The thing is, no matter whether you’re wanted or not, whether you have a place to be or someone to be once you’re there, you’re stuck with it. You have to be someplace, even when there isn’t a place to be. If you’re sufficiently entangled with friends and family, with work or calling, that can carry you on through the horrible unfolding of the days. You can mix tears over tragedies, you can spend your words for other words, observed and described again and again. Nowadays you can even do all this online, finding your fellow travelers well outside your standard orbit. Still, some of us don’t fit, and can’t make the ill fit work. We are missing pieces that we can’t see.
I am out past the openings, past the invitations. I only have conversations that I start, only have events that I claim myself. Age gives a little, and it takes a lot. The doors keep disappearing as the days dig down, people gone before I knew they were going as the neighbors jeer and spit. The last absence was a surprise, but it shouldn’t have been. Whatever I bring to the table, people seem pretty anxious to be rid of. Now that I know, I know.
It feels a lot like it did in 6th grade, when a group of my classmates all got together to see a movie on Saturday night. After we were seated, I went to the lobby to buy snacks, and upon returning, everyone had ditched me having moved to the other side of the theater. I could feel my face flushed with hot embarrassment, realizing no one really wanted me there, that my friends weren’t my friends at all. I sat in a daze of revelation as the movie plodded on, this one lesson that life keeps teaching me. I don’t have a set, don’t belong in a group, and am excluded from all but the most ragged and beset of company. That “us” and “we” does not include me.
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