the one who sat on his lap at the kitchen table while he read the sports section and who believed, with the bottomless credulity of a child, that the lap was permanent, that the kitchen was permanent, that the man behind the newspaper was a fixture, a wall, a load-bearing element in the architecture of her world. He knew that version. He saw that version every morning for ten years. And then he packed a suitcase and walked out of the house with a woman named Charlotte, and the walking-out was the first proof, the original data point, the evidence from which all subsequent evidence would be interpreted: to be known is to be left. To be seen is to be found insufficient. To be loved by a person who has access to the real you is to be loved provisionally, on a lease with a termination clause, and the termination will come without warning and without apology, and you will be standing in the hallway holding a cereal bowl watching the back of his coat move through a door, and the door will close, and the closing will be the sound the rest of your life is tuned to.
After the door closed, I learned the corollary. If being known leads to being left, then the solution is to not be known. Not to not exist, because existing is not optional, or was not optional before the car and the curve and the grey. To exist but to not be seen existing. To be present in the room but not in the room in the way that matters, not with the real Quinn, not with the girl who feels everything and has no off switch, but with the performing Quinn, the entertaining Quinn, the Quinn who laughs too loud and dances too long and leaves before anyone can ask where she is going, the Quinn whose entire public self is a noise machine designed to generate enough interference that the signal, the real signal, the quiet, frightened, overwhelmed signal underneath, cannot be picked up by anyone who might, upon receiving it, decide to walk out of a door with a suitcase.
The performance worked. The performance worked for ten years. The performance was so convincing that even the therapists, those trained signal-readers with their degrees and their empathy and their careful, boundaried attention, could not always tell the difference between the performing Quinn and the real one, or could tell the difference but could not get past the performance to the reality, because the performance was designed by a ten-year-old in a hallway holding a cereal bowl, and a ten-year-old who has just watched her father leave is perhaps the most motivated engineer on the planet, and the system she builds to prevent the leaving from happening again will be, of its kind, a work of genius: airtight, comprehensive, self-reinforcing, and almost impossible to penetrate from the outside.
Almost.
The light penetrated it. At the Threshold. The light went past the performance and the noise and the jokes and the decades of insulation and found the girl in the basement, the girl who was locked behind the door, the girl I have been protecting by imprisoning her, and the light did not do what my father did. The light did not see her and leave. The light did not see her and find her insufficient. The light did not see her and calculate the cost-benefit of staying and conclude that Charlotte, or whatever the light’s version of Charlotte would be, offered a better return. The light saw her and was glad. The light saw the whole transcript, every page, every entry, every night, every cowardice, every lock and every wall and every lie, and the light’s response was not a closing door but an opening one, not a suitcase but an arrival, not a leaving but a staying, a permanent, unconditioned, immovable staying that had no termination clause and no forwarding address and no Charlotte.
And I ran from the staying. I ran from the gladness. I ran from the one thing I had wanted since I was ten years old, standing in the hallway, watching the coat move through the door. I ran from it because the wanting was the most dangerous thing about me, more dangerous than the drinking and the noise and the numbness, because the wanting was the soft spot, the opening, the place where the next leaving would enter, and if the next leaving came from the light, from the One whose gladness had no conditions and no limits, if the light eventually produced its own suitcase and its own Charlotte, then the leaving would not just close a door. It would prove the theorem. It would confirm the hypothesis I had been testing since I was ten: that the girl in the basement is unkeepable. That to be known is to be left. That there is something in the real Quinn, the underneath Quinn, the girl behind the door, that is too much, too broken, too raw, too demanding of a patience that no one, not even a light that has no limits, can sustain.
The nearness is sustaining it. The nearness has sustained it through all the running. The nearness sustained it when I sang the wrong words. The nearness sustained it when I paced twenty steps and turned and twenty steps and turned. The nearness sustained it when I made jokes to an empty grey about its interior decorating. The nearness has not cracked. The nearness has not shown the first sign of the fatigue that precedes the leaving, the particular tiredness that my father wore for the last three months before Charlotte, the tiredness that a ten-year-old could read without being able to name, the tiredness that said I am running out of the thing that keeps me in this house.
The nearness is not running out. The nearness is, if anything, more patient than it was when the running started, as though my running used its patience the way a fire uses air, not by consuming it but by drawing it in, pulling more of it into the room, and the room is bigger than the fire, and the air is older than the room, and the metaphor is collapsing under me but the fact it points to is not collapsing, and the fact is: the nearness has not left. The nearness is not going to leave. The nearness is here in the way that breath is here and gravity is here and the fact of existing is here, beneath the things that can change, unmoved by the things that move.
