ihavebeenfloated

I’m boarding a train in Oceanside, making a run for it to San Francisco, or maybe just Salinas, since I’ve heard it’s pretty nice around there. I’m running from her, to meet her again. Sarah. Her name, to me, is like the pyre in which I turn to ash and rise again. The nature of my journey at this point confirms this fact, but I can’t make you understand that, I can only tell you how it is.

We met at the job I am not at right now, and not returning to tomorrow. I didn’t think anything of her at first, she seemed a hard worker who kept to herself and asked for help when it was only dire. She spoke with a gentle lisp and said what far too many times for me liking, but her hearing aid and my soft spoken nature never really got along in the first place. I always knew her smile could melt glaciers, that much was apparent to me from the start, but I didn’t think it could disarm me. After a failed attempt to get together with one woman from work, I begun to wonder if Sarah was the one I should have been eying all along, usually that’s the way things happen, isn’t it? I was just about declare the truth in all the statements of stupidity about getting involved with someone at work when Sarah and I began to talk more frequently.

We wound up eating lunch together one afternoon, sitting across the hallway from each other, our backs holding up opposite walls. There was no weight involved in my speech and I was surprised at the level of comfort involved. She was obviously tearing holes in her brain, but I tried to calm her. We talked about this and that, but no conversations of any importance come to mind. I ended up asking if she’d want to do something after work, what exactly I hadn’t figured out.

I drove us to the beach and we sat in the sand and watched the sunset. It was cliche and trite and all of those things but it was beautiful, the orange glow of the sun smoldering in ocean, setting the water all a boil, lighting her face in the most delicate of ways. Her hair pulled back partly, a few wisps pulled behind her ears. Her lips curling back over her teeth, the one corner of her mouth back further than the other, she was smiling at me and I thought I was dying.

We kept it up, seeing each other here and there. Her taste in music, the opposite of mine, and her schedule to busy to keep up on any books, so our conversations were limited to the stresses of work, bills, money, and sometimes God. We’d have heated arguments over the nature of God, two Atheists arguing their case of the existence of the nonexistent. Looking back it’s still fairly humorous, but sad at the same time, two people staring at hope but still completely without it. Searching for what we’d already found, we moved in together, sharing a one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Escondido.

We had a microwave that I had bought for the last place I lived, sometimes it would argue with you, you pressing buttons and it not responding in the desired manner. Sometimes it would talk to you when least expected, beeping from across the room and displaying numbers it really shouldn’t have been. We always thought it was funny and laughed about it openly to friends and family, but sometimes I worried that something more was at work than glitchy electronics. Nothing became of it though and as far as I know from my seat on this train, she still has it at the apartment, but it won’t be there for very long.

Sarah and I had our share of fights, admittedly. Something about the television one day, argument about my microwave the next. Every now and then we’d get into it so bad that I’d have to go and stay with a friend for a night or two. Work the next day was fearsome at best, but we were both reasonable people who kept our outside life problems out of the working situation, something you can’t say for most people. She was always concerned that I was getting too crazy with my religious research or my readings in general. She said all that nonsense was going nowhere, and though I admit that she was right, it was still cruel at the time.

I started going to a psychiatrist, hoping he could give me something that would wrap my head in a towel. Always heard that phrase before, “wrap my head in a towel,” when speaking about anti-depressants or anti-crazy pills, or what have you, and I wondered if it was really like that. It is. He put me on some something-or-another and I have to say, it was like sleeping through life. If you turn your brain up to a eleven for an extended period of time, and get used to it, when you crank it back down to six or seven, it feels like you’re not even alive. I started smoking a pack a day, a fact that Sarah was not too happy about.

I finally took myself off the medication yesterday, and now here I am on this train. I can’t really explain what got me here, but I know it’s what I have to do. This is what’s going to happen, and I swear I’m telling you the truth.

I’m going to get off this train in Salinas and walk down the street to a Starbucks, I’m going to order a large iced coffee of some sort, and sit outside and smoke cigarettes for a long time. I’ll have a notepad and I will write all of this down, but not as it is written now, differently. When the sun finally sets I will walk further until I find a hotel, it will be a Motel 6 and I will buy a room there for $43.99 a night.

The next day I will find myself a job, repairing televisions in a little hole in the wall shop owned by a 67 year old man who still calls black people coons. This will offend me but I won’t say anything about it because he agrees to loan me enough money to get myself into apartment two blocks away. I have about four thousand dollars in the bank, so I don’t really need a loan, but I’ve always thought it was better to have money than to spend it, and I’m sure the old man could use the interest I will have to pay him back.

After work I will spend my night unpacking what few clothes I brought with me in the closet in the apartment. I will write a letter to Sarah and tell her where I am and where I’m living. I will lick the seal of the envelope and seal it with my thumb, with a piece of tape as added security. When I awake in the morning, I will send the letter and continue on working until she arrives.

I will be sitting at the small card table I bought as a placeholder for the oak one I’d like to pick out with her. Sure, collecting nice furniture in an apartment seems a little gratuitous, but shopping for furniture feels like being alive. Someone will knock on the door and I’ll know it’s her. She’ll have managed to find her way in through the front gate without buzzing my apartment just to surprise me. I will open the door and she’ll look at me, tilt her head to the left a little, and smile that smile of hers. She will step forward and slide her arms around my sides and hug me tightly in a way that feels like she will never let go, but she finally does. I will grab her suitcase and bring it inside. The possessed microwave will be down in front of the building in her car, our car. I’ll laugh as I carry it up the stairs, entertaining the thought of dropping it off the balcony, our balcony, next time it acts up.

We’ll head out to that same Starbucks I visited when I arrived here, I’ll say to her, “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.”

So, she’ll ask, “What are you thankful for?”

I’ll reply, “Two things… here, and now.”