I go through the motions, I cut my pills in half, I cling to my list.
16 Sex, Drums, and Lawyers
People.
It’s the second item on my list. It comes after “sunsets” and before “dancing,” and I just stare at the word sitting on top of its thin blue notebook line when I wake up in the morning. The six tiny letters gather weight when they stand together; they become something enormous and terrifying, a slideshow of all the people I’ve hurt and left broken and taken from. They come at me in a mob. Following them come the people who have left me broken: my daddy, who died too soon; the pastors; the Ladies in Pearls; the doctors who tried to fix me with their Easter egg–colored tablets; and sometimes, though he never means it, Jack. Shame peeks in at me. I get nervous; I pick up my little list, its edges starting to fray, and I fold it away. Most of my “people” aren’t near me. I’m back in Nashville for good now. It’s late September and Jack is still on tour, Katie is busy with her kids, my daddy is with Mrs. God. I need to find new people for myself before the isolation, the medication, the loss of hope begin again.
I meet Allie at the end of the month. She’s a musician and lives just down the street from us in a tiny ’70s duplex with windows shaped like diamonds. It sits across the street from an identical ’70s duplex with a yard full of barking Rottweilers that make me jump when I walk by. My old Bible study friend Katherine introduces us; they met at camp or school or church. Something like that.
“You know, Allie just needs to find her people,” Katherine muses on the phone.
I do know. I need to find my people too. I used to find my people in church, but I haven’t been in ages, and I’m not sure I’ll ever go back. I’m tired of the transaction: expectation and betrayal, reward and entitlement, the rising costs of salvation. Faith is different for me: my God gives graciously, forgives freely, and teaches endlessly. She asks for nothing in return but love. Now, though, I’m not sure where to find my people, so when Katherine calls, I decide to find fellowship with someone called Allie who is also looking.
One night, Katherine and I walk down the bright white sidewalks to Allie’s house with a cheese pizza. RUF taught me that it’s easier to find fellowship with food. We all eat together sitting on cinder blocks underneath the rusty, corrugated carport that’s too short to house her big white van and stands in as a patio instead. I like Allie right away, which is a relief. She’s sweet and funny and deep and asks the most thoughtful questions. She has a three-year-old son named Gabriel. Her eyes get wide and peaceful when she talks about him, going on about how he doesn’t like sleeping in his own bed or broccoli, how he’s a billion watts of brightness and energy and perfection, how she can’t wait for me to meet him. I listen and nod and think about what it must be like to raise a child alone in a big city, to travel through a new world and be expected to guide someone else. I get my own motherly feeling, a call to protect her and help her, whatever that looks like. I don’t want her to have to be alone. Conveniently, I don’t want to be alone either.
Deep into autumn, I visit Allie and Gabriel nearly every day. We play in the dirt and count freckles, first the ones on his nose, then the ones on his mom’s. In the evenings, we meet across from the big barking dogs and walk along the wide white sidewalks until supper. Gabriel darts ahead and pauses to blow big soapy bubbles out of his plastic wand while Ellie waddles behind us. I watch them together, see him tuck his hand into hers, hear the song she sings to him about waking up in the morning, and motherhood cries out to me. We eat lots of takeout dinners together on the cinder blocks, and when we sit there talking all bundled up, I feel like I’m perched on the worship rocks at DeSoto again. I tell her my everything, about Jack and being on drugs and getting off drugs and wanting a family. She tells me her everything, too, about being in love, getting pregnant and divorced, and after all of it, still wanting love more than anything else in the world. Wordlessly, we make an agreement to be there for each other. She’s the first person I meet since losing myself to pain who trusts in me enough to lean on me.
I babysit Gabriel for her as often as I can. After a long night playing at the bar where they serve two-dollar cans of PBR, she comes home exhausted. The guitar case slams against the doorjamb when she drags it inside; her top lip is covered with snot from her runny nose. She tries to smile big at me, but I know she’s pretending. I know what it is to pretend that way. We look in at her son, asleep in a room as bright as a tanning bed, and God says something through her.
“Thank you for taking such good care of us.”
I hold her for a long time, lovingly, the way my daddy held me. The words are such a gift. I’ve been working hard, cutting back on the medicine bit by bit, soothing myself through the night sweats and dizzy spells and surges of pain. Every pill I’ve snapped in half and swallowed down has held fear and hope inside, and today it feels like hope is bigger. Just a month ago, I couldn’t even take care of myself.
Helping Allie becomes a new kind of medicine, though it can never really heal me. Attempting to rescue someone else from their pain just distracts me from my own. I show up for her daily with open arms, ready to be useful but really, ready to feel useful. Looking outside myself to be the answer to somebody else’s problems is easier than looking inside to find the answers to my own. I’m loyal, steadfast, and kind. Tentatively but joyfully, I let her believe in me. I begin to believe in myself.
* * *
Jack’s on the road when I tell him about Allie, about the babysitting, about the long, winding walks, about the conversations that go on too late. Our phone calls are short and flat, debriefings.
“That’s great, babe,” he mutters through the phone. I’m not sure where he is, but he sounds further away than he’s ever been before.
We isolate when we’re suffering, and Jack is still suffering. He hides it differently than I do, on a tour bus outside Denver instead of in a bed, but it’s hiding all the same. I want him to see that I’m ready, that I can show up for him, but the harder I try to reveal myself, the less he wants to look.
“I made a new friend!”
He sighs, like all he can see is a recluse.
“I walked two miles today!”
He rushes off the phone, like all he can see is a cripple.
“My doctor says I’m the poster child for healing!”
He says he needs to say goodbye and I feel like he can’t even see me.
“I love you!”
It’s like all he can hear is I need you.
“We’ll talk again soon,” he says, while beer bottles clink in the background and people say muffled cusswords. There’s laughter and he laughs, too, at a joke he’ll never explain to me. It used to be “tomorrow,” but now it’s just “soon.”
I keep working on me so that eventually, he’ll want to work on us. I see a holistic pain doctor who gives me vitamins and teaches me stretches and cheers me on with clinical enthusiasm. I take yoga classes and Pilates classes and get therapeutic massages to try to make my body a more peaceful place to live. I read books about how to heal chronic pain and books about how to heal my relationships, which remind me how little control I have over them. I can only try to heal myself. I try my best, balancing the pain inside me, the relentless burn, with the beauty that exists outside it. It’s the only salve that seems to work.