Crevice

Into the Wilderness: Story 59

I’ve been thinking a lot about attachment. Some people can cut people out of their lives as simply as lancing a pimple. Slash and the connection is gone. Not me. I’m more like the grown-too-big baby kangaroo no longer able to fit in its mama’s warm pouch. I keep trying to return to the comfortable safety of the known, over romanticizing the relationship rather than facing the end.

In my daughters’ generation, people ghost each other all the time. No explanation. No closure. Just poof and a gap the size and shape of the former love or friend hulks invisibly away. Not even the memories remain. When I ask my daughter about these missing people, she blinks bewilderingly as if the incisive light of a surgeon’s headlamp were suddenly turned on her face. Once, I simply asked if a former best friend had contacted her. “Have you heard from Bea?” I asked. “Stop interrogating me,” was her reply. One question was too much.

Which is how I know that ghosting indeed casts a pall of pain.

How could it not? We humans are social creatures. Connections create belonging, and belonging begets the cell-stored memory of floating in the womb, at one with another human being. We all begin life enmeshed with another. Being alone is our unnatural condition.

I know my daughter’s flippant response is really a sign that she sees the gap too, though not with active awareness. My fear is that one day, she’ll wake up and she will find herself on the precipice of an enormous hole called loss. Or perhaps she has skirted the crevice, and I’m the one who has slipped dangerously into the bottomless sentimental fissure.

I remember the ending I didn’t know was an end. I’m in my family room. The summer evening is unexpectedly cool. Through the open windows, I hear the cheers and jeers of a late night game of hackey sack, the “aha, I got you” taunts and laughter. After, the sweaty 20-somethings stand around my kitchen’s center island, shoving huge pizza bites into their mouths, the gooey cheese and oil dribbling down their chins. When they depart for the evening, the good byes linger as if it’s the last time. And indeed, it is. But who could tell? In my world, the connections were tethered, not cut.

I particularly miss two of my daughter’s friends— one female and one male. I’ve written about the male before, how he was the son I never had. “Mama,” he’d say to me, “let’s make [insert yummy Middle Eastern dish] for dinner.” I’d gather the ingredients like a busy squirrel hoarding nuts for the winter, overstocking the pantry in hopes of the next request. I end up instead with a stocked pantry and missing relationship.

The female bewilders me. She stood in my kitchen and proclaimed to my daughter, “I will stand by you,”— like the song— but barely two weeks later she is gone. She too called me “Mama,” and I ate up the honey of that word like syrup seeping from layers of baklava. I’m a sap for mothering.

This friend ran to me for comfort from her overbearing father. He pushed her for infantile closeness while complaining about paying for her health insurance. He forced her to pay for her car and school dormitory while demanding 10 pm curfews. “Mama, I already have 3 jobs,” she’d cry. She was exhausted, the energy of youth and fear maintaining her momentum rather than drive. “Your dad is afraid of losing his baby girl,” I explained. “He wants to maintain control but he also wants to release his responsibility,” I said. “Come live here,” I’d offer when her father threatened to kick her out. We certainly had enough room.

I noticed almost immediately that she had ghosted my daughter. Her name didn’t come up. The late night arrivals for food and comfort stopped. It was simply quiet. Finally, one day I asked my daughter, “How’s Bea?,” already knowing the answer.

Then I began to worry. Was she safe? Was she sick? Did she have a breakdown? My daughter simply shrugged and continued to draw.

I’ve never been good at separation. I stayed in a bad marriage too long. I stayed in stressful jobs too long. I clung to boyfriends who had hurt me— and that I didn’t even want— simply because they were gone. It’s the absence— a prematurely emptied womb— which I’ve experienced too. It can’t be brought back. It just has to begin anew.

Now, however, I have promised to keep my distance, not to offer my food, mothering and love so freely. I don’t regret having done so. But my heart cannot take the untethered nature of today’s youthful relationships. It’s too easy, too casual, too broken. I am now saving myself for those who stick around.

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