Close and Far and Close

Seven years ago next week, someone I loved very much was killed in a drunk driving accident. For the entire week after that, I had my first taste of acid reflux and would lie on the couch in my parents’ bedroom feeling like my esophagus was on fire. My grandparents were visiting that week, but after one disastrous attempt to get me to come to dinner, my mother relented somewhat and I retreated to numbing hours of “Law and Order” at the other end of the house. Even after a couple of months, I would sometimes lie down on the floor, with my cheek pressed against the carpet, and try to reconcile the enormity of Ben’s dying with the everyday experience of living: trying to find a relative place for the frustration of traffic next to the trauma of loss.

A friend of mine has a video of our group from our sophomore summer of college. We passed around the camera while drinking wine and eating a fruit tart in her room at her sorority. When the camera came to me, I became enchanted with the zoom function. I can be heard narrating: “Chris! Close and far and close and far… Mo! And close and far and close and far…” It’s dizzying to watch as I haul the focus forward and back, but I certainly sound like I’m enjoying myself.

Now, though, my shifting focus is just giving me heartburn.

Here are things that are true:

I like my job. This is somewhat miraculous in light of the fact that less than a year ago, I had another job that ground down my confidence and sanity on a daily basis. I live in a very cute apartment, which is on the perfect route for my commute. I have fantastic friends, and I am in love with a very good man. I know a really good recipe for corn-meal encrusted tofu and have a pack of Diet Dr. Pepper on top of my fridge, which is always nice to come home to.

Here are other things that are also true:

I am engaged in a Cold War with my mother, which is something we have never done before and is remarkably painful. My uncle is undergoing treatment for cancer, as is my paternal grandfather. Someone I love is facing massive and frightening uncertainty in her life, and I can’t do anything about it. I live in constant fear that someone I love will be taken suddenly, or slowly, away from me. An essay I wrote just got rejected from the New York Times, and I have gained twelve pounds in the last year.

If you’ll pardon the lack of eloquence, how the fuck does a person make sense of all of this?

The short answer is: I have no idea.

When Ben died, I imagined that I had this cruel little rock inside of me—like a small, jagged chunk of obsidian—and if I could turn myself inside out, and sort through my organs, I could find where the pain lived. I could take that rock, and look at it, and understand where the screaming was coming from. I could point at it and say, “Here. This is where it lives.”

Now I spread my insides out on the table and look at the collection. My losing Ben has been worn down a little smoother now: a dull ache rather than a scraping pain. I’ve tucked my grandfather’s cancer under an obscuring organ, because I’m not ready to look at it full on, full time, and I know there will come a time when I won’t have a choice. When I think of my uncle, my mind automatically deflects itself to think of his son, my cousin, whom I love like a brother—I’m shoving one more degree of separation in between me and the reality. My fight with my mother has left a raw patch in my chest, and the rejection from the New York Times felt like an unwarranted sucker punch on top of that ache this morning.

It’s sort of a wonder how my joys spread themselves out amongst the sorrows, like insulation, guarding the hard parts from one another so that they don’t come together and become unbearable.

Lately I find myself experiencing a kind of emotional vertigo that leaves me dumbfounded and profoundly useless. My brain struggles to keep up: do I sum the hurts and the happiness? Is there a sliding scale, or are there points categories? Illness is less than death but greater than having wet socks all day? Is a personal hurt greater or less than one with a greater, for instance familial, context? And where do I fit Egypt and Yemen into this, if I do at all?

Is pain a cumulative phenomenon, or is it exponential? And happiness? Happiness is just as complicated as grief. The daily barrage of changing magnitude frightens me, because I know the stakes are only going to get higher as I get older. I zoom in and out of focus daily, and all of these things exist simultaneously inside me: a galaxy contained in reluctant skin and blue jeans. The looming threat of my grandfather’s illness exists right next to an almost intolerable smugness that I got flowers for Valentine’s Day. What upset me today? That I am having a relationship-altering fight with my mom, and my boyfriend’s cookies that I sent haven’t gotten to him.

And it’s very, very difficult to try to figure out how to feel all of those things at the same time and not go stark-raving bonkers.

I wondered aloud once to a friend why I can’t think in more solid terms about global warming. Make no mistake, I’m incredibly nervous about it; I recycle, and I take the bus, but I felt like I should be more worried about it more often. My friend, who probably studied psychology or environmental science, surprised me by shrugging and telling me that the human brain wasn’t built to face biological demise 24/7. Meaning, to a certain extent, that denial (or a least firm muffling) is hardwired into us. I wasn’t entirely convinced, since many of my friends spend their professional and personal hours actively trying to change our environmental destruction, but it certainly made me think.

Maybe I’m not supposed to be able to fully grasp the relativity of the things in my life: how large and small it is and isn’t. The enormous good and bad things and the tiny good and bad things have to live all together, inconsistently and impossibly, within me because for better or worse, they’re mine. Taken as a whole, rather than a sum of very disproportionate and confusing parts, maybe this is just the human condition. People have been losing loved ones and stepping in puddles and finding five dollar bills and overthrowing dictators forever, and many of them have not lost their minds. Perhaps at the end of the day you just keep moving and always remember the ultimate truth in Robert Frost’s great and overarching theory about life:

“It goes on.”