So I am still. I am still and the stillness is doing the thing it always threatened to do, the thing I built the walls to prevent, the thing the flask was for and the music was for and the crowds were for and the whole rattling, exhausting, decade-long apparatus of Quinn’s survival was for. The stillness is letting me feel.
It comes in waves. Not waves like an ocean, rhythmic and predictable, the kind you can brace against because you can see the next one coming. Waves like a flood, all at once, from every direction, with no pattern and no warning and no interval between them in which to catch a breath. The feelings are not new. The feelings are ten years old, some of them older, stored in the basement with the girl, packed into the small dark space behind the door, and they have been waiting with the patience of things that know they will eventually be released, because every prison is temporary and every lock rusts and every ten-year-old engineer eventually runs out of the materials she needs to keep the door closed.
The first feeling is grief. Not grief for the dying, though the dying is in it. Not grief for the car and the curve and the rain and the specific, particular, irreversible fact of twenty-four years ending on a Sunday night in November, though that is in it too. The grief is older. The grief is for the hallway. For the cereal bowl. For the coat moving through the door. For the morning I woke up and the kitchen was the same kitchen but the chair was empty and the newspaper was gone and my mother was standing at the counter with her back to me, and her back was the first wall I ever saw, the first demonstration that a person could be in the room and not in the room, and the back said I am holding myself together by not turning around, because if I turn around I will see your face, and your face will be the face of someone who has just learned that love has an exit clause, and I cannot look at that face right now because I am the same person with the same face and we will break each other if we look.
She did not turn around. I ate the cereal. The kitchen was quiet. And the quiet was the beginning of the terror, the original quiet, the mother of all the quiets I have been filling ever since, because that quiet had in it the truth the noise was designed to drown: that love leaves. That the people who know you will find, eventually, a reason to walk away. That the staying is temporary and the leaving is permanent and the hallway, the coat, the door, is the shape of every relationship you will ever have, and the only variable is the timing.
The grief comes and I let it come because I have no flask to drown it in and no bass line to smother it with and no crowd to absorb into and no bartender to charm into pouring another round. The grief fills the space the noise used to fill. The grief is enormous. The grief is ten years wide and as deep as the basement and as heavy as the girl who has been living in it, and the girl has been carrying the grief the entire time I was running from it, carrying it the way a child carries a toy she refuses to set down, not because the toy brings joy but because the setting-down would be an admission that the thing the toy represents is gone, and the gone-ness would be final, and the finality would be the end of the hoping, and the hoping, even the hoping for a thing that has already left, is better than the nothing that lives on the other side of giving up.
I was hoping my father would come back. I was ten, and then eleven, and then twelve, and I was hoping he would come back, and the hoping was the thing I locked in the basement with the girl, because the hoping was too painful to carry in the open and too precious to throw away, and the basement was the only place I knew to put things that were both painful and precious, and the girl took the hoping and held it and has been holding it for fourteen years, patient and cramped and faithful, in the dark.
He did not come back. The forwarding address was temporary. The new phone number lasted eight months. The birthday cards lasted three years, each one thinner than the last, each one signed with less of his name, until the last one was just a D on a piece of cardstock with a cartoon animal on the front and no return address. A D. Not even a Dad. A single letter. The minimum denomination of presence. The smallest possible evidence that a person existed who once sat in a kitchen with a newspaper and a daughter and a chair that fit him and a life that, for reasons I will never understand and have never stopped trying to understand, was not enough.
The grief is for the not-enough. The grief is for the girl who was not enough to keep a man in a chair. The grief is for the conclusion she drew from his leaving, which was the foundation stone of everything that came after: I am the reason he left. There is something in me, in the real me, in the girl behind the performance, that is too much or too little or too something, and the something is the thing that makes people leave, and the only way to prevent the leaving is to never let anyone close enough to find the something.
The nearness has found the something. The nearness has found it and has not left. The nearness has found the something and has responded with gladness, which makes no sense, which violates every axiom in the system, which is like hearing that gravity runs uphill and being asked to believe it while standing on level ground. The nearness has found the too-much, the too-raw, the too-broken, the thing my father found and walked away from, and the nearness is still here, and its still-being-here is either a lie or a revolution, and I do not know which, and the not-knowing is a kind of vertigo, and the vertigo is the grey spinning, or me spinning, or the whole structure of my understanding spinning on an axis I did not know it had.
