miles

E–


I was in Georgia about three months. I thought of it in my head like it was my Summer Vacation, and I treated it like that. I let go of my rigorous pitching schedule and these weekly missives and tried instead to figure out who I want to be. It…worked? 


Honestly, the vote’s still out. 


But I did figure out a few things that felt distinctly wrong.


And a lot of that led to a thick nostalgia wherein I was desperate for a time before this was my job, before I had to convert words into food, and suddenly a handful of cities in the States came into my mind in bright, vivid detail.


And among them was Chicago. And I know everyone’s Chicago is a little different, but My Chicago is South Side and North Side, it’s the lake and the West Suburbs, it’s catching that tricky exit at 31st around that wicked bend and sleeping naked in front of an open window all summer. There are so many barstools in My Chicago: both those that I have tended and those that I have been welcomed to sit upon. But more than those barstools are all the people who sit on them and eat vegan sandwiches and play bar games and discuss all the minutiae that makes Chicago Chicago.


I just miss this so much.


And then, yes, there’s my hometown too. And your description of it being reduced to a bar at the end of the universe: this feels so apt in so many ways, chief among them the daydream that has been playing on repeat in my head since the pandemic started. This is the one where I park my car in the lot, cross to the door, reach for the handle, and enter a familiar bar to see the smiling faces of folks I haven’t seen in two or three years.


It’s so seductive, Erin. And the fantasy is so insidious because it’s real. It’s not just “some bar,” it’s a specific, real bar that has, so far, actually managed to survive the pandemic. It just reopened a month ago.


I’m describing this place like it’s inanimate; like a place that waits for anyone to open the door, but it’s not quite like that, at least not for me. Because much like “My Chicago” and “Your Chicago,” behind the bar is someone that transforms it to something far beyond a place to perch on a barstool.


But that’s how it works, right? People transform the spaces they inhabit, and your relationships and experiences color your perceptions of places. And if you’re me, and you spend a lot of time in new places, then this seemingly insignificant difference between some bar and A Bar Transformed has become an idea so large that I’ve hung a good portion of my life – and fantasies – upon it.


And in all of those fantasies, all of those bars and the people that inhabit them have become so convoluted that it’s hard to pull them from each other, and I can’t pull either from the places they live, and I can’t pull all of those places outside of the idea of them being so very far from me. And by far I mean all kinds of measurements of distance like time, and money, and miles, and all the years that have passed that have likely left all of those places unlike the image of them in my head.


And I’m suddenly aware that the more time that passes and the more homesick I get, the less all of these places will remain how I know them. And I fear that if I wait too long I’ll have nothing left to return to. And a lot of days I fear that this has already happened.


It’s weird reconnecting with all of those people that ground you to a place. Isn’t it? When you’ve been gone for a while? And it’s weirder when this sparks you to retrace those lines between someone you were and someone you are now and seeing how terrifying that line looks because of all of the experiences it represents. For me, worse even than the fear that I’ll run out of places to hide from The Nothing I have to return to is looking back on all of those lines with regret.


I’ve been, over the last year and a half, retracing my own line without really realizing it, and now that is has come into terrifying focus I’m regretful of so many of the things I’ve done along it. And I guess now that my priorities require me to take far fewer risks, it’s probably too late to  redraw it in a different direction.


But trust me: knowing that doesn’t keep me from looking back down those paths in my minds eye over and over again. But within this unhealthy and untruthful daydream is something very real about my fears and choices, but mostly, as I’ve come to realize, about my self-esteem.


I’m quick to defend my choices. Or rather: I won’t defend them because I don’t see the need to. I’m an adult with free will, and the concept of different people liking different things is not lost on me. I don’t see simple choices as inhabiting a hierarchy wherein some are better than others.


Logically.


Because of course I do actually do this, and I see this spelled out all over my adulthood that I can now see so very clearly, and I’m ashamed and sad and I can’t believe I’ve done this to myself. And now it’s far too late to undo because I can see how I’ve internalized this idea that I’m inherently a total fucking mess, and how this means that there are certain things that I don’t deserve.


