I like the first day of being somewhere after being on a plane for 20 hours. I left on Friday evening and I arrived in Sydney on Sunday morning.
On the train from the airport, an older guy was sitting across the car from me and after everyone else filed out, he asked me where I was "coming back" from and I could feel in me this nervous energy trying to make small talk, wondering where the divide between me looking like someone who's worth talking to on a train and whatever haunted echoes come out of my mouth that always seem to put people off.
Somehow this. lead to the man lowering the neck of his shirt and revealing an incredibly long gnarly stitch line down his chest, to which he revealed that he'd had open heart surgery on Friday and was making a break from the hospital. I don't know how true that is (how do you break free from the hospital two days after open heart surgery? I know they can't force you to stay, but... how likely is it? What does a 2-day old wound look like? My hip surgery wound was a mess).
He concluded, and I don't know what prompted the advice, "You gotta find the people who love you and stay there with them."
And I just said, quietly, "I'm still working on that one, man. But I appreciate it."
And it's true. I don't know who loves me these days, somehow let myself believe that love isn't real unless it's verbally expressed, maybe because my definition of love is unconditional, and that I believe for it to be real, the person feeling it wants me to know regardless of their own fears, uncertainties, and personal issues.
And I say that as someone who, a decade ago, would be booking these flights to places, running away from having to feel the feelings that were too hard to feel: the pain of abandonment, the alienation of knowing not just that I'm "other" from those around me, but that people keep a distance from me with that in mind, the uncertainty that I have permission to do things for myself. I thought if I went to a town as war-torn as my heart, it'd make the pain philosophically romantic, but instead it just made me see how, despite my alienation, how deeply intertwined and braided together the collective ennui of humanity really is.
Now I'm sitting in the 28th floor of the Four Seasons overlooking the Sydney Opera House, and it doesn't feel like I'm running from anything... it feels like I'm trying to force myself to feel... but now I'm more self-aware than I was then, familiar with this whole process of extrapolating for the sake of interpolating.
Asking myself if the sentimental, almost maudlin advice of someone exiting a train and telling me to find the people who love me couldn't possibly be well-placed in the moment, someone reading my energy with absolute correctness, despite the heavy-handed side story of being an open-heart surgery escapee.
Before I boarded the flight to Sydney, I reached out to my old friend Adam. I sent him mail, real mail, four months ago in an attempt to not lose touch with every person I've ever known. And he replied. And then replied again. And I couldn't let myself reply back until now. He's one of the only remaining people who witnessed me as I was when I was younger, one of the last chances I have for affirmation that the fragments of trauma I remember were in fact very real, but I think I was scared to hear one more person tell me, not meaning to cause harm, that they didn't remember because they weren't paying attention to what was going on with me then.
And honestly, I don't think anyone will ever give me the level of detail I want or need... and the only people who could give me that are the people who hurt me the worst.