Living and Loving on the Morning Commute

I take the same bus every day, and the more or less similar cast of characters I encounter must have by now grown accustomed to my occasional bursts of laughter. They may think I’m the crazy girl who laughs at random, but mostly I’m just the crazy girl who’s listening to “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” on podcast and who has no interest in containing her mirth. Or maybe they don’t even notice at all—it is, after all, the MBTA.

Last night on the bus home, I was reading a back issue New Yorker, which was practically in shreds from having lived in my purse for a month. I was reading through David Brooks’ article entitled “Social Animal” when I came to a sentence that made me laugh out loud: “Living is an inherently emotional business.”

It’s times like that when I’m tempted to return to my adolescent vocabulary and respond with a monosyllabically inclined phrase like, “Um, duh?”

It’s easy to find obvious statements like that amusing when your life, and the emotional business therein, is on a more or less even keel.

This morning on the bus, however, I wasn’t so much thinking about David Brooks or the inherently emotional business of living, though I was in the trenches of the latter. This morning I was frantically firing out emails and texts to a tiny network of friends, trying to get news about our best friend and wracking my brain for the name of the city where he is stationed in Japan.

The name came to me in a flash—Sasebo—after I had finished leaving a message for my best friend, the other female quarter of our four-person whole. I launched my smartphone map function and typed in the name, reflecting in a sort of detached way that I had never searched for a place so remote before. The map, having blinked away from Boylston St. in Boston, resolved with a little dot on the far southwestern end of Japan. I had just read on my news app that the earthquake had hit the northeast.

It is always strange to me when an emotion takes on an intensely physical form, when my body responds first and most strongly, almost drowning out coherent thought. In the moment when Sasebo showed up on my phone, far from the epicenter, I felt like my bones had suddenly lost their density and a huge breath escaped me, like a ghost had been exorcised.

Most of my friends, including the man whom I have called my “twin” for twelve years and who is now stationed in Japan as a Seabee, know that I am intensely reactionary. I like to think that as I get older, I can get my rationality to the scene of the event almost as quickly as my emotions, that my reason can wrestle down my initial spike of panic. It is a weird duality, now that my reactions come in twos:

THAT STUPID CREDIT UNION ATM DIDN’T GIVE ME MY MONEY!
Calm down, go inside, ask at the desk. Call your bank. They’ll know there’s an error.

OH MY GOD I FORGOT TO SEND IN MY RENT!
It’s only the second of the month. It’ll get there in a day. You’ll be fine.

However, in those nauseating moments of perspective, when the small, stupid problems with which we busy ourselves daily fall away in the face of something potentially shattering, my voice of reason has a hard time keeping up:

THERE’S BEEN A CATACLYSMIC EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN—IS HE OKAY?
(Radio silence.)

The panic, the fear that feels like I swallowed a cold, smooth river stone, is so massive that it flattens my fledging rationality. The irony is that for the last twelve years, my rationality has not been self-generated. It had an external source: my twin, my sardonic, reasonable best friend who joined the Navy straight out of college. It is only recently that I have been able to rein my hysteria in without prompting from him. And so I found myself doubly exposed in the middle of my morning commute: my own reason had deserted me, and the unexpected danger to my reasonable half had been the cause.

While a sick, dark feeling in the pit of my stomach persisted—and would not be dispelled until I heard from him—I had a sudden rush of embarrassment: for being the over-reacting, totally irrational, trying-to-cover-up-the-fact-that-I-am-crying-on-the-bus girl. I felt stupid—not to mention inconsiderate—for having texted his brother. It was a large, messy and headlong reaction, and I thought for a moment that he himself would be rolling his eyes lovingly at me, across the length Pacific and the continental US combined.

But then I realized maybe my embarrassment was also a little unreasonable:

My fear for his safety, his wholeness, is equal and opposite to the enormity of happiness I experience when I see him for the first time in months. He is fairly accustomed to my launching at him for a hug (which usually resembles more of a slide-tackle than an embrace), and he’s become very adept over the years at catching me as I flail joyfully. The persistent dread I felt until I got his email was the mirror image of the continuous thread of our friendship: a perfect, platonic partnership between a very reactionary girl and a very amused, unflappable boy, now a woman and a man, slightly less reactionary and still unflappable, respectively.