Indiana, Take Me In

People will sometimes ask me where I might want to end up living eventually. These people are usually my peers, and I believe their curiosity, which I share, comes from a newfound realization that some of the plans we made might need a little tweaking. We live in places in chunks of two and three years, and we puzzle over where we will end up on a more or less permanent basis. So when I am asked, I give an honest answer: “Indianapolis.”

People will almost invariably laugh at this. They think I’m kidding. They think it’s absurd. And I, for an irrational moment of defensiveness, think that they are assholes. Here’s the thing: I have lived on both coasts, in the south (very briefly), and in the middle. One thing I have noticed is that though each coasts believes it is better than the other, they come together in mutual agreement that they are both superior to the middle. People in California in particular tend to think of the Midwest as more of a theory than an actual place—as in, the place you fly over when you’re going to New York. When I was in high school in Berkeley, a girl in the class above me asked me once, in all seriousness: “You’re from Chicago, right? Do you know my friend Anna?”

Oh yeah. Anna from Chicago. She lived two doors down from me.

(Pause while a small piece of my soul dies.)

The coastal condescension reminds me of the phenomenon in which Harvard and Princeton disagree as to which is the best but can at least agree that they are both better than Dartmouth. As an alumna of both the Midwest in general and Dartmouth in particular, I can attest to the outright fallacy of the claims of the Snooties—both regional and collegiate.

I have no problem with people being loyal to the cities and regions of their upbringing—I think that’s only natural. I take issue, however, when loyalty becomes disdain for other places. Sports rivalries, I will grant you, inhabit a different theoretical space, but the fact that many people I know, honest to God friends of mine, are willing to discount a place they have never even been is downright annoying.

I grew up in suburban Illinois, but both sets of my grandparents lived in a small town in Indiana, about an hour northwest of Indianapolis. My parents were high school sweethearts, and before that they were childhood neighbors: they grew up across the street from one another. As a result, both sets of my grandparents were localized in one square block of Crawfordsville, IN, and I emerged from childhood with strong connections to both Illinois and Indiana.

In some cases, my loyalties between the states are a bit mixed: the Bulls of the mid 1990s are sacrosanct, and so is Walter Peyton. After the genuflection to Sweetness, however, my allegiance leaves the Bears entirely and heads to Indie: I firmly believe Peyton Manning is a demigod, and I live and die by his right arm. The best pizza in the known universe is made by Pizza King Pizza, serving central Indiana since 1958. The best hot dog in the world, though, comes from the Chicago recipe: mustard, cucumber, tomato wedges, celery salt, pickle spear, and chopped onions on a poppy seed bun. God help you if you even think about bringing ketchup anywhere near it.

Fortunately there are enough regional characteristics to eventually overcome my being an Illinois/Indiana crossbreed to make me simply, proudly Midwestern:

Any beverage that is sweet, carbonated, and comes from a bottle or can is called pop. If you were to order any of the following items from any fair, you would not be met with blank stares as you would anywhere else: black cow, brown cow, elephant ear, Turtle Sundae. (For the record, I have tried to do a patch job on the sacred Turtle Sundae out east, but walnuts do not replace pecans. Epic fail.) Sprinkles are called sprinkles and milkshakes are called milkshakes—because that’s what they are. Halloween costumes must be roomy enough to cover a snowsuit. Ears of corn are purchased by the dozen in roadside shacks—the grubbier the better—and traffic delays caused by tractors and freight cars are simply a part of life.

During my senior year of college, I interviewed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is (in my opinion) the crown jewel of the most underrated, visionary museums in the US. It is set on 100 acres of land grant in the city and is home to historical houses, botanical gardens, outdoor installations, and a new state-of-the-art museum facility. The director, the magnificent Max Anderson, is nothing short of a badass, whose staff would follow him off a cliff in a heartbeat. I spent the most remarkable day in the IMA, at the invitation of the director, touring the departments, meeting staff and curators, and looking at art. At the end of the afternoon, I left the museum and walked out into one of those perfect, Midwestern spring afternoons: warm and a little humid, but with a cool breeze. I was high from the amazing museum and the kindness of the staff, and the thought of an empty I-65 through the cornfields made me borderline euphoric. I knew, in a very real way, that I had come home and that I would probably spend many adult years trying to get back there.

And so I would issue a challenge: to those who would cast aspersions at the Midwest, maybe spend some time there first. Go to Indianapolis, go to Cleveland, go to Minneapolis, and spend time in the parts of the city that are the equivalent of where you hang out in your East Coast and West Coast cities.

And when you’re pulling out of the beautiful museums and parks, on streets which follow a blessed grid instead of a cow path, notice how people will let you turn left across traffic. Then you can ask yourself if such a miracle would occur anywhere else.