Castaway

I had a boyfriend once who loved The Police more than any other band. When he was in his late 30s, he bought us expensive tickets for seats in the very last row to see them play live.

“What’s wrong with that?” you might ask.

The Police wrote amazing songs for 15-year-old boys. All the emotions are found on the primary and secondary color wheel. Each song has the stirring rhythm and beat of a new hormonal discovery. When The Police play, a man is forever lonely, rejected, and misunderstood. He is a castaway on an island of his own making. He saves the lonely prostitute, stalks his ex-lover, and as he grows older dabbles in Lolita fantasies. The Police gave boys a gift: the aural equivalent of privilege.

I remember sitting there, my back pressed against the seat, the cement of the stadium behind my head. Giant screens hovered over the stage, where we could see images of Sting projected amidst the flashing lights and thousands of screaming faces. It was too loud and the sound was not very good. I briefly wondered, as my boyfriend drank many opaque cups of bad overpriced beer, why he had spent all this money to watch these tiny figures on a television screen.

When the band finished playing and my boyfriend was unpleasantly drunk, we left. As we made our way out of the arena, he bought a number of Police-themed souvenirs at the merchandise stand, all of which were wildly overpriced and unnecessary. Outside, in the parking area and surrounding streets, my boyfriend and I got into a fight. It was probably about his drinking and his spending, but when I look back on it now, I think it was about the fact that he wanted to be alone on his own little self-made island and wouldn’t admit it.

Maybe at the time, the truth was that I did too.

Being a self-contained unit seems like it would be a satisfying thing. You die alone, so why not live that way, unencumbered by any real emotional weight of those you meet along the way?

This kind of freedom comes with it an inherent ignorance. Not simply the ignorance of what you lose and what you miss out on, but specifically the ignorance of what it means to have this freedom in the first place. If you have it and give it up, or if you never had it at all, you understand. You can imagine how nice it might be to get so lost in your own self you forget to care about someone else, or to not know how much another person’s pain is worse for you than even your own. But if you have never stepped off your solitary island, then what do you know of how free you really are?

And this freedom is not, of course, very nice at all.

It’s not nice for you or for anyone. It took me a long time to understand this, and when I finally did, I felt very sad for the people who had tried to love me. I felt sadder still for anyone I had tried to love.

I have known many people who prefer the company of animals, or the mountains or ocean, or computers, or even themselves, to the company of most other humans. For the most part I cannot fault them. They can and do connect to other people, can and do see them as human – or at least try their very best – but they are happier as solitary creatures. Sometimes everyone is.

The other people, those with sad privilege, like to think they are solitary. The truth is they do quite well in the company of others, as long as there is something they need.

My relationships with men tend to spread out like a series of archipelagos from the center of my heart. All these islands, each populated by someone who waves down my plane only to tell me he has a little more tending to do near his lean-to on the island’s eastern shore.

Part of seeing them as human, in the way I wish they would do for others, has been in learning to leave them there.