Damp

I walked to the corner to store to buy more cigarettes. Cigarettes which I’ve been smoking more of recently, more than I can afford, not as much as my older brother used to smoke which he could afford even less, but more in any case. I’m reading The Zero and that’s fucking with my head. It’s one of those morose, confusing books that people with my affinity for philosophizing over dive bars and sad stoners tend to be drawn to.

I stood under the weird overhang of the second story at my apartment complex, an odd little cavern that’s often filled with steam belched from the dryer vent deep in the cavern like a methane leak in some subterranean dungeon in West Virginia.

It was raining. Not enough to keep me from reading my book, but enough to make everything damp, and slowly more damp, and the cavern was dry. So, I stood, reading my book, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a trickle of water make its way across the dry pavement, forging a new path from one side of damp to the other.

There were other rivers across the artificial desert of the cavern, places where puddles had broken their water tension damns and miniscule flash floods carved insignificant rivers over the dirty asphalt. But, this one was small and new, and alone. It crept at a snail’s pace. The shiny bubble at the front rolling onwards, following gravity, leaving a trail of damp and slowly less damp behind it.

I thought, in my self-important state, of my own little journey. I thought of the way that I had broken the religious water tension from the SPU puddle and began making my own way from damp to less damp, seeking something more damp. I thought of how I had avoided other, wider rivers. The rivers of atheism, Anglicanism, non-denominational evangelicalism, libertarianism, socialism, hedonism. I’d been at the fountainheads of each of these rivers and, for some reason or other (by the grace of God?), flowed away.

Now I find myself halfway across the artificial desert, and I am ready to get back to the damp. I am ready to leave this parking lot and flow into the street, into the gutter, the drainpipes, and eventually the ocean. I want to be done with this dry place and reunite with my soggy brothers.

I have been told that I am a support for people. I do not want to believe this. I want to support people, yes. But, to be a support? No. I want to help prop others up, but I also want to be able to walk away without fear that they will fall.

Recently I’ve felt my emotional energy draining from me. It takes a lot to talk with people about the hard things, about the important things. This past week was filled with talking and listening and praying and crying, and by the end I was running on empty. The other day after another important conversation that I’m very glad I had and would not take back for anything yet left me in a bit of a funk, I came home around 1am and surfed the internet in an emotionally numb daze for an hour and a half. I had a vague sense that I was looking for something. That night I dreamt about work.

I was walking out to the dumpster, and when I opened it I saw movement in a blanket on the steel floor. I reached in and pulled out an infant, wrapped in a dirty strip of cloth. Terrified and traumatized, I took the infant into the office. There were customers in the café, so I walked quietly and didn’t make eye contact with anyone. In the office, we called the police, who came and took the infant to the hospital. Things didn't look good. She was cold, barely breathing, her heartbeat was faint even considering the size of her. I was worried and very scared. I called Father Yuri, the priest at my church. I wanted him to come and give her last rites, or whatever it is that the Orthodox do when an innocent thing is destroyed by cynicism. He came. I woke up.

I am moving to Corvallis in four months. I am leaving Seattle because if I stay here, I will be stretched until I tear. There are too many people, too many lives that are so important. Too many things that I can’t say no to, and have no desire to say no to. Too many people who I care so deeply about that to turn them away or ignore them would be cold-hearted, even cruel.

I am moving away because I am halfway through a desert and it will take all of my energy to make it back to damp. Where I am now, with the people I have surrounded myself by, to take the energy I give to them for myself would be wrong. The only honorable thing to do, as far as my sun-stroked brain can tell, is to remove myself from the equation. They will be fine without me. They will survive. God will provide them with pillars far sturdier than I.

I might be running away from my problems, like my brother before me. Or, I might be metaphysically joining a monastery for a time, like my father before me. In any case, I am a desert mouse in the wilderness, a whisper in a hurricane, a puff of steam from the dryer vent, a trickle of water across the pavement of a parking lot. Any meaning that I have must be proscribed to me. I have none on my own.