Kind people look at me and think they have to teach me. Maria thought this. Maria looked at me and saw a fixer-upper, a broken person she wanted to put back together, an ignorant person who needed to be taught to see the light. A person who needed her.
Maria was wrong.
The truth is, I see the light. I always have. But I’ve lived most of my life in the dark, a place concerned with little more than getting by, and it shows. It shows in my ragged edges, my bad table manners, my impatience for small talk. It shows in my disdain for the comforts of life which stems, even I recognize, from having been deprived them for so long.
I see both the light and the dark, a privilege afforded only to those who have lived in the latter. Those who have lived only in the light are unable to see the darkness that hints at the edges of their existence. They spend their lives incapable of recognizing the reality of a life lived within that darkness. Any hint of it frustrates, angers, and terrifies them. Just as all things they don’t understand frustrate, anger, and terrify them.
It’s like this -- you can survive on a diet of HoHos and Doritos and Slim Jims. It’s not the healthiest, to be sure, but you can do it. You may not be as shining a specimen as the person sitting beside you who’s had a life filled with bananas at breakfast, apples at lunch, and vegetables with dinner, but you’ll survive.
The shining specimen sitting beside you probably looks upon you with not a little bit of disgust. Looks at your unkempt appearance, your unfit shape, your messy complexion, and wonders -- Why are you like this? Because he or she can’t, or won’t, realize that for some people there aren’t bananas at breakfast and apples at lunch and vegetables with dinner. There are HoHos and Doritos and Slim Jims or nothing at all.
And that has been my life. HoHos and Doritos and Slim Jims or nothing at all. I chose the former in order to survive. In order to make it to the next day, the next hour, the next minute. Is this healthy? Even I know the answer is no.
But you can survive without healthy behavior. I recognize that it’s probably better to talk about my feelings. I understand that there’s something to be said about sharing. I know that too much reticence is bad for any kind of friendship. I know that my way isn’t healthy. I also know that it’s how I’ve survived so far.
Life, for me, has been about survival, just as it is about comfort for so many others. This, I believe, is where the line between light and dark is drawn -- between a life about survival and a life about something more.
For most of my existence, life has been about survival, so when Maria turned to me that day, desperation in her eyes, and said, “You need me,” a buzzer went off in my head. A buzzer that was both disturbing and comforting because of its familiarity.
It’s the same one that went off the first time a foster parent slapped me for smiling, the same one that rang in my head the first time I was carried away from the place I had been told to think of as home. It sounds not unlike the one heard on a game show just before the host turns to Ernie from Elkhorn and informs him that Madison, not Jefferson, was the father of the Constitution. It screams “Wrong!” with a clarity that surprises and unsettles me every time I hear it.
It screamed that day because, quite simply, I didn’t and don’t need her. The revelation made me able to walk out the door into the sunshine and leave her behind to safety. It made me realize that since I didn’t and don’t need her, I could conceivably live the rest of my life without ever touching her again. I was glad to have been given the resolve to leave and terrified at the prospect of never returning.
People like to think that love is the be-all, end-all. Some people are convinced of this and live accordingly. People who believe this are much of the time, I suspect, the same people who had bananas at breakfast and apples at lunch and vegetables with dinner. They have the luxury of thinking life is impossible without love because they’ve never experienced life without it. They don’t want to realize that you don’t need love to survive. People around them who remind them of this truth, remind them of the darkness -- people like me -- frighten them. Liz, I think, is still a little bit scared of me because of that.
The truth is, love is nice. Love is wonderful. Love makes you feel alive. Love, as they say, makes life worth living. Love makes life about something more than just survival.
But (and this is an important but) love is also a luxury. Love is air conditioning. Love is comfortable shoes. Love is automatic windows and locks in your car. Love is bananas at breakfast.
In the dark, love is something you can live without.
END
