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.