lagoraphobia

That earworm has been persistent and I’ve been preoccupied with trying to figure out why this, and why now.

And I think I figured it out.

It’s because I think i saw something important in that song. It’s still pretty fucking ineffable, but the talk of one hit wonders when I was digging into the story behind the song itself and interviews with the artist, and listening to other songs of his, I found the pattern I was looking for.

Some things can only happen once: those perfect moments where you feel the most like yourself. It’s the perfect concordance of all of the things -emotions, memories, desires – that make you happy. A preponderance of squee.

It’s so rare to see something like that, something important. Most times we look because other people tell us it should be important to us. Sometimes we look because that’s what we tell ourselves.

There was a moment a few years ago for me like this. I was struggling with where I was going to go next, what I was going to do because science had become lost for me, an I was lost for it. I was at a show at a bar with some friends, and I saw something important that night in one of the musicians in one of the bands. I saw a perfect union.

You don’t see that often. Most times people give up before they can become great. Other times the ambition outweighs the heart, and they never grow into it properly. Seeing someone so perfectly suited to being exactly where they were are in those moments – that’s important to me.

Because that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. To feel like everything that came before was leading up to that moment. And because that’s how i can believe it might be true for me one day too.

Go do something important.

Make me sick with envy.

I’ve been working from home the past two days, lying on the living room floor because of a lower back injury I got when I was sixteen.

I was at crew practice when it happened. I was on a rowing machine, coming into the last stretch of a 1500m sprint, and I had a really good split going, so I was pulling my heart out in the last leg. When rowing, you always go “knees, back, arms,” not only because it’s more efficient, but also because you can really hurt yourself if you don’t. In my excitement, I momentarily lost coordination and went, “back, knees, arms” and ripped the muscles in my lower back. I didn’t finish the sprint. I could barely unhook my feet from the stirrups, the pain was so shocking. I couldn’t walk for about a week, and I couldn’t walk right for another week or two after that.

Lower back injuries are awful. They never really heal right. It’s one of the few types of injuries where homeopathic remedies are the only options. Ice and heat. Ibuprofin for the swelling. Regular massages to break up the scar tissue. Despite these things, my back would go out at least once a year, and I’d be out of commission while the scars reknit themselves. The only thing that’s helped in the long term is yoga – building up the rest of the core muscles and stretching my too-tight hamstrings so there’s less strain on the fragile scars that hold me upright.

It’s strange to be 17 with debilitating back pain. It’s strange to be 23. 25. Asking friends to help you get up off the floor to go to the bathroom.

One of the important lessons you learn from an injury like this is that you can’t curl up with it, no matter how uncomfortable it is. You can only indulge the pain for two days, nesting on the living room floor with everything you might need within arms reach, before you have to suck it up and start moving around again.

So this morning I hobbled over to the coffee shop a block from my apartment to get some coffee. I walked past an 80-something year old woman with a walker. We were walking with the same short, shuffling steps.

That, along with a conversation I had this morning with some of my VPeeps on twitter got me thinking about pre-existing conditions and the zombie apocalypse. As an intellectual exercise, preparing for the zombie apocalypse is one of my favorites. What you would take, where you would go. They’re ways to explore those dark places of your heart. We all want to pretend to be noble, to promise our friends we’ll shoot them when their time comes. That they’ll promise to shoot you.

But would you really? There’s a moment in the thoroughly mediocre 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead where a character is waiting to have his head blown off before he changes, and he keeps asking the shooter to wait because he wants “every… single… second…” It rang out as true for me. I’d talk big before, but when the moment came, I’d want every last second.

I have asthma. And a bad back. They’re two things I try not to think about when having these arguments with friends. Because they’re one of the few times I get to pretend I’m unaffected. That I wouldn’t have to worry about making it in and out of a zombie-infested pharmacy to steal medication so I can breathe, where I can run away from a horde without blacking out from lack of oxygen. Without being able to worry if I pushed myself a little too hard in case my back goes out and resets any progress I’ve made. I want to be able to make it to the end of the game. Because I see that woman shuffling by and see a bit of my future. It’s only a matter of time. There’s only so much albuterol to go around.

I’m a guaranteed casualty in the zombie apocalypse. If the zombies don’t get me right away, the dwindling supply of medication or a tweaked back would eventually do me in. I don’t get to answer the question, “What’s your plan for survival?” Instead, I’m forced to face an entirely different question: “How would you die?” Would I throw myself to the horde to buy my more able-bodied companions more time? Would I try to take as many down as I could before the end? Would I be able to do myself in if necessary? Would I even join up with a group of survivors, knowing I would be an impediment? Or would I steal as much medication as I could, some to extend my life, others to end it quickly, and find a place to nest with everything I need within arms reach, hoping for the problem to take care of itself?

I don’t know the answers to these questions.

But I see that old woman, shuffling past me on the street, and I stand up a little straighter, wincing at the pain, knowing I’ll be back on my feet by Sunday, and I ache to instead be the kind of person who has a survival plan.

In the meantime, I’ll dream about going back to yoga when my back’s better and pull my inhaler in a little closer.

What a strange week.

It’s hard to put into words what all of the strange parallels and bursts of nostalgia did to me in the half-fevered state I was in between Thursday and Thursday.

It was Los Angeles that did me in. I didn’t have a chance.

In grad school, I used to make the two hour drive to LA nearly every weekend because I needed to be somewhere that wasn’t San Diego, and I needed to be someone that wasn’t the person I was in grad school.