The second feeling is shame. The shame is different from the grief. The grief is for what was done to me. The shame is for what I did to myself.
The shame has names and dates. The shame has a geography. The shame is the specific, documented, retrievable record of a decade of choices made not out of strength but out of terror, each one smaller than the one before, each one a little further from the version of myself I might have been if I had not been so afraid of being still.
The shame is the night I drank too much at a party in sophomore year of college and woke up in a room I did not recognize beside a person I did not remember meeting, and the not-remembering was not the shameful part, and the person was not the shameful part, and the drinking was not the shameful part. The shameful part was the relief. The relief of having filled another night. The relief of having avoided another evening alone with the quiet. The relief of knowing that from ten p.m. to six a.m. the girl in the basement had been locked behind enough noise and enough numbness that she could not have reached me if she tried, and the locking was the point, and everything that happened between the locking and the waking was collateral, was acceptable cost, was the price of another night of not-feeling.
The shame is the look on Naomi’s face the morning she found me on the kitchen floor at 412 Garfield, shoes on, jacket still zipped, a bottle of something amber on its side beside me and a bruise on my knee from where I’d hit the cabinet on the way down. The look was not anger. The look was not disappointment. The look was recognition. The look was one damaged person seeing another damaged person’s damage and knowing, from the inside, that the damage was not carelessness but architecture. That the drinking and the falling and the kitchen floor were not a failure of character but a failure of materials, the walls running out of the substance they were built from, the system I had engineered at fourteen buckling under the accumulated weight of ten years of continuous operation.
Naomi picked me up. She did not lecture me. She did not call my mother. She made coffee with that bomb-defusing focus of hers and handed me a glass of water and sat across from me at the kitchen table and said, “You don’t have to tell me.” And the not-having-to-tell was the kindest thing anyone had said to me in months, because the telling was the thing I could not do, and every other person in my life seemed to believe that the telling was the cure, that if I could just articulate the problem the problem would dissolve, and they were not wrong, exactly, but they were wrong about the timing, because the problem was not a problem I could articulate from inside the architecture. The problem was the architecture itself. And you cannot describe a building you are standing inside of to someone who is standing outside of it, because the person outside sees walls and windows and a roof, and the person inside sees only the fact that the walls and windows and roof are the only things preventing the sky from falling in.
Naomi understood the architecture because Naomi had her own. Naomi’s walls were made of fury instead of numbness, but the function was the same: keep the soft thing safe by surrounding it with the hard thing. Naomi’s soft thing was the twelve-year-old in the pew. Mine was the girl in the basement. Different basements, different girls, same lock.
The shame is all the mornings Naomi picked me up and did not lecture me. The shame is Micah driving me home with his quiet, ironic patience, one hand on the wheel and one tuned to the radio, finding a station I would like because finding a station I would like was his way of saying I see you and I am not leaving and the station is not the point. The shame is having roommates who loved me in the precise, careful, non-invasive way that damaged people love each other, and having used their love as another wall, another layer of insulation, another buffer between me and the quiet, because even love, when it is received by a person who cannot be still, becomes a form of noise.
The shame comes and I let it come because I have no alternative. The grey offers no alternative. The grey is the absence of alternatives. The grey is the room after the room has been emptied of every object, every distraction, every tool, every prop, every method of making the room into something other than what it is, which is: a place where I am alone with what I have done and what has been done to me and what I have become and what I might yet be, and the might yet be is the thing I cannot look at, the thing I turn from, the thing that frightens me more than the shame and the grief combined, because the shame and the grief are about the past and the past is fixed and fixed things are safe because they cannot change, and the might yet be is about the future and the future is open and open things are dangerous because they ask you to choose, and choosing requires stillness, and stillness is the thing I am in and the thing I fear most.
The nearness moves closer. Not closer in distance, because distance is not the unit the nearness operates in. Closer in clarity. The nearness is becoming clearer the way a sound becomes clearer when the noise around it drops: the sound was always this loud, but the noise was louder, and now the noise is gone and the sound fills the room.
The nearness fills the room. The room is the grey and the grey is everywhere and the nearness is in it, through it, underneath it. I can feel the warmth on my skin, or on whatever has replaced my skin in this place, a warmth that is not the warmth of temperature but the warmth of attention, the warmth of being looked at by someone who is not looking for something in you but looking at you, the whole of you, the way you look at a valley you love: not evaluating, not assessing, not calculating its potential, just seeing it. Just receiving the fact of it. Just allowing the valley to be what it is without needing it to be something else.
