I Wake. And the World Is Good. Because I Am Loved.

At Least That’s How Normal People Live

There’s a security that comes from your mother’s love. It’s a feeling of “safe” that changes within your consciousness over time. It moves to different places in your awareness. One day it’s your OS, then suddenly it’s running in the background.

Mother’s love means safety. It’s why you’d grab her leg when strangers got too close. You don’t even look for it — you just reach, and it’s always there.

Dads are different. When you need Dad, you’re calling out the Kraken. You’re radioing base camp for the fast movers. Dads don’t wrap you in safety. They lift you high and make you taller than you’ll ever be so you can tell the scary people to kneel before Zod.

But Moms. Moms are an idea, and their core mission is to convince you that the idea of them exists. When a baby wakes and sees his mom, he learns the idea that the world will be good to him. It’s the most basic muscle memory. Life’s earliest lesson.

I wake. And the world is good. Because I’m loved.

I wake.

And the world is good.

Because I’m loved.

About 10 years ago I made a friend where I used to work. She was a few years younger than me and relentlessly optimistic. Fresh out of college and living in a studio in a part of the city where all the 20-somethings lived enjoying life. She played matchmaker for me a couple of times (with women who were way out of my league). One day we ran into each other in the lobby of our midtown office, going in opposite directions. We chatted about a friend of hers I’d recently gone out with who’d decided she wasn’t interested. She gave me the pep talk. But it wasn’t necessary, I explained.

I don’t expect anything good out of life. She looked confused. It was simple. I don’t expect good things. I don’t expect to be happy. My days don’t start off in the black or in the red. They start dead even, and each moment of the day somehow chips away at the status quo, until by the end of the day I’m in some sort of emotional debt.

Every moment of every day, my heart’s fending off Vandals and Visigoths. I’m pouring boiling oil from the top of the gates. And when times are quiet, I’m rebuilding the parts of the walls where they almost got in.

Okay, I didn’t tell her all that. What I actually sad was this…

Most times when I go to bed at night, I really don’t care if I wake up tomorrow. I’m not saying I don’t want to. I’m perfectly fine if I do. But if I don’t, that’s okay, too.

And my friend started crying in the middle of the lobby. Our co-workers passed and likely imagined quite a different conversation than we were actually having.

Our friendship faded a few months later. Not necessarily as a result of what I revealed, but probably due to what it revealed. She was hope and energy and joy. I was hopeless, listless and joyless. She’d seen me in moments when we hung out at happy hours where I wasn’t like that. Moments where I was like her. A way that I am when I make new friends.

Because new friends surprise me. I’m constantly surprised when something good comes into my life. Something new and something good. I don’t believe it. I question it and marvel at it. I become drunk in it. Then I try to milk every ounce of it until it disappoints me that it’s not The Answer.

There needs to be a special name for the anxiousness I feel, having never learned the most primal lesson from my mom. People who felt the love of their mother have such a unique gift. It’s why they turn to people like me with looks of incomprehension.

The gift isn’t just the mother’s love. It’s that most basic reasoning…

If my mother loves me, then love exists. And if love exists, there’s something good in the world. There’s always a chance for there to be something good in the world.

It arms you with a feeling that if every part of your life were torn down by misfortune or hate, there would still be this base — a foundation no one could touch that would allow you to start over.

Normal people have that. I fully acknowledge that the pieces of my life that I’ve managed to patch together look well-reasoned and developed. But I’ve been copying off the test of the gal next to me the entire way. And if a strong wind came along and took my blue book away, I wouldn’t know how to start over.

I found that out when my two closest friends moved away from New York about 10 years ago. I’d met one in high school and the other in college — during phases when it feels natural to bring new people into your life. Finding people that you’d say “We’ve been buds since…”

Once they were gone, I found New York to be the cold place most outsiders think it is, but not in the way they imagine. It’s not fast and cruel and nasty (not that it can’t be at times). It’s just more often… ignorant. In New York, people treat you like you aren’t there, and if you are, why are you there? It’s a place where if someone doesn’t already know your name, they have no reason to think that they should, so let’s just move on.

I live here with no reassurance the world is good. I never learned that. I have no proof. It wasn’t drilled into me day after day by someone who was there no matter what. Someone who had happy days and sad days, days when she hated my guts, and days where I was the light of her eyes. Days when I disappoint, and days I made her call all her friends to tell them what I did.

I have plans for tomorrow. The second season of “Girls” just came to Amazon Prime. And “Teen Wolf” has been a pleasant surprise. I might even grill a ribeye. But if I knew for sure that day isn’t coming? I might stay up a little later. I might binge watch season two of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or the first season of “Suits.”

But if tomorrow never comes, I’d be okay. Because I’ve never been excited for tomorrow. I just wake and say “Here it is again, with its Visigoths and its Vandals. Tearing at my walls once more.”