The Things that Keep Us Here

It took a few seconds to realize I was utterly and completely lost. It was in the days before maps were readily available on your phone- when the best we could do was print out Mapquest directions and yell at one another.

“Was that Laurel St.? Could you see?!¨

“At the speed you’re going, my best guess is that it’s Kkhadksufheauin St.”

“Nobody likes a smartass.”

“I strongly disagree.

“Well, you would wouldn’t you?”

We kept driving when things started to feel . . . eerie. That’s the exact word that popped into my head, which was odd. Normally I’d have thought strange, scary maybe. But eerie?

I remember when I first learned that word. It was during a Scrabble game with my grandmother. Maybe the memory sticks out so much in my head because, at least in my memory, it wasn’t long after that when she began developing what would become severe dementia. Eerie– what a word.

But the thing with driving in Louisiana and Mississippi at night (we were crossing the border) is that it often feels eerie. This shouldn’t have been different. It didn’t look different, but it felt different. Was it darker than usual? Was there a streetlight that should’ve been on but wasn’t?

We came to a crossroads.

“Your guess is as good as mine- right, left, just the same direction we were going in? . . . Hello, can you please say something?”

He was gone. My first boyfriend, the first person I loved. I slammed the brakes and threw the car in park. I slowly opened the door and got out. The air smelled burnt. Walking a few steps forward, I noticed a scorch mark on the ground.

I met him during my first week in college. We were in what used to be called something like Comp 101 but in our generation was renamed to be something that I guess was supposed to sound more appealing. Something like “Communicating the Self in Writing”, or maybe it was something edgier and simpler– like “Core 1.” Whatever it was, the idea was that writing was going to be central to the adult selves we were becoming, and we were going to learn the skills for it in that classroom.

I don’t believe in love at first sight. However, the two times I’ve met someone that I’d eventually fall in love with, I had a feeling. The feeling really wasn’t any more complicated than a sense that I wouldn’t be able to let this person go until I’d absorbed them entirely– like when you pick honeysuckle off a vine and absorb its sweetness.

Although it wasn’t a conscious thought, I suppose in my awareness of this feeling, falling in love with these people was inevitable. My mom used to tell me to be careful what I said out loud. If I said something particularly dark or sinister, she’d even yell, “Do not say that! Do not even think that– you get that thought out of your head immediately!”

Overall a traditionally “logical” woman, my mother was still from Louisiana. For about a week before their beloved pet cat showed up at their door, I had been saying things like, “I wonder how the dog would react if a little kitten just showed up here at the back door one day.” When other things I said casually often came to pass, she thought it best to take precautions.

Our first assignment in that writing class was to describe ourselves in a simile. He said that he was like a really good loaf of French bread– a bit hard and crusty on the outside, so soft on the inside he’d melt in your mouth. We were in love by the end of the academic year.

I was from Louisiana (I suppose I still am), he was from Mississippi (although I’m not sure if he is anymore). We both dreamed of leaving the South, convinced there were some freer, bolder, sexier versions of ourselves we would catch up to out there.

He looked like Ryan Gosling, making him quite sought after at the time. During a different road trip (young Southern nights are full of long drives), we stopped at a gas station to buy him road beer. The middle aged woman working behind the counter immediately yelled.

“You look just like that young white man that’s in the Notebook. Okay, when are you building her that house then? Hey, Sharon, come over here. Doesn’t he look like that young white actor, Ryan something?”

“I don’t know anything about romantic movies. After work, all I want to see is someone get shot or run over.”

He was a philosopher, I was an anthropologist. Every week, the philosophy department posited a question on a long piece of butcher paper in a dingy hallway. I usually responded to these questions in ways that made me (and sometimes him) laugh.

“Should women over 25 freeze their eggs to insure the healthiest viable fetuses?”

In a green pen that stood out among the very serious sea of black script written with thick-tipped felt pens, I wrote: “But where would I put them?”

One week the question read: “If an alien species came to Earth and offered you the chance to leave with them and explore the unknown to humankind universe, but you could never come back or see anyone you loved ever again, would you go?”

I immediately said no. What was life without the people I loved, and without the chance to meet new people to love, or to at least laugh with? He said he would be sad to tell me goodbye, but that he’d go. It’s just an opportunity he couldn’t refuse.

“What if this really happens? What if the aliens come and take you? What if you regret it and you’ve left me here, forever?”

Later that night, we played Scrabble. He was as good as my late grandma had been in her heyday. Already well ahead of me, he played the word “eerie.”

“That’s so weird. The first time I learned that word was in a Scrabble game. My grandma played it.”

“I wish I could’ve met her.”

“I wish you could’ve, too, if only to see which one of you would win at Scrabble. . . That’s another reason I couldn’t leave Earth with the aliens, you know. Like this is where all my memories are. If I left forever, wouldn’t I slowly forget them?”

Our relationship was tense for weeks after that, as only the relationships of the very young who don’t really know how to talk to one another can be. But a year later, it was more or less forgotten. Or, more accurately, it was pushed to the side so that we could wallow in the feelings of new love, as yet uncharted territory for both of us.

The night of that eerie long drive was two weeks before graduation. My academic advisor had failed to convince me that I should apply for a Fulbright. I knew that I should, but I couldn’t bear to plan the ending of my relationship. Not yet. So, after graduating, my boyfriend and I were leaving to work in a national park for the summer. That at least bought us four more months of not having to make a decision about whether or not we were really trying to be in love for the long haul.

“Hey, look away from the Mapquest, and your beer, for a second– do you see that?”

“What?”

“It’s an owl. It’s right there in the tree, really close to the road. It’s like, staring at us.”

“Sorry, don’t see it.”

“Damn it, how drunk are you exactly?”

As I touched the scorched piece of pavement on the crossroads, I looked up to see another owl about a foot away from me. It let out a long screech and flew away.