I am a valley the nearness loves. The sentence arrives in me and I do not know where it comes from and I do not want it and I cannot send it back. I am a valley the nearness loves, and the loving is not the love of a person who has not yet seen the terrain, the love of the first visit, the love that sustains itself by not looking too closely. The loving is the love of someone who has walked every acre, who has seen the dry creek beds and the eroded hillsides and the places where the soil has been stripped by carelessness, by flood, by the ten-year drought of a person who was too busy running to tend anything, and the seeing has not produced a leaving. The seeing has produced a staying. The seeing has produced a gladness.
I do not understand the gladness. I have not understood it since the Threshold. I have run from it and numbed against it and filled every available silence with noise to drown it out, and the gladness has survived everything I have thrown at it, every flight, every wall, every refusal, every joke and every song and every counted step, and the gladness is here now, in the stillness, in the place where I have run out of room and run out of fuel and run out of the materials for building walls, and the gladness is not triumphant. The gladness is not gloating. The gladness does not say I knew I’d catch you or I knew you’d give up. The gladness is simply here, as though it has always been here, as though the running changed nothing about the gladness, as though the gladness is a property of the nearness itself and not a response to any particular quality of mine, and the not-a-response is the part I cannot fathom.
Everyone who has ever been glad about me has been glad about something I did. Glad I was funny. Glad I was willing to stay out late. Glad I was the kind of person who filled rooms rather than emptied them. Glad I was performing. The gladness was always conditional on the show. The gladness was always a review, a rating, a response to the product Quinn was offering, and the product was carefully designed to produce exactly this gladness, because gladness-in-response-to-performance was the only kind of gladness that was safe, because performance could be adjusted, could be calibrated, could be improved or intensified or, if necessary, withdrawn, and the withdrawal was always an option, always a contingency, always the exit strategy that kept the gladness from getting close enough to require the girl behind the performance to show her face.
The nearness is glad about my face. The real one. The one I have been hiding. The one the performance was built to cover. The one the girl in the basement wears when there is no one watching, the face that is too raw and too open and too full of the weight of being alive to be shown in public, the face I wear in the four a.m. bathroom when the numbness has lifted and the mirror shows me the person I actually am: tired and scared and twenty-four and wanting something I have never been brave enough to name.
The wanting is in the room. The wanting is out of the basement. The door has not opened but the wanting has gotten through somehow, leaked through the crack between the door and the frame, and the wanting is filling the stillness the way water fills a low place, quietly, naturally, finding every depression and occupying it, and the wanting is this: I want to be known and not left.
That is the whole of it. The entire ten-year architecture reduced to seven words. I want to be known and not left. I want someone to see the real Quinn, the underneath Quinn, the girl who feels everything and has no off switch and sat in a plastic chair at fourteen and felt the weight of being a person, and I want that someone to stay. I want the staying to be permanent. I want the permanence to be unrelated to my performance. I want to be known the way the nearness knows me and to not be left the way my father left me and to not have to earn the staying the way I have earned every other staying in my life, by being entertaining, by being loud, by being the girl who fills the room so the room does not notice it has a right to empty.
The wanting is out and I cannot put it back. The wanting is in the grey, exposed, visible, as naked as I am, as stripped of insulation as I am, and the wanting is looking at the nearness and the nearness is looking at the wanting, and the looking is not a transaction. The looking is not an evaluation. The looking is a meeting. Two things, face to face, with nothing between them, and one of them is terrified and one of them is glad, and the terrified one is me and the glad one is the nearness, and the gladness is not a response to the wanting but a recognition of it, as though the nearness has been waiting for the wanting to come out of the basement the way I have been running to keep the wanting in the basement, and the waiting and the running were about the same thing, and the same thing is this: the girl, the real girl, seen at last.
The terror peaks. It peaks the way a fever peaks, not gradually and not all at once but in a sustained, shaking crescendo that takes the whole body, or the whole whatever-I-have-instead-of-a-body, and holds it at its maximum, at the highest note the instrument can produce, at the frequency where the glass begins to shake and the room begins to hum and the question becomes whether the instrument will shatter or the note will resolve.
The terror is this: I am being seen.
