You know, sometimes the weirdest shit just falls out of your mouth.
I was on a date a few months back. The usual dance. Small bites, a couple of drinks. She seemed interested enough. She was from Michigan; you could tell by the accent she was trying to scrub out of her voice. A little bit of the ghetto still clinging to her, but she was smart, attractive. One of the ones who almost made it out.
The talk turned to Sedona, my one-year sabbatical from the real world. I made the usual jokes, told the story for the hundredth time. Not to impress her, but to lay out the map, to let her know I was a different kind of animal: a traditional, conservative, goddamn hippie.
And she, for some reason, got hooked on the meditation part.
“So how does it work?” she asked.
I told her my version of it, anyway. It’s not about finding God or any of that bullshit. It’s about finding an exit sign.
“You find a quiet place,” I told her. “You sit your ass down. You slow your breathing, and you wait for that goddamn committee of assholes in your head to finally shut up. And when it’s finally quiet, when there’s nothing but a weird, beautiful silence in there, you let an image form.”
“An image of what?”
“A place,” I said. “A picture of a place where you can look at yourself in the mirror and not want to puke. A place where you can finally fall in love with yourself. That’s the place you’re supposed to go. That’s your next move. Your escape route.”
She gives me a call this evening. Wants to come by the house. Says her “hormones are kicking in.”
And so begins the usual dance, the tired, old script. The flirtation, the dance of expectations, the whole “friends with benefits” charade that people play when they’re too scared to admit they’re just lonely and want to feel another warm body in the room.
But then, in the middle of all that bullshit, her voice changes. It gets quiet, serious. And that hard, ghetto edge she wears like armor, the one she picked up in Michigan and never quite managed to shake?
It just drops away. And for a second, you hear something else. Something real. And you stop thinking about the game, and you just… listen.
“You know,” she says, “that conversation we had. The one about closing your eyes and finding your place to fall in love with yourself.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I was in Michigan, visiting my family. I was by this lake, sitting on a bench, and I did it. I did exactly what you told me to do.”
I just listened, a drink in my hand.
“And by the time I opened my eyes,” she says, her voice all strange and full of this new energy, “I already had the vision. I was in Colorado. I saw an elk, a bear, an eagle. Mountains that took my breath away. So… I’m going. I’m driving to Colorado.”
All because of some bullshit I said on a Tuesday night.
It’s funny sometimes. I think I’m the only person who ever really listens to myself. I’ve been through the ringer, I’ve seen some things. But it’s a strange, rare thing to connect with somebody, to throw out some piece of your own private madness, and have them actually catch it and run with it.
So she’ll be out there in late July, making that seven-hour run from Tucson, right through the gut of another goddamn armpit they call New Mexico, heading for Durango. And when she gets there, it’ll be like stepping onto another planet. Night and day.
The flowers will be blooming, all stupid and beautiful. The whole place will look like the goddamn Swiss Alps, with waterfalls cutting through the rock. I’ve been in that part of the country. It’s absolutely, terrifyingly gorgeous.
And you think about it. You think about this girl, this Michigan hood rat, with all her city scars and her ghetto accent, standing in the middle of all that. All that beauty, all that incredible, indifferent nature that doesn’t give a single, solitary shit about her or her problems.
And you realize, if a person can’t fall in love with herself and learn to at least tolerate the sight of their own goddamn soul in a place like that…
Well, then they’re probably fucked for good. And no amount of pretty scenery is going to change that.
I’m looking forward to her return. To connect again. To see if there’s a difference. To see if that beautiful, crazy bitch actually found what she was looking for, or if she just traded one cage for another, prettier one.
