Small Comforts

I was the kind of child who spent a lot of time in their head. Books were shrines wherein I could bear my suspicions about the world and then take something like knowledge for myself. They were always there, and always willing to take in a quiet, lonely kid. The local library was a well-trod landmark throughout my young life, from the time I could read. Beginning around age twelve, I’d go there for a few hours until my mother would pick me up after her workday ended. During this time, middle school, I’d suspected that the after-school book club one of the librarians had debuted was for me, not the least because I was the only regular attendee. 

The first book club was attended by a boy who I recognized from school, an anime fanatic slash gamer, who talked a lot, and who was gregarious and had found a sense of humor, a thing I hadn’t discovered for myself yet. I was intimidated by him. There was myself of course, and a girl called Natalie I’d somehow managed to bring along, and who considered herself my friend on the condition that I let her copy my pre-algebra and ancient world history homework. I felt like a kind of fairy godmother, and I wondered if she felt the same toward me.

I’d spend the night at her house, where she would teach me the do’s and don’ts of makeup, dressing, and socializing. She had begun her period a full year before I had, and I felt that the wisdom she’d gained was priceless. She saw my tall, gangly figure as like that of a fashion model, and my clear olive complexion as beautiful; just as I saw her curves, wheat-gold hair, and exuberant heedlessness. She would hold me down and wax my moustache and shape my eyebrows, I would argue that the harsh skin products she was using only made her acne worse, and that no, she wouldn’t stink if she stopped inundating herself in various body mists and scented lotions. She thought my authentic self was ugly and outcast, I thought hers was overdone and fake.

Not after long, we became something like unconditional friends. Natalie and I would get dressed up – she would straighten my hair with her hot iron because it always came out half-ass when I tried – and walk the six blocks from her house to a local park, where we’d meet other kids, her friends, and where I’d shrink in the periphery until she’d yank me out with a blush-inducing flourish. She knew better than anyone else, even my family it seemed, the sheer depth of my adolescent anxiety. Without fail she’d call out the little ghouls living in my head by their proper names with jokes and taunts. She was honest, in that even if she wasn’t always right, she was truthful. No wonder everyone thinks you’re a weirdo. By then I had understood most forms of outward expression to be a bad thing. It was dangerous, and often brought on worry and susceptibility to what I had understood then to be the equivalent of a fish stabbing itself while in a pool of sharks. So I never taunted her back. It would take me many years to be comfortable enough around others to talk shit about them.

We parted with an unceremonious fizzling out, which was how my friendships tended to end back then. Tenth grade year, she became great friends with a girl, a glamorous girl, and one with relative sexual experience, which neither Natalie or I really had at that point, and who seemed to enjoy abhorring and mocking me, which she did with enthusiasm. I was the doomed “different” and mostly friendless. Instead of fighting for my friendship with Natalie, I became a ghost. She seemed to have no qualms about treating me as such.

After finishing college, I moved across the country, to Los Angeles, where I’d had family. In college, I’d studied theatre, not really knowing what I’d do with the degree. I wasn’t a performer, neither was I any serious devotee of drama. I didn’t get clever references to M Butterfly or Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I’d been assigned both for reading my sophomore year but was somehow able to get through without reading them. (This bothered me, these momentary lacks of interest in reading, a thing that had once seemed so essential to my nature.)

Naturally, I fumbled around. I took a job as a florist, where it seemed my meager set design knowledge helped me with issues of color, shape, and composition, and aesthetics generally. I was eventually given license to design floral arrangements. My manager often thought them campy, too baroque, though she voiced appreciation for my basic skills. I was let go after two years of employment, cited for lack of attendance. A similar trend continued through my early twenties.

Six jobs, one marriage, one coming-out as gay, and one divorce later, and not even edging thirty, I found myself at the arrivals gate outside the Pittsburgh International Airport, waiting for my mother to pick me up. I felt cashed out, jaded maybe, and dread at the idea of living in my childhood home, in the neighborhood I’d grown up in, until I could regain my footing, a thing I’d felt I was never really good at.

On the drive to my mother’s house, I let in the phantoms of my growing up. I wondered at a nightmare I’d had several times as a young child, six maybe, wherein an attractive foil balloon I’d plucked from the PVC cage at the local grocery store swept me into the sky and away from my family, the balloon not even so generous as to let me hang on to my favorite Winnie the Pooh sneakers. Soaring through a grey sky somehow eased my bereavement at being taken from my family, though I cried. I remembered then the local cemetery, where in the ninth grade I’d tried my first cigarette and spent a lot of time alone, admiring the silent, large beauty of the place, and wondering about the dead. Across the boulevard from the cemetery, the public library I’d spend a few hours at after school each day, and from whence I’d discovered the grand cemetery. Perhaps I was never destined to be the kind of person who could long for their past, I thought. Maybe I would always be rootless.

Entering town, I was startled by how incomprehensible everything felt. This feeling, which I’d heard about for so long, and knew was perfectly possible and likely, hit me with an eeriness which exceeded anything else I’d experienced. Many places I’d known remained – the cemetery, for one, and the library, thank goodness – but so many had been disappeared, remade or gone derelict. I hadn’t recognized a single face within my first days of being there. This was unusual for the area, being the sort of working-class neighborhood which kept a certain rhythm. It was very much a walking neighborhood: familiar people walking to the corner store, the bus stop, the laundromat, the park. The man who walked his fat beagle around my block, I was told, had died the previous spring. The neighbor kids next door had all grown up and moved out. A man, a widower, the new owner of the house, had cut down the giant sugar maple tree I’d played on. The kids who walked past my mother’s house on their way home were faces that acknowledged me but didn’t know who I was; they’d sometimes say hello. The cosmetics store I’d avoided for years, because Natalie’s new friend worked as a cashier there through high school, was now a personal storage facility. Many places I’d avoided, and for similar reasons, for memories I’d rather not run into.

It was at the local library that I ran into Natalie on a Saturday afternoon. Still very much Natalie, her wheat-blonde hair now a well-maintained platinum, faultless makeup and clothing, and obvious breast implants. She introduced me to her children, a baby and a little brown-haired girl of six or so, who sat alone in the corner the children’s section with her nose buried in a chapter book. I worried for the little girl’s future, and then took it back, realizing the silliness of it.

Natalie and I conversed in neutral small-talk, though she seemed glad to have run into me. I felt the same. We exchanged numbers and said we’d make it a point to catch up. We never did, and probably won’t ever, but it had been a nice meeting, a small comfort. I checked out a few books, and left the library feeling light, young and possible, like when the old librarians, none of whom remained now, knew me as the quiet, solemn girl who'd smile when at the circulation desk with a stack of books in her arms. I’d had the time now to read as much as I wanted, while waiting for job and apartment-approval callbacks, until I had to get out of my head and grow up again.