I am being seen completely. I am being seen the way I have never allowed myself to be seen, by anyone, in any room, at any hour, in any state of numbness or sobriety, in any conversation with any therapist or any friend or any stranger in any bar. I am being seen past the performance. I am being seen past the jokes. I am being seen past the dancing and the drinking and the three a.m. exits and the I’m-fine-really and the deflection and the laughter that was too loud and the departure that was too sudden and the entire, elaborate, exhausting, decade-long production of Quinn: The Musical, the one-woman show I have been performing since I was fourteen to keep the audience entertained and the backstage door locked.
The backstage door is open. Not because I opened it. I did not open it. I do not have the tools to open it or the courage to open it or the willingness to open it. The door is open because the stillness did what the stillness always threatened to do: it peeled away the performance, layer by layer, until there was nothing left between the audience and the backstage, and the backstage is where the real production happens, and the real production is a girl sitting on the floor with her arms around her knees, rocking, feeling everything, terrified of the feeling and terrified of the not-feeling and terrified, most of all, of being seen feeling by someone who has the power to leave.
The nearness has the power to leave. Everything has the power to leave. My father had the power to leave and he used it. The friends had the power to leave and they would have used it if they had seen the backstage. The therapists had the power to leave and they structured their leaving into fifty-minute intervals so the leaving was called professional boundaries instead of I have reached my limit of you. Everyone I have ever known has had the power to leave and I have spent my life managing their departures by preventing their arrivals, by keeping them in the audience where the show is good and the lighting is flattering and the Quinn on display is the Quinn worth staying for.
The nearness is backstage. The nearness is standing in the wings with the girl on the floor and the rocking and the feeling and the fear, and the nearness is not reaching for a suitcase. The nearness is not checking its watch. The nearness is not calculating the cost-benefit of staying. The nearness is simply here, the way it has been simply here since the Threshold, the way it was simply here when I was running, the way it was simply here through every step and every count and every song and every joke, and the simplicity of the being-here is the most complex thing I have ever encountered, because the simplicity requires an explanation and the only explanation available is the one I cannot accept, which is: the nearness wants the girl.
Not the performance. Not the Quinn who fills rooms. Not the Quinn who dances with her arms over her head and her eyes closed in a crowd of strangers. Not the Quinn who is funny and reckless and always leaving and never landing and never, never still. The nearness wants the girl on the floor. The nearness wants the one who feels too much. The nearness wants the one I locked away because I believed she was the reason people leave.
The terror says: This is the trap. This is the bait. This is the warmth before the leaving. This is how it works: they see you, they want you, you let them close, they find the something, and they go. The nearness will go. The gladness will end. The Charlotte will arrive. The door will close. The hallway will be empty. The cereal bowl will be in your hand. And you will be ten years old again, except worse, because this time you let yourself want it, this time you came out of the basement, this time you stood in the open and showed your face and said here, here I am, and the here-I-am will be the thing they use against you when they leave.
The terror says all of this and the saying is loud and the loudness is the last noise, the final noise, the noise the system produces when every other noise has failed, the alarm that sounds when the walls are breached and the door is open and the girl is visible, the alarm that says Run. Run now. Run again. You have run before and you can run again and the running hurts but the running is survivable and this, this being-seen, this being-known, this standing-still-while-the-nearness-looks-at-the-girl-you-locked-away, this is not survivable, this is the end, this is the thing the running was for.
I listen to the terror. I listen to the alarm. I listen to the whole clanging, shrieking, decade-old system telling me to bolt, to flee, to find a direction and take it, to put distance between me and the nearness, to fill the silence with anything, to rebuild the walls with whatever material is at hand.
And I do not move.
I do not move because I cannot move. I do not move because the fuel is gone and the engine is dead and the legs are done and the system, the brilliant, exhausting, self-destructive system that a terrified ten-year-old built in a hallway with a cereal bowl, has finally, after a decade of continuous operation, run to the end of its power. The alarm is sounding but the alarm is not connected to anything anymore. The alarm is a noise in a machine that has no moving parts. The alarm is a memory of a function. The alarm is the ghost of a flight that is no longer possible.
I am still. I am seen. I am known. The nearness is looking at the girl on the floor and the girl on the floor is looking back, or not looking back, or trying not to look back but unable to look away, because looking away requires motion and motion requires fuel and fuel requires a reason to keep running, and the reason, the original reason, the father and the door and the coat and the conclusion that being known gets you left, is being tested by a fact that will not cooperate with the conclusion.
The fact is: the nearness has not left.
