I am immediately embarrassed by what I’ve just said. Portland on the inside? What the hell do those words even mean? People like us? Why did I say us? Us? How terribly presumptuous to suggest the concept of us. Us.
Us. Us. Us.
She looks at me, her eyes widen, and she smiles. I change my mind. I don’t know what I meant, but I’m glad I said it. I decide that heaven is saying anything that makes this woman smile like that.
The event begins. When it is my turn to walk to the podium and speak, I disregard half of my planned speech and say things about shame and freedom that I want Abby to hear. I look at the hundreds of people in front of me and think only of her behind me. When I finish, I sit down and Abby looks at me. Her eyes are red.
The dinner ends, and people begin to approach our table. A line forms in front of Abby fifty people deep. She turns and asks me to sign a copy of my book for her. I do. Then she turns back toward the crowd and starts smiling, signing, making small talk. She is comfortable, confident, gracious. She is used to this.
A curly-haired woman who had walked into dinner behind Abby approaches our table. I can tell she is waiting to talk to me. I smile and motion her over. She leans in to me, as close as possible, and whispers, “I’m sorry. I’ve never done anything like this before. I just, I know Abby really well, like a sister. I don’t know what happened here in the last hour, but I’ve never seen her like this. I just, I really feel like she needs you in her life. Somehow. This is so weird. I’m sorry.” This woman is flustered, and she has tears in her eyes. She hands me her business card. I understand that my answer will be important to her.
I say, “Okay. Yes. Yes, of course.”
My friend Dynna from my publishing house is waiting so that we can walk out together. I look over at Abby, still forty fans left to sign for.
I am not sad to leave Abby. I am excited to leave her so I can think about her. I am excited to leave because I realize I have never in my life felt this alive, and now I just want to go out into the world and walk around feeling this alive. I just want to start being this new person I have just suddenly, somehow become.
I say, “Bye Abby.” Oh my God, I’ve said her name. Abby. I wonder if it’s okay or if I should have asked permission to use this word that sends shock waves rippling through me. She turns toward me, smiles, waves. She looks expectant. Her face is asking a question that one day I’ll answer.
Dynna and I walk out of the ballroom and into a grand hallway. She stops me and asks, “How do you think it went?”
I say, “It was amazing.”
Dynna says, “I agree. You were on fire up there. Different somehow.”
“Oh, you meant the speech. I was talking about the whole night. I felt the oddest thing. I felt like Abby and I had some kind of connection.”
Dynna grabbed my arm and said, “I cannot believe you just said that. I can’t believe this. I swear to God, I felt it, too. I felt something happening between you from all the way in the back of the ballroom. This is so wild.”
I stared at her and said, “It was. It is. This whole night…the connection between us…it was just like…”
Dynna looked hard at me and then said, “Like you two would have been together in another life?”
DROPPING KEYS
The small woman
Builds cages for everyone
She
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck her head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.
—HAFIZ
I was never completely gone. My spark was always inside me, smoldering. But I sure as hell felt gone for a long while. My childhood bulimia morphed into alcoholism and drug use, and I stayed numb for sixteen years. Then, when I was twenty-six I got pregnant and sober. Sobriety was the field in which I began to remember my wild.
It went like this: I began building the kind of life a woman is supposed to build. I became a good wife, mother, daughter, Christian, citizen, writer, woman. But while I made school lunches, wrote memoirs, rushed through airports, made small talk with neighbors, carried on with my outer life, I felt an electric restlessness buzzing inside me. It was like constant thunder rolling right there beneath my skin—a thunder made of joy and pain and rage and longing and love too deep, scalding, and tender for this world. It felt like hot water simmering, always threatening to boil.
I was afraid of what was inside me. It felt powerful enough to destroy every bit of the lovely life I’d built. Like how I never feel safe on a balcony because: What if I jump?
It’s okay, I told myself. I’ll keep myself and my people safe by keeping my insides hidden.
I was amazed at how easy this was. I was filled with electric thunder, simmering water, fiery red and gold, but all I had to do was smile and nod and the world would take me for easy breezy blue. Sometimes I wondered if I wasn’t the only one using her skin to contain herself. Maybe we are all fire wrapped in skin, trying to look cool.
My boiling point was the moment Abby stepped through that doorway. I looked at her, and I could no longer contain myself. I lost control. Fire-red and golden rolling bubbles of pain and love and longing filled me, brought me to my feet, threw my arms open wide, insisting: There. She. Is.
For a long while I thought that what happened that day was some kind of fairy-tale magic. I thought the words There She Is came to me from on high. Now I know that There She Is came from within. That wild rowdiness that had simmered for so long and then turned itself into words and lifted me was me. The voice I finally heard that day was my own—the girl I’d locked away at ten years old, the girl I was before the world told me who to be—and she said: Here I Am. I’m taking over now.
When I was a child, I felt what I needed to feel and I followed my gut and I planned only from my imagination. I was wild until I was tamed by shame. Until I started hiding and numbing my feelings for fear of being too much. Until I started deferring to others’ advice instead of trusting my own intuition. Until I became convinced that my imagination was ridiculous and my desires were selfish. Until I surrendered myself to the cages of others’ expectations, cultural mandates, and institutional allegiances. Until I buried who I was in order to become what I should be. I lost myself when I learned how to please.
Sobriety was my painstaking resurrection. It was my return to wild. It was one long remembering. It was realizing that the hot electric thunder I felt buzzing and rolling inside was me—trying to get my attention, begging me to remember, insisting: I’m still in here.