So I think this morning, when he got my email, he probably didn’t roll his eyes, because he knew that my enormous fear was just a symptom of my even greater love, that for every second of extraordinary fear I was remembering every second of blissfully ordinary happiness. When I step back and look at a bigger picture of our lives in the context of others’ lives, I experience a humbling, crushing awe and empathy for the loved ones of service men and women who live every day with the fear that nearly crippled me this morning.

And I wonder if maybe David Brooks got it backwards: that in fact conducting emotional business, the intense and messy and embarrassing work of loving and fearing and figuring it out every day, is the only way you can really, inherently live.

It is a MESS. And it is worth it.

Modern Love: Across the Great Divide

I used to have a sound-bite I’d drop into conversation amongst my like-minded group of liberal friends. I’d say, with more or less disdain, “I don’t date Republicans. I think it’s bad policy.” This would elicit some amusement from my friends and a pang of foreboding in the recesses of my brain, like a foreshadowing that someday I would grow up enough not to make comments like that. Or that someday I would fall in love with a Republican.

I did exactly that, though when we first met, politics were not really an issue. John and I met in Rome five years ago this spring, while we were both studying abroad. As if that weren’t enough, I saw him out of my window, sitting on the balcony below my apartment. A recklessness I have yet to fully outgrow made me call out to say hello, and a self-consciousness I will never outgrow made me duck back into my room shortly thereafter. When he came up to say hello later, and as we got to know each other over the next couple of weeks, the only debate we ever came close to having had nothing to do with politics.

“Who’s your favorite -ini?” he asked me, as we were standing in Santa Maria Maggiore.

I thought I had heard him wrong. “My favorite what?”

“Boromini or Bernini?” He nodded down at the floor, where the latter –ini was buried. I fell for him in a series of moments just like that. As it happened, we each chose a different –ini, but we decided to get gelato instead of argue about it.

We went back to our respective colleges about a month later and fell out of touch, until last winter, when I found him again. He had been, in many ways, the one that got away: the first guy who had ever made me feel like my entire self was entirely fine just as she was. It was a miraculous feeling, one that kept me poking around for him online every now and then. On one of those occasions, I actually found him and—with no small amount of anxiety—sent him an email. He answered quickly, and a few months of emails became a few months of phone calls became meeting in Washington, DC one Sunday in August.

In another city of columns and marble, he interlaced our fingers and told me with a grin, “You know, I’m really glad you didn’t get married in the last five years.”

And I fell in love with him all over again.

We got to know each other again more thoroughly this time, filling in gaps we had forgotten or never really gotten around to filling when we were in Rome. I learned about his time in the ROTC; he learned about my sometimes contentious relationship with my sisters. We figured out that in spite of his not liking cocoanut, my cocoanut-oatmeal cookies are his favorite. Some knowledge came more by osmosis than outright conversation, so I guess it was not all that surprising when his tone changed noticeably one night over the phone.

“I want to talk to you about something.” He spoke with the tone of someone gingerly stepping out onto a frozen pond, not sure if the ice is solid yet.

I became cautious. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Healthcare.”

“Ah.”

The time had come at last.

John was raised Republican in Virginia, in a Roman Catholic family. It is worth noting that my mother would correct me with her time-honored admonition: “One raises hawgs. One brings up children.” This reproach is an excellent example of an odd element of my Northern upbringing, which made me very receptive to my sweetheart’s Southern charms: for as long as I can remember, my mother’s best friends have all been Southern. Therefore, with help from my father of course, I was brought up by a pack of Southern women. And I mean Southern with a capital S. As a result, where many of my friends have a more or less dim view of the South, I have no problem with it. Actually, I think they do a lot of things better down there—not the least of which is to bring up somebody like John. My mother likes to claim that I was “bow-un” (rough linguistic approximation of “born”) south of the Mason-Dixon, but I never felt that Fort Lauderdale really counted.

Therefore, for maternal reason, upbringing did not separate us as it might have, in terms of geographical prejudice. It did, however, separate us in terms of politics.