The nearness has been here since the Threshold. The nearness has been here through the running and the singing and the counting and the pacing and the jokes and the silence that swallowed the jokes and the stillness that swallowed the silence. The nearness has been here through the grief that came like a flood and the shame that came like a second flood and the wanting that leaked through the crack in the door and filled the low places. The nearness has been here, constant, patient, undimmed, ungloating, unanxious, warm, glad, looking at the girl with the face the nearness has apparently always been looking for, and the nearness has not picked up a suitcase. The nearness has not produced a Charlotte. The nearness has not checked its watch or calculated its tolerance threshold or showed the first sign of the fatigue that means the leaving is coming.
The terror says: Wait. It will come. The leaving always comes.
The nearness says nothing. The nearness does not argue with the terror. The nearness does not produce evidence or make promises or offer guarantees. The nearness simply stays. The staying is the argument. The staying is the only argument the nearness has ever made, and the argument is not made in words but in duration, in the sheer, sustained, unreasonable fact of still-being-here after everything I have done to make the being-here impossible.
Something shifts. Not in the grey, which does not change. Not in the nearness, which does not change. In me.
The shift is small. The shift is the width of a breath, or the width of a thought, or the width of the space between the terror and the fact. The terror says the leaving is coming and the fact says the leaving has not come, and between the terror and the fact there is a gap, and the gap is the shift, and the shift is this: for the first time since I was ten years old, the terror’s case is not airtight.
The terror’s case has always been airtight. The evidence was conclusive. My father left. The friends would have left if they had seen. The therapists left on schedule, fifty minutes at a time. Everyone who looked had a limit. Everyone who loved had a condition. The data was consistent. The hypothesis was confirmed by every interaction, every relationship, every departure that was either actual or anticipated. Being known gets you left. This was not a theory. This was a law. This was gravity. This was the bedrock on which the entire structure of my survival was built.
The bedrock is cracking. Not because the nearness has made an argument. The nearness has never made an argument. The nearness does not operate in the register of arguments. Arguments can be refuted. Arguments can be matched with counter-arguments. Arguments are a form of motion, a back-and-forth, a kind of running in place, and the nearness does not run. The nearness stays. And the staying, the unreasonable, irrational, theory-defying staying, is doing what no argument has ever done: it is introducing a variable the system has no protocol for.
The variable is: what if someone stays? Not because they haven’t seen. Not because the performance is good enough to hold them. Not because the walls are high enough to keep them out of the backstage. What if someone stays because they have seen? What if the seeing is not the reason for the leaving but the reason for the staying? What if the girl in the basement, the girl who feels everything, the girl who has no off switch, the girl I locked away because I believed she was the defect, the flaw, the too-much-ness that drove my father out of the kitchen and through the door, what if she is not the defect? What if she is the point?
The thought is too large. The thought is a door I cannot walk through, not because the door is locked but because walking through it would require me to dismantle the hallway, and the hallway is the first thing I remember, and the first thing I remember is the architecture, and the architecture is me. If the girl in the basement is not the defect, then the locking was wrong. If the locking was wrong, then the running was wrong. If the running was wrong, then the flask and the noise and the crowds and the performances and the I’m-fine-really-I’m-fine and the ten years of filling every silence with anything louder than the girl’s voice were not survival but waste. Ten years of wasted courage. Ten years of running from the one thing that was never chasing me.
The nearness. The nearness that was never chasing me. The nearness that was only ever waiting. The nearness that found the girl at the Threshold and was glad, and the gladness was not a chase, not a trap, not a bait, not the warmth-before-the-leaving, but a glad arrival, a glad seeing, a glad there you are spoken not in words but in the quality of the warmth itself, the warmth that said I have been looking for you in the way a parent says I have been looking for you to a child who has been hiding, and the looking was not a hunting and the finding was not a catching and the gladness was not a claiming but a welcoming, and the welcoming is still here, unchanged, undimmed, waiting for me to stop running long enough to feel it.
I have stopped running. I am feeling it.
The feeling is not what I expected. The feeling is not the annihilation I spent my life anticipating. The feeling is not the shattering of the glass, the collapse of the structure, the detonation that the terror always promised would come at the moment of full exposure. I am fully exposed. I am standing in the grey with no walls and no noise and no performance and no locked door and no girl in the basement because the girl is not in the basement anymore, the girl is here, the girl is me, the girl has been me all along, and the being-me-all-along is not the death sentence I was promised. The being-me is a fact. The fact is in the grey. The grey is in the nearness. And the nearness, the warm, patient, immovable nearness, is receiving the fact the way the grey receives my voice: without judgment, without recoil, without the slightest adjustment of temperature or distance.
