Moving On

It's a new year. 

I hesitate to write a New Year entry, since I tend to reflect at the end of the school year (having known no other calendar since I was five). Also, who reads blogs anymore? It's basically just you (whoever you are) and my sister (there is a 98% chance you are my sister). And yet.

2011 was a surprisingly significant year for me, and December 31 this time around was particularly heavy, so here I am. But I'll try to keep it brief. 

Flying over the great big Colorado mountains in May on my way home from Alexis' graduation, I felt a strange urgency I hadn't felt since I was nine. Death felt very real to me. Danger felt imminent. For the first time in my life, I was afraid to be on an airplane. I had a panic attack.

It'd been years since I'd had a panic attack, but this one came on in full force. Here is what this is like for me: a thousand very small knife-yielding phantom men (picture the death-eaters as interpreted by the Harry Potter movie franchise) attacking on all sides, including the side that has my lungs in it. I cry in that very dry, gaspy, red-faced way I must have learned from watching a bunch of grunge movies in the nineties. It really does feel like the world is going to end, for a seemingly endless half hour.

Is this embarrassing to experience on an airplane? Yes. Not only do you start feeling deeply intimate about the waxy puke bags in the seat back in front of you, but the flight attendants all start giving you hawk-eye glares, like you're a mid-level terrorist and they are excited to nab you.

I'm telling you this because it didn't go away. I started to get these panic attacks a lot. The insomnia I had when I was in fourth grade and our teacher taught us about AIDS returned (by the way: why are they teaching fourth graders about AIDS? There's no turning back once you know about AIDS. Childhood ends after that. The Portland Public School System hates childhood.) I started to be kind of a pain to be around: I was that person who goes to bars and says, "But what is the POINT of life anyway if you're just going to DIE?" What's that? You don't have a friend like that? That's because people like that don't usually have friends.

And that's probably why my relationship ended. I'm sure there were a lot of other reasons for it, too, but I'm guessing that the primary one was that no one really wants to be with someone who makes Conor Oberst look like a peppy fantasy clown at a child's birthday party by comparison.

I want to say this and get it out of the way: it was a great relationship. Everything about it was completely worth it and wonderful, and I'm sure that's why it hurts so much; why I want to be so mad. But I can't really be mad. This guy was never anything but kind to me and honest with me, and the world is better because he is in it.

Please don't ever make me repeat that.

We met on New Year's Eve. I was drunk. Know that I am not a drinker: it took me years to have anything but wine -- I didn't even let that pass my lips until I was 21 and officially legal. That was 2008, the year of my other significant break-up, so I was kind of a huge mess (hence the being drunk). We played board games, and I held grocery store fireworks in my fists and lit them. I remember almost none of this. I only remember feeling a little bit better for the first time in a long time. 

I've spent the greater part of the last three years feeling better. Learning to garden, developing theories about child psychology, building houses and chicken coops and cutting boards. There was a deep calm to all of it; I felt like I had somehow found myself perched right inside the life I wanted to live. 

But then there was that plane ride. I don't know why that was the moment of self-destruction. I'm one of those people who cries at any movie I see on an airplane (this is a phenomenon that has been widely documented but ill-explained), so maybe that was part of it. Maybe it was watching Alexis graduate and knowing that a gigantic chapter in my life and the lives of all my family members was totally and completely closed and sealed forever. Maybe it was just some kind of biological clock that waited until I was 25 to remind me that life is short and full of failures. I can't explain it at all (where's Clarissa when you need her, right?). 

There was the plane ride, and the decline, and then the break-up. For a week I did nothing but watch every single episode of Community and cry. Literally nothing else. I didn't even pee very often.

But at some point, one has to move on.

That point may have been, for all its shit-show glory, New Years' Eve, 2011. I was drunk. Somehow I ended up on Mississippi Avenue, wearing a beautiful dress that no one could see because I was married to my wool coat and too wasted to care, stumbling around a crowded bar full of people who struck me as looking very stringy-haired and sad (I may have been projecting. Remember: I am not a drinker). I climbed out the front door and onto the street, where there were more stringy-sad people gobbling up cigarettes and discussing the merits of bike racks, and clomped down to a part of the street where I could be alone, because I wanted to think.

But of course, I found a storefront from my memory instead. One of those storefronts that is so vivid you can remember the exact conversation you were having the last time you were in front of it:

"Which one is your favorite lightbulb?"

"The one that looks like a lobster brain exploded and got covered in slug guts."

"I like the one that is yellow."

"I like you."

"I like you, too."

So I called him. I had deleted his number right after the break-up, but even while desperately inebriated I could remember the number (such is the case with anything you really want to forget). And it rang, rang, rang. What would I say?

I felt like I should apologize for something; tell him that everything was my fault; that I hoped we could be friends. I wanted to be the good guy. Maybe not. I don't know what I wanted.

And then came the familiar voicemail recording I'd heard a thousand times before, and a beep. I hung up, and he never called back. Which is for the best.

I say that it's for the best because I really did everything right in this relationship. I don't say this to brag; I have done almost everything wrong in basically every relationship prior to this one. But this time I'd been honest with him. This time I'd called just the right amount of times; I'd learned how to listen without always needing to talk; I never told him I needed him (a rookie's mistake). OK, OK. Maybe I told him I needed him once, at the very end, way past the point of me being sane or rational anymore. But that doesn't count. We are never the best versions of ourselves when we desperate. In the past, I have smothered exes with attempts at friendship relatively soon after break-ups. This is a little like trying to squash a smouldering bonfire with your bare thumbtips. It gets messy fast. Emergency rooms must be called.

