They say you can’t run from yourself, but maybe the key to life is the same as the key to real estate- location, location, location.
Sometimes walking away is not enough. Sometimes we have to run away, fly away and then drive away to actually get away. Distance, as easy as it is to create- with a look, a withdrawn hand- can often feel impossible to maintain.
After she showed the driver a crumpled paper with the address on it, being not yet adventurous enough to speak, she sat, alone, in the back of the taxi as it gently wended its way from the airport, ducking under green signs with unknown towns on them. Foreign directions. Dawn would be breaking soon, the light charcoal cover would soon be lifted, offering her first glimpses of this city. On the radio, two men chatted with a women in lively morning radio voices. They spoke too fast for her to pick out the words. Their voices held the confidence that everybody listening to them knew exactly what they were talking about, all the pop-culture references, all the bad puns, all the sexual innuendo. And most people probably did. Most people were probably on their way to their jobs in those towns she did not yet know, yelling in their strange language to get their kids ready for school, just like they were at home. But now she was here, and she didn’t have any lunches to pack and she didn’t yet have a job to go to and she wasn’t sure if her Berlitz tapes were ever going to help her connect intimately with another human being. She wasn’t sure she wanted to connect to another human being in this place, particularly not intimately. She wasn’t even sure what this place was, though she new what it wasn’t- it wasn’t home and it wasn’t hopeless and it wasn’t boring. And yet, she knew that it was all these things too, only not to her, not yet. To her it was a place full of people who had never heard her story, of people who never would hear her story, because she would never find the words in the Berlitz book as fast as the feelings flood. And the people wouldn’t accuse her or prod her or get angry, they would understand the one simple thing she had been telling him all along. Language fails
The light came slowly and colorlessly. The sky simply grew lighter, the color of the inside of a cloud. The streets crissed and crossed in ways let no uncertainty that one had to be familiar with this town to get anywhere quickly. She checked the growing number on the taxi meter, tried briefly to convert the number to dollars, but arrived at a number that certainly couldn’t be right. She wasn’t sure how long the taxi ride would be- five minutes? Thirty? She grew mildly suspicious that the driver was taking “the long way,” realized she had no way of knowing this, and abandoned this line of thinking.
Language fails, and when it does, it hurts worse than almost any other betrayal. When you sit, and you carefully hand-pick each word, only to have them turn to shards of glass in his hand
And then the sky exploded into a blue-tint, and the streets were just starting to fill. The bakery was soon to open- the colorful pastries and breads already filled the display cases. The butcher shop was opening the awning with a rotating metal pole. Whole heads and sides of animals sat out, unprotected by plastic wrap. She thought of the superstore markets at home, where she could buy everything she would ever need in one place- tuna fish, sauvignon blanc, yoga pants, a ratchet set, a new comforter, Armorall, tennis balls, greeting cards, frozen pizza, a set of margarita glasses, photo frames, lip gloss, a house plant, and condoms all in one place. People exited small doorways, spilled out of metro stations. The faces were mostly pale, but some were brown, some even closer to black. None of them were familiar. The cars were smaller and less into maintaining their lanes than at home. She couldn’t help smiling and creeping closer to the window. She watched the buildings, their crazy architecture, the people dressed in slacks and shoes instead of jeans and sneakers. The cab driver smelled of coffee and cigarrettes. Her breath gently fogged up the glass below her nose.
That night when she threw the glass of red wine against the wall. She didn’t know why or when she let every other aspect of her life go to shit and started caring only about him. She hated her job, felt overwhelmed by her family’s love and concern, she hadn’t created anything worth a damn in a long time, and she felt so far from her spiritual center, so far from when she knew that she and everything else was okay in the world and as it must be. And here he was, getting mad at her when all she thought she was saying was “I love you.” Why did he hear so many other things? Like “you’re a failure” and “you’ll never be enough” and “you don’t love yourself.” The wine slid like thin blood down the wall, when she threw it. Dried like thin bloodstains.
The cab driver turned gruffly toward her and asked her a question. The smoke smell got stronger first, then the coffee smell. And then something new- faint, like a body smell or a gasoline smell... She thought she understood two or so words, but they didn't make sense in this context. She raised her eyebrows, then realized that it might look as if she were going to speak, and promptly lowered them. He repeated the words, this time with some new ones tagged on, but they still sounded nothing like the "Mr. Smith goes to the store on Thursdays" she had come to believe this language entailed. He turned away from her just as gruffly. She looked again out the window.
The voices on the radio talked to a caller, someone who obviously knew how to use a phone in this place. She had tried, upon landing, to call her one friend here, an old college roommate, and to call her mother, after having an espresso in a little ceramic cup in the bright arrivals-area café in the airport. She bought a phone card, and thought she was following the directions, but somehow kept getting a fast busy signal.
She wondered what being here might hold for her. What joy, what newness, what small mysteries and miracles. They say you can’t run from yourself, but maybe the key to life is the same as the key to real estate- location, location, location.
And yes, she knew one day she might have to stop running. Maybe…
But she wanted for life to forever be beyond her ken, always something she scurried behind, eager for more, full of beginner’s mind. She wanted to forever be walking towards something, not walking away. With life always in front of her, just beyond her grasp, she could keep running and running and running…