I myself was brought up Democrat, through and through, in one of the most conservative counties in Illinois. I had thought I was fairly radical, until my family moved to northern California and I enrolled in a high school on the Berkeley border. I had to add a few darker shades of blue on my political color wheel after that experience. Nevertheless, I was as much a “cradle Democrat” as I was a “cradle Episcopalian.”

John brought up the question of healthcare as the first step into an arena where we were both fairly certain we wouldn’t agree on much. During that first conversation, I was more on the defensive than anything else: when in doubt, defend Obama. John was not on the offensive by any means, but I had become so cemented in my party’s line that I hadn’t bothered to get many details. As my beloved Republican respectfully began to ask me for specifics to back up my arguments, I found I had few, if any. The next day I did some research on the healthcare reform and figured out why exactly I thought what I thought.

It was a miracle: my Republican boyfriend was making me a better Democrat.

We agreed after that conversation, in tones of relief because there had been no yelling, that we should bring up a contentious issue maybe once every couple of weeks, to keep things honest and interesting.

A few months later, we had our first fight in earnest while he was visiting me in Boston. In the intervening months, John had picked up the sometimes annoying habit of pressing political issues when I had no particular interest in their being pressed. The evening of our fight, I was making dinner for us and some friends, and he brought up tax breaks.

In retrospect, the most dangerous part of our conversation was not the fight itself but the fact that we were fighting with blunt ideological instruments. We never used any specifics—no percentages, no actual statutes. As the fight progressed (or rather, devolved), we essentially became caricatures: Blue and Red yelling at each other from opposite sides of the aisle or, as it happened, my kitchen.

We made up later, but the fight still bothered me. I realized that we hadn’t actually been discussing anything; we hadn’t been trying to accomplish any understanding. We were just yelling at each other. I stepped back from the fight and thought about what I believed, and why I believed it. When I called him and delicately brought it up, I found he had been having similar worries.

As we talked about it, really talked, we found out that we could understand where the other was coming from. He told me he wants to believe that he can be wealthy: that he can work hard, earn a good living and not have the government take more than half. I told him that I didn’t believe the super-rich should receive tax cuts simply because they were super-rich, because I don’t believe the trickledown effect works. We talked about the Citizens United decision and discovered that we had some common-ground on disagreeing with the decision. Miraculously, we found that when we weren’t yelling, we could actually hear each other.

The greatest challenge I have observed, in politics and relationships, is an all or nothing mentality. How can anything work when “give and take” becomes a spiteful form of “you didn’t give me this, so I won’t give you that”? If you think you’re always right, then the other side can’t be anything but wrong. These ideas seem so obvious, but watching any political coverage—or my most recent argument with my boyfriend—would prove otherwise.

After we had fought, but before our real conversation, I went back into my living room where John had stationed himself on the couch. We had, in effect, gone to our separate corners, as much as one can do that in a studio apartment. I nudged his leg down from where he’d propped it on the coffee table and sat down on his lap. I looked him square in the eye.

“I’d rather fight with you about things that are important to us than fight about things that aren’t.”

He smiled at me, the same smile that made me weak in the knees five years ago and still does, and said, “Me too.”

As I was giving my best friend the rundown of the weekend John visited, I told her we had fought, and she asked what about.

I told her: “Tax law.”

Note from Dylan

A little while ago, I sat down at my computer and very purposefully set out to write an essay for the Modern Love section of the New York Times. Since I discovered it in June of 2009, I have stalked it mercilessly and begun worship at the shrine of Daniel Jones (as far as I'm concerned, he's right up there with Emma Thompson). So I sat myself down and wrote about my (modern?) love. I sent it in, knowing that even if it got rejected, I could still post it here: it wouldn't die of shame in the depths of my hard drive.

It is remarkably easy to be philosophical in advance and even more remarkably difficult to remain so when something sucks. Like an essay being rejected.

I remind myself, though, that being rejected outright is enormously better than being accepted, encouraged, then at the last minute rejected (see my Newsweek trauma for details). So I still love me some Daniel Jones, and proudly present my Modern Love submission. Even if the NYT didn't, those nice folks at Dylan's Middleground (yes, namely me) loved it.