Because, Erin, a long time ago I was very much in love with a dear friend of mine that was on an extremely stringent, extremely admirable path. And I looked at my own path with all of its cities and twists and turns and I couldn’t imagine them fitting together. And now I know that I asked for them to intertwine far too quietly, and then, when I was left without a response, shelved the idea that he nor anyone like him would ever care to walk my path with me.


And in the meantime, meaning all of those years in between that tacit decision and now, it’s not like he left my life. There have been some years where he faded into the background but he was never gone. And on one hand, I was right: he basically designed his life completely opposite from my own, likely imagining it as a vector projecting through time on a steady incline. And then he followed that incline all the way to the spoils of traditional success that he now enjoys the rewards of: things like food, and health insurance, and a home that bears his name on the deed.


And along the way he bought The Bar at the End of the Universe, the very same one that has made so many appearances in my minds eye. And despite how obvious it should have already been I’ve only just realized that this place is so important to me precisely because he bought it. And now that I’ve spent my Summer Vacation realizing that it’s him behind the bar and not the bar that I miss, I don’t really feel like I deserve either anymore. 


Because for lack of vectors, I’ve just been out here in the wide world weaving spider webs that always seem to break when it rains, and there’s nowhere left for anyone to land.


And much like you – like, exactly like you – we shared an exchange that your words to me seemed to illustrate better than any I could recall and string into sentences.


Because I told him I loved him, and I meant it. And then he told me he loved me and he meant it. 


But unlike your apocalyptic balcony in Reno, there was no fridge to which we could surrender for another PBR. There was only me closing my laptop, and, in the still, humid night where I was occupying a slim bed alone, the grim realization that the exact same words have this tremendous tendency to mean completely different things when they are spoken by two people who have made different choices. 


And now I’m in Istanbul.


And here is the closest place to home I’ve had in the last year. And even before I ever came it represented something I was desperate for: a way out of South Africa, an unexpired visa. The chance to have people in my life again so I could be free of the crushing loneliness of a Johannesburg winter mid an unprecedented pandemic. 


And from my perch in Georgia it all seemed so romantic, because from there, My Istanbul looked like a snapshot from a time I could easily snatch back, and I hadn’t exactly realized that I would have to build it anew. And maybe I don’t know how anymore because I’m beginning to wonder what all of this is for.


There are more bars. In the States, I mean. There are far more than just that one in my hometown, and they have all kinds of people tending them.


There’s one in Miami, too. Maybe my favorite bar in the world, I once described it as: “a bright light on a dark map that welcomed anyone who cared to join.” 


But even though I never admit it, My Miami is gone, and I’m wondering where exactly I belong. 


I wonder who welcomes me. 


And on top of all that: I worry, frequently, that I have nothing of value to say about any of it.


And that is concerning because my sense of self is so incredibly intertwined with what I have to say that I have no tools to reconcile this save to write something, anything, down. And this is all coming at a time when that sense was already waning, thinning to something I don’t recognize.


And in the exact right now, I’ve found myself in a city where I transform nothing. Istanbul is a behemoth in the middle of the world, it spans two continents and thousands of years. It cares not that I choose to be here.


And then I read your letter. And I was so moved, yes, because it’s easily the best thing I’ve read in weeks. And by that I mean the message as well as the sheer deftness with which it was crafted, and probably many other rubrics that I am not skilled enough as a writer to name.


But more than it being the best, it was also my favorite. Because it put into such stark relief so much of what I was feeling and couldn’t articulate, and I’m just so goddamned thankful because I was paralyzed by the reservoir behind the dam inside my heart, and all of it was tying me to a moment I couldn’t release myself from.


So you asked: “Have you seen anything beautiful lately?”


Yes. I have. It was your email in my inbox.

I love and miss you.



xx–M

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