I very rarely planned my trips up there beforehand. It was almost always born of impulse – to flee something that was chewing me up inside. More often than not, I’d just be sitting on the couch, watching TV, and I’d suddenly feel like I was suffocating. I would grab a notebook (and sometimes my guitar) and just go. It made me feel lighter. It made the itch go away.

Driving made me feel blessedly empty, so I got lost a lot. I found spots along curving mountain roads where I could see the ocean, so I would sit on my trunk and smoke cigarettes and stare. I found pull outs on those same roads where I could curl up as best I could in the backseat of my tiny car to sleep. I read in coffeeshops. I talked to strangers. I made friends.

Then I burned all of it down and stopped going.

I’d been back a few times since, usually to go to a show, but I never went back to places I was prone to haunting before.

But sitting on the shuttle bus coming back from a company function, I began to point out places I knew to the woman in the seat beside me. What I didn’t tell her was about the memories flooding up as the blocks stole past: the diner where two hairstylists tried to pick me up. The Jamba Juice where I once sat for hours, nursing a smoothie, because that’s all the money I had could afford. The Best Buy lobby where I met someone asked me to be his valentine. The streets I would drive on for hours listening to a combination of B52′s, Death Cab for Cutie and Oingo Boingo. The coffeeshop where I would sit outside and read The Picture of Dorian Grey and House of Leaves and American Gods.

So when the meeting let out on Wednesday, I grabbed my box lunch, threw all of my germ-laden crap in the trunk and drove to the mountains. I found the same hidden spot where years ago I would sit and smoke cigarettes and stare at the ocean. I sat on my trunk and ate my lunch. I drove to the Valley and went to the bar where I sang karaoke for the first time and a stranger told me I had a nice voice and shouldn’t be shy about it. A bar where a make up artist told me I had a good face for make up, then proceeded to do a spot on impersonation of John Lennon. Where Pauli gave me unsolicited writing advice. Where I got to hang out with someone I am proud I can still consider a friend, who snuck me onto the Universal Studio backlot and give me a tour of my childhood memories. Where the bartenders and bouncers and regulars all knew me, at the end.

I sat down at the bar and ordered a hot toddy. No one recognized me.

It was strange to think about the two Kelly’s driving around LA that day. It made me immeasurably sad. Maybe it’s because I can’t get those moments back. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to anymore. Maybe it was the free lunch in my stomach or the business casual in my trunk, or the company-bought gas propelling me around on a tour of a very painful and formative period of my life. Or maybe it’s just the lingering head cold.

There are parts of ourselves we give up with every choice we make; small things that get lost as a life restructures itself. It makes it so that we can’t fit into the person we were before.

I had dinner that night with a new(ish) friend and his family. It was the first time in days I felt like myself again, and I had an amazing time.

Lots of people don’t like LA, but for me, it’s a city that was everything I needed it to be at a time when I needed it to be it. It was where I sat, emptied out from the highways, and forced myself to think about the life I really wanted for myself. And all these years later, I finally think I’m getting close.

Today was a complete bust.

I’ll start off saying this week destroyed me, and I feel a bit befuddled because I walked into it completely unaware. I KNEW this week was gonna be hard just with the sheer amount of shit I needed to get done (both at work and at work after work), but I didn’t want to think about it beforehand because one of those things was two of my closest friends moving to New York (they make an awesome married couple). So I wound up pretending every single thing leading up to it wasn’t really ACTUALLY happening.

Then it happened. Now every bit of me is exhausted.

So I spent a lot of time today watching all of the relationship Kevin Smith movies back to back to back to back (while also getting one of those other things I had to get done done).

It also didn’t help that this morning I stayed in bed to read the last third of Ready Player One.

And now I’m listening to Disintegration.

So let’s see what we’ve got so far: denial, funny nostalgia, painful nostalgia, mopey nostalgia.

That’s usually a good signal to my reptile brain that there’s something I need to start working on if I want to pull myself out of this weird little hole I’ve dug myself into tonight. Thus the Disintegration. I swear, I don’t even have to paint my nails black since they’re the exhaust ports through which the emo escapes my body. The Cure helps facilitate this periodic venting.

In any case I realize I’ve been thinking a lot about friends and relationships lately. No surprises there. I don’t want to get into any of it, really, but saying goodbye is awful. I can see why some people never move. It must be nice to never have to acknowledge the little deaths, the goodbyes that signify the end of a period of your life. Because when people  who deserve their own epochs leave, you feel like you’re losing that part of you they nurtured and helped change. And you sit and worry that the memories you’re left with will be all you ever talk about when you get a chance see them again over coffee because there’s nothing else to talk about.

But I’ve had extremely good fortune to have the people I do in my life. They’re the kind of people I know will always be there with me for the rest of my life. And even though we don’t live in the same cities anymore, it’s only a matter of time before we see each other again. It’s inevitable.

So when I pulled into their driveway to pick up their coffee table to replace my one that was on the verge of collapse (due to a system-wide duct tape failure), I realized it was the last time I’d be pulling into their driveway. And I almost lost it right there in the car.

I had to say goodbye A LOT this past year, and I’m going to have to say it a lot more this upcoming year. And there’s nothing I can do about any of it except keep on plugging away at all of these other things, like reading, slushing, article editing, writing, story editing, band practice, while hopefully squeezing in some errands and some yoga in there somewhere. It’ll make the time fly by until I can see them all again.

At least that’s what I’ll do until the next goodbye in a few weeks.