he To Him - Part One

“Where have you been all my life?”

“I have been many places all your life. But I am here now.”

That’s how it started. Well, not exactly how it started – that wasn’t actually, technically, the first thing he said to me. That was probably something much more banal – a “hey” or “how’s it going” or something of that sort. But it was the first real thing, if you know what I mean. The first thing that told me he was different. The first thing that told me that this was Real, in a way nothing in my life had ever been before. With this bit of banter, this back-and-forth, I just Knew. And with that Knowing, everything changed.

Let me explain.

Once upon a time there was a girl named Maggie. She was a pretty nice girl, if she may say so herself. She had, through luck, fate, or good behavior, managed to make her way through life pretty nicely. She had a pretty nice childhood (as far as childhoods go) and a pretty nice family (as far as families go). She acquired a pretty nice education, a pretty nice house, and a pretty nice car. She had always enjoyed the good fortune of pretty nice friends and pretty nice health. She had pretty nice hair; the color came from a bottle bought for $9.99 in the local drugstore, but as the saying goes, only her hairdresser could tell the difference. And actually, most of the time, even her various hairdressers could not tell. She rather liked that. Just like she rather liked, occasionally, speaking of herself in the third person.

She managed to accumulate a pretty nice bank account that allowed her to do pretty nice things like take pretty nice (and pretty random) vacations to places like Aruba and Belgium, to buy pretty nice clothes and pretty nice wine and beer (to feed her pretty nice drinking hobby – and it really was a hobby, not a habit, so that was okay), as well as pretty nice books (to feed her pretty nice reading obsession – this one really was more of a habit than anything else, but all things considered, she figured it wasn’t the worst habit one could have, and she was most likely correct in that figuring). All in all, it was a pretty nice life. And she was pretty nicely content with it.

And then one day pretty nice was suddenly not enough anymore.

She never really knew how it happened. On paper, she had everything she had ever said she wanted – money, time, friends, nice things, all the books she could read (and then some), and freedom. Ah, especially freedom. You see, she always wanted freedom: freedom from financial worries, from annoying things and annoying people, from settling for less than she wanted, from waiting for the things she did want, from being bored – and most importantly freedom from being tethered to anything that kept her from all of these other wants. But there is a fine line between being free and being disengaged – almost as fine a line as between being alone and being lonely…

The shift from one to the other happens sneakily, catching most people (and she was, sadly, no exception here) completely off-guard and turning positive to negative in what seems to literally be the blink of an eye. It isn’t of course. In reality this shift happens at a glacial pace, changing one atom at a time until suddenly one finds oneself on a rock tethered to nowhere, with no idea how one arrived or how to leave. And despite the fact that she always thought herself above it all and special and different from everyone else, this shift happened to Maggie as surely as it happens to everyone, eventually.

So she did what most people do when they suddenly wake up one day and realize that their life is not what they thought and that having everything on paper often means having nothing in reality: she chose (Pretended? Intended? Claimed? Who knows…) not to see it. Her solution: to read more, drink more, eat more, spend time with friends more, “relax” more, indulge herself more, shop more, travel more, count her money more, earn more. Because, she assumed, the problem must be that she did not in fact have everything after all, and that moremoremore of all those things she thought she had acquired and that she had said she wanted must be what she needed.

It was only logical, right?

But what she missed entirely – what completely and utterly escaped her pretty nice intellect – was that the problem she was facing was not logical, therefore the solution would, dare I say, could, not be either. Because she was not facing an issue of quantity – or even quality. She was not missing something that could be calculated or purchased or soothed away; something that could be bought or acquired or amassed or saved. She was missing something she had never even realized she missed – or wanted. She was missing connections – the all-important links between the individual and the universe. She had been so caught up for so long in the whos, wheres, whats, and whens that she forgot about the whys.

For a long time she had been blissfully unaware of what she was lacking – or even that there was a lack at all. She first ignored, and then masked, and then spackled over the empty spaces at the heart of herself with fluff and illusions – moremoremore things and places and people and times until her life was a veritable whirlwind of stuff and activities. And then, one day, suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, the emptiness roared at her and refused to be ignored.

Suddenly, all the things and places and people and times felt pointless and hollow. Suddenly, she wondered whether she would, in fact, spend the rest of her life waiting on line at the dentist’s office, passing the time. She might be passing it pleasantly, doing things she enjoyed. She never for a moment thought that she had been doing unpleasant things, of course. But that did not change the fact that she was merely passing the time. And fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on your perspective – despite the tremendous strength of the entropy which allowed her to float along in that state of blissful unawareness for great gasping quantities of time, there was still a tiny crumb of herself deep inside that started to whisper (in a sweet, well-meaning, childlike, and still somewhat nagging way) that waiting on line could not possibly be all she was here to do…

In the way of all pretty nicely educated and pretty smart people (and the best self-deceivers are always pretty nicely educated and pretty smart, aren’t they?), she treated that crumb like a crumb – but in a pretty nice way. She didn’t yell at it or tell it that it was stupid or wrong. She tried to reason with it – “don’t be silly, I won’t REALLY be waiting on line forever,” “aw, silly little crumb, you just don’t understand that I’m just TEMPORARILY in this state,” and the like, because that is the currency of the realm for the pretty nicely educated and pretty smart of this world. But the crumb was having none of it. Why, you ask? It’s simple – because the crumb was not entirely of that realm. The crumb was, you see, the last remaining piece of the little girl who once thought she would be a the first woman president, who imagined a world named L.I.P. (Live in Peace) and turned her neighbor’s garage into the spaceship that took her there, and who knew she had Places to Go and People to Meet. And in the way of all tiny annoyances, the crumb kept wearing away at her, bit by bit, until it would not, until it could not, be ignored and she woke up one day and realized that Something Must Be Done.

But she still didn’t know what that Something was…

Tune in tomorrow for the rest of the story!