Sometimes, when faced with something simultaneously mundane and unexpected, I have noticed moments in which my brain can’t quite seem to keep up with current events. Even as I am experiencing something quite different from what I was expecting, my brain will briefly, stubbornly dig in, as if it is saying, “No, just wait a minute—that liquid in your mouth is apple juice. I promise it is. Just hold on a second.”
In this particular instance, I was about eight years old, home sick from school, when I shuffled downstairs to get something to drink to soothe my sore throat. In the fridge there was a tall glass of alluring, amber liquid. I thought it was apple juice, and for a few seconds my brain kept trying to convince me it was, until it finally gave way to the irrefutable fact that I had just taken a large gulp of beer.
My mother came downstairs to find me coughing and sputtering on the kitchen floor, and I was convinced (at least for another several years) that beer was some sort of punishment inflicted upon poor, unsuspecting mortals.
In retrospect, those moments are often comedic: the time in which your brain has to catch up, while the rest of your body knows exactly what is going on and begins dealing with the issue independently. After all, my tastebuds weren’t wrong: that was definitely beer. No two ways about it.
I notice this phenomenon occasionally when I’m dealing with my alarm clock.
When I wake up on a week day, of my own accord, my body is instantly suspicious. Usually I have to be hauled forcibly out of sleep by a very insistent alarm. It is immediately evident that not only do I feel more rested than usual, but also that the light in my bedroom looks brighter than it should. In times like this, I will roll over and look with some bemusement at my alarm clock. The time will usually read an hour later than I expect, because for some unfathomable reason my alarm didn’t go off, and I will spend a few seconds gazing in mild confusion at the clock, thinking, “That’s funny—this clock is wrong.”
While I’m thinking this, the chagrin will be mounting in my stomach, and when my brain finally kicks into gear, I’m usually already launching out of bed with an emphatic pronouncement like, “SHIT!”
So all right, maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake. It is interesting, though, that not infrequently do my brain and my body disagree—or at least believe in two separately, not entirely compatible ideas—and more often than not, my body turns out to be right. I observe this trend especially in dating: while my brain is churning out excuses for some guy’s not calling, my stomach and surrounding organs know that no, his arms have not fallen off due to a rare and exotic fungal attack. He’s just not going to call.
I know that I’m not the only person who possesses this kind of intuition: the most common expression is “knowing in your gut.” I think it’s interesting that the noun of choice in that phrase is “gut.” It’s blunt little word, and it seems to conveniently refer not to a specific anatomical locus, but to the general space in your body where emotions manifest. I tend to think of my gut as the space in between my organs, and it is subject to all kinds of interesting physics. Without any actual change of state, temperature, or location, my gut can freeze, melt, sublimate, tighten, or drop into my boots very convincingly. Also not for nothing can the noun “gut” also function as a very effective verb, meaning to eviscerate, disembowel, or just generally take all the inside stuff and make it outside.
There is an odd corollary, though, to the phenomenon of feeling something in my gut. Sometimes, very rarely, my brain will actually figure something out ahead of time. For whatever reason, I’ll know in advance that I’m going to feel something very strongly, even though I’m not feeling it yet.
This seems kind of self-evident: of course I can anticipate emotional events. Nevertheless, it is unusual that when I realize I have an emotional punch coming somewhere down the line, I don’t simultaneously begin to feel that punch.
Recently, my parents sold their house outside of Chicago. For the last few years, my dad has been working in Fort Lauderdale, and my mom has been holding down the fort in Illinois, in the house they lovingly remodeled as the place in which they would be grandparents. Ironically, though this situation might work for many married people (one partner in one state, another partner in a different state), my parents, after thirty-eight years of marriage, are still crazy about each other and couldn’t stand living apart. Fort Lauderdale was never really home, but eventually they decided that being together was more important than keeping the house, so they put it on the market.
This was not the house I grew up in. Still, it was the house to which I came home. The first day we moved back to Illinois, my two best friends came over to celebrate, and we all ate carry-out Chinese food. They both drove—maybe thirty minutes or so—when for the past four years, they had had to spend about five hours on a plane to get to me. That fact alone was enough to make that house sacred to me, but it also just felt right. It sits on a big front lawn, on a street lined with old growth trees, a few blocks up from your typical small, old Chicago suburb, complete with tiny train station. Our dear departed Bogart used to sit on the back porch landing, surveying his domain with benevolent grace, and when it got dark in the summer, the fireflies came out.
To be perfectly honest, what I had expected was for the house to be on the market for years, long enough for my dad to retire, and for my folks to simply move home. I was surprised when the house sold, after only a few months of being listed. It was an odd, abstract sensation—not being part of one of our family’s large, wrenching moves. There have been quite a few, and the ones in which I participated were horrible, drawn out affairs. When the various and inevitable dramas of inspections and contacts began to rev up, I felt an unflattering sense of relief: far away in Boston, installed in my little apartment, I didn’t have to deal with it. Sure, I talked on the phone with my mother, who was experiencing the same trauma I remember very well, but I didn’t actually have to be there in the thick of it.
When the house sold, I felt mild surprise, but not much else.
What my brain realized then was that eventually, I would feel more. A lot more. Intellectually I knew that there had to be fallout: there was no way that I could lose something I had loved so much and not feel it, even though I hadn’t had to live through all the nasty, real estate details of losing it like I had had to do before. So I shrugged, and waited.
And eventually turned out to be right.
One evening last week, I set my alarm for a few minutes later than the current hour, and sat on my bed to wait. That morning had been one of those times when I woke up and wondered why my clock was wrong (shit). I wanted to make sure my alarm clock wasn’t going to make a habit of not going off, so I set the time and waited. While I did, I killed a little time on my phone.
I puttered around in my apps, eventually bringing up a weather program I don’t usually use. When I first got my phone, I added to the weather app all of the places I thought I would need: home, school, Rome (just in case). As I waited out my alarm, I went through the varying locations. Boston came up first: no snow in the forecast. Damn. I swiped across to the next place.
Glen Ellyn, Illinois.
I started to cry. I had known it was coming, but the pain in my stomach was somehow still surprising.
Though belatedly, I had officially been gutted.