I am known. I am standing in the open, in the place with no walls, with the whole of me visible, the grief and the shame and the wanting and the girl and the cereal bowl and the hallway and the decade and the flask and the floor at 412 Garfield and the bruise on my knee and the look on Naomi’s face and the sound of the door closing behind my father and the weight of being alive that fell on me in Ms. Reinhardt’s class and never lifted, and the nearness is looking at all of it, the complete and unedited catalogue of Quinn, and the nearness has not flinched.
The nearness has not flinched. I say this to myself and the saying is not enough, the words are not heavy enough to hold the meaning, and the meaning is: the thing I was most afraid of has happened, and the thing that was supposed to follow it has not. Being seen was supposed to be the end. Being known was supposed to produce the leaving. The exposure was supposed to trigger the departure, the suitcase, the Charlotte, the door, the empty chair, the newspaper that is not there. The whole system was built on this sequence: seen, then left. Known, then abandoned. Exposed, then rejected. And the sequence has not completed. The first term has been met. I am seen. I am known. I am exposed. And the second term, the leaving, the one the whole architecture was designed to prevent by making the seeing impossible, has not arrived.
The leaving has not arrived. The nearness is here. The warmth is here. The gladness is here. The specific, personal, knowing attention that looked past every wall and found the girl and said (not in words, never in words, but in the temperature of its presence) there you are, I’ve been glad about you since before you were afraid of me is here. And I am shaking, or the thing that serves as shaking in this place, the internal tremor of a person whose entire operating system is being challenged by a single, persistent, non-compliant fact.
The fact is: I am known and I am not left.
I do not trust the fact. I want to trust the fact. The wanting is the girl’s wanting, the same wanting that leaked through the crack in the door, the wanting to be known and not left, and the wanting is pressing against the fact the way a hand presses against a surface it is not sure is solid, testing, pushing gently, waiting for the give, waiting for the trap to spring, waiting for the warmth to withdraw and the gladness to end and the nearness to reveal itself as the last and most sophisticated version of the same old leaving.
The warmth does not withdraw. The gladness does not end. The nearness does not step back or look away or show the first hairline fracture of the patience that would indicate the fatigue that would precede the departure.
The nearness remains.
And I am trembling at the edge of something I cannot name and cannot trust and cannot look away from. The edge is not the edge of a cliff. The edge is the edge of a room. A room I can see into, if I turn my head, if I allow myself to look, if I stop bracing for the leaving long enough to notice that the room is lit, and the light in the room is warm, and the warmth is not the warmth of the trap but the warmth of the hearth, the warmth of the place you come home to, the warmth that says this was always here, this was always waiting, the light was burning before you were afraid of fire.
I am not in the room. I am at the edge. The edge is as far as I can go, as far as the stillness has carried me, as far as the collapse of the running and the surfacing of the grief and the rising of the shame and the leaking of the wanting have brought me. The edge is where the girl meets the nearness without walls between them, and the meeting is not the annihilation the terror promised, and the not-annihilation is the most confusing, the most frightening, the most unexpectedly gentle thing that has ever happened to me.
I am not destroyed.
I am still here. The girl is still here. The nearness is still here. The grey is still here. And between the girl and the nearness there is a space, and the space is not a wall and not a lock and not a door but a breath, a held breath, the breath between the seeing and the believing, between the fact and the trust, between the wanting and the receiving.
I hold the breath. The nearness waits. The grey is patient, the way the grey has always been patient, the way the nearness has always been patient, the way the gladness that is older than my fear and wider than my running and warmer than every wall I ever built has always been patient, and the patience is not a countdown and not a timer and not a clock, because the grey has no clocks and no closing time and no bouncer tapping my shoulder to say the waiting is over, decide now or the offer expires.
The offer does not expire. The nearness does not tire. The gladness does not dim. I am standing at the edge of a discovery I cannot yet make, a discovery that would cost me the terror and the running and the locked door and the girl in the basement and the whole ten-year architecture of being someone other than who I am, and the cost is everything, and the everything is the only thing I have, and the having is the holding, and the holding is the last motion left to me, the last gesture of the flight, the refusal to open the hand and let the thing I am clutching fall.
I clutch. The nearness waits. The warmth does not withdraw.