The right thing to do -- the adult thing to do -- is to let everything go cold in its long, sweet time. This, by the way, is a summary of pretty much all we've learned in all our years of reading Seventeen magazine: Don't pick at your scabs; you will end up with uncomely scars that will deter all the cute boys from ever finding you even nominally attractive ever again.

You might be thinking, "Is it really the adult thing to do to be scrawling all your personal business all over the Internet?" And to you I say, I don't know. But at work today I sat to talk with a very important student of mine in the garden and it struck me how hesitant she was to talk about her pain. She'd hint at it but then immediately drop a conspicuous joke to change the subject. "My dad kicked my sister and that was scary." And then, "But I kicked OSTRICH DROPPINGS and that WASN'T scary AT ALL!" I think we are all scared to admit that the world has hurt us; that we have been let down. We want to be strong and brave and thick-skinned. But I think the really grown up thing is to look the failings of our lives in the face, and then to survive. 

Just as I was amazed three years ago at how I felt better after a New Year's Eve party, I am amazed now at the same thing. Only this time I have not needed anything extraordinary to happen. Nothing had to come knocking at my door to pull me out of it. Everything is just OK on its own. I am moving on.

I flew back to New Orleans from a wonderful visit to Portland three days ago, and I slept for the entire plane ride.

June bug

I am back in New Orleans. Everything from the heat to the rude neighborhood children to the aggressive mosquitoes feels familiar and home-like. That's a good feeling to get, and I've sunk into it a little bit, letting the summer tower over me like a playground. Things feel good, but it also feels weird for them to feel so good, and last night sitting on the impossibly perfect bridge in front of Cabrini High School (see image), with my legs dangling through the tough blue-gray triangle holes towards the bayou, staring out at the impossibly perfect sunset over impossibly perfect City Park, I cried open-mouthed for a few minutes. And not in a happy way, either, but scared, because it was all too impossibly perfect, and I just couldn't quite handle it. This is evidence to me that human beings -- or maybe just human beings named Sophie Johnson -- can't allow themselves be totally happy for very long. They'll melt like that.

But I don't feel too far off from being totally happy most of the time. For the first week we were back (I have Sam in tow, hooray!), we worked with Hannah, Derek, Bryn, Eli, and Wes to build from scratch our very first ever CHICKEN FORT [coop]! It is nearly there. We worked every day from morning until it got dark, and it's been hot, so that was delightfully uncomfortable. The soon-to-be-chickens (eight or nine, at last count), are getting big and awkward and teenagey. They nest on top of their food dish and peck around at the cardboard box they live in and make great cheeping noises through the night. In just five weeks they'll move into the AWESOME FORT we built them. We took them outside for an adventure a few days ago, and a few of them got to sit in the chicken fort. One fell asleep and the other pooped. Those are both pleasurable activities, so I trust the chickens will be happy. The garden is battling a variety of very hungry caterpillars and hissy stink bugs, which is a pain, mostly because I fall into deep moral and ethical despair over killing them. Just more evidence that I would never survive in the wild.

Then Eli went off to Farm Camp (yes, such a thing exists. If you know Eli, you know that this is among the most appropriate things for him to be doing with his life), and Derek and Hannah and Bryn and Wes (and Leah!) went to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit (more to come, I hope), and Sam and I went swimming. It was strange to slip into Lake Pontchartrain and expect the water to be cold (or at least cool) -- as it is, after all, a huge body of WATER -- and then have it feel even warmer than the hundred-degree air. But it was still exactly right. I bought us big, disgusting, pink-red slushies at the gas station afterwards, because I knew that would make it Summer For Real, and it did, because our hair dried all crispy and our tongues turned colors and we felt mutually sick and sleepy when we got home.

On Saturday we went to the Abita Springs Bicycle Festival at the UCM Museum (and OH MY GOD, what a place that is, and what a festival). It was weird and decidedly Southern, and I remembered two springs ago, when James and I went to Natchez and I experienced for the first time how the green is different down here. It really is, and it's hard to describe. You just have to be inside these southern forests. There's more yellow, and the birds sing differently, and it seems somehow wetter and more oozy. I remember as a kid thinking how organized the chaos of the Portland woods were. I was dazzled that the earth just threw things together like that -- just the right amount of moss here, and a perfect cluster of ferns there, and all those tall, tall, straight-line trees. The south is nothing like that. It's like nature just spilled a bunch of paint and leaves all over the landscape down here, and said, "That looks good. Let's leave it." The trees are absurdly large and round and they seems to laugh when it rains. The landscapes are just different. It makes my heart feel achingly enormous to love them both so much.

We picked blueberries, too, which is another Johnson family activity that screams SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER! We sweated so hard we couldn't even fill our gallon buckets to their teeming points, but it was still a LOT of blueberries. It's kind of sick that they're already almost gone. We've been eating them in fistfuls.

I feel optimistic that this is just the beginning of something about to bloom. The days are long and drawn out. I feel ready to fight for something. I feel ready to get my feet on the ground and love the world with my whole heart and mind, and to give again. There is a gentle sway to the days that has taken on the hopeful rhythm of a pendulum, and I'm looking forward to its widest swing.