The grey goes on, and I am in it, and I am still, and the stillness has not killed me, and the being-seen has not destroyed me, and the being-known has not produced the leaving, and the not-leaving is the most terrifying fact I have ever encountered, because the not-leaving means the system was wrong, and if the system was wrong, then the girl in the basement was never the monster, and if the girl was never the monster, then the door should never have been locked, and if the door should never have been locked, then I have spent ten years in a prison of my own construction, running from a love that was never going to hurt me.
I am not ready to believe this. I am not ready to open the hand. I am not ready to step from the edge into the room.
But I am at the edge. And the edge is further than I have ever been. And the nearness is here, and the gladness is here, and the warmth is here, and the girl is here, and the grey is here, and the quiet is here, and none of it has killed me, and the not-killing is the first crack in the foundation of a building I have lived in since I was ten years old, and the crack is the width of a possibility, and the possibility is this:
What if being known does not end with being left?
What if the leaving was my father’s, and not the universe’s? What if the door he walked through was his door, and not the door, and the conclusion I drew from his leaving was a ten-year-old’s conclusion, built from a ten-year-old’s evidence, scaled to a ten-year-old’s understanding of how love works, and the understanding was not wrong for a ten-year-old in a hallway with a cereal bowl but is wrong for a twenty-four-year-old in a grey place with a nearness that has not left?
What if the nearness is telling the truth? Not in words. Not in promises. Not in guarantees or contracts or assurances. In duration. In the sheer, stubborn, relentless fact of still being here after everything I have done to make the being-here impossible. What if the duration is the truth, and the truth is: I am known, and I am not left, and the not-left is not temporary and not conditional and not the first half of a leaving I have not yet seen coming?
I cannot answer. The answer would cost me everything. The answer would dismantle the hallway and the cereal bowl and the architecture and the decade and the girl behind the door, because the girl behind the door is only behind the door because I put her there, and if the putting-there was wrong, then the girl belongs in the open, and the open is the place I am standing, and the place I am standing is the scariest place I have ever been, and the scariest place I have ever been is also, impossibly, the place where the warmth is strongest and the gladness is closest and the nearness is most unmistakably, irreducibly, unignorably here.
I tremble. The nearness waits. The grey holds me, or the nearness holds me, or the stillness holds me, or something holds me that is not the grey and not the nearness and not the stillness but all three woven into a single condition, a single sustained fact, which is the fact of not-falling, the fact of being held in a place with no floor and not falling through, and the not-falling is a kind of being-carried, and the being-carried is a kind of being-wanted, and the being-wanted is the thing the girl in the basement has been waiting for since the morning my father walked through the door and took the wanting with him.
I am wanted.
I cannot believe this yet. I can feel it. I cannot believe it. The feeling and the believing are separated by a distance I cannot cross, not now, not yet, not from this place of trembling and newness and the old terror still sounding its alarm in a machine that no longer moves. The feeling is in my chest and on my skin and in the warmth that is not the warmth of temperature but the warmth of being-looked-at-and-not-left. The believing is on the other side of a step I have not taken, a step that would require me to trust the warmth the way a child trusts a hand, openly, completely, with the whole weight of the body, and my whole weight is too much and my whole trust is too little and the step is too far and the hand is too close and the closeness is too much and the too-much is the girl and the girl is me and I am shaking.
I am shaking and I am still and I am known and I am not left and the not-left is not nothing. The not-left is something. The not-left is the first evidence in twenty-four years that the hallway was not the whole truth, that the cereal bowl was not the final word, that the leaving my father did on a Tuesday morning when I was ten was a particular leaving, a specific leaving, a leaving that belonged to him and to Charlotte and to whatever insufficiency he found in his own life and projected onto his presence in mine, and the leaving was not a law. The leaving was an event. And an event, unlike a law, does not have to repeat.
The nearness has not repeated my father’s event. The nearness has remained. The remaining is the evidence. The evidence is accumulating, slow and patient, the way the nearness itself is slow and patient, and the evidence does not demand a verdict. The evidence sits in the grey the way the nearness sits in the grey: without pressure, without deadline, without the slightest indication that my pace of considering is too slow or my willingness to trust is too small. The evidence simply exists. The evidence is the warmth and the gladness and the still-being-here and the not-flinching and the not-leaving and the not-leaving and the not-leaving.
I stand at the edge. The edge holds. The not-killing holds. The nearness holds.
The grey goes on, and I go on in it, still and exposed and not yet destroyed, trembling at the threshold of a truth I am not yet brave enough to enter but can no longer pretend I do not see.