I Walk Faster in Front of You
To keep my pace while moving through a desert that was once ocean
When my mother told me her mother was gone in late January, I felt summertime in the Blue Ridge Mountains, on a little apartment balcony, over so much green. My fingers close into my palm, and, absence. I look for my glass — my glass? A fresh pour, another can of Canada Dry ginger ale — I know I just had it. I can hear the ice, its chatter. I somehow feel like the sound of the thing. So where is it? Where could I have put it down?
Standing there with my phone on the bedroom carpet is the same sensation as that one night, on that one visit when I was seventeen. I was quietly walking into Gran’s living room to go out to the balcony and be alone with the outside. But I looked and saw Gran, already alone with her mountains, having a cigarette. Earlier that afternoon over ice and a smile, she told me she’d quit. “Never smoke, little girl,” Gran said. Yet there she is; I could even see the shimmer of fresh plastic on a new pack.
This moment is so vivid to me, not because Gran lied about having quit smoking. That didn’t surprise me. I understand in the moment that because she’s smoking, she’s truly alone with herself. A secret, or a crave, or a moment resembling having a cigarette on a long, navy night, is just you. It’s a ‘you and you’. That is the only time I saw Gran in a ‘you and you’ moment. That is the time I felt closest to her. The second time I felt closest to Gran, after years of no communication, was when Mom called to tell me she had passed.
“It seems she started to go bad the same time you were in Baltimore,” Mom says. “That’s interesting to me, don’t you think? The timing?” Mom, Gran; half the trunk of my family tree is rooted deep in Maryland: four centuries deep. Only a week or so prior I’d come home from visiting Baltimore, my mom’s hometown. Nobody on my mom’s side was aware I was there. Of course Gran didn’t know I was. “It is,” I reply.
Later that evening, I try to mourn my estranged grandmother and walk the dirt road at the most northwestern edge of town. It’s my ‘you and you’. I look at my mountains, the Davis Mountains where I know Mom is at home with Dad; I see the Chihuahuan Desert, the Texas heavens, cattle, the yucca. It’s a little life in a big, blue desert. Walking here tonight is my cigarette on the balcony, I think. Out here I let myself want that summer in Virginia and what was between Gran and I for a time, almost a decade ago. Everything else — her dysfunction, her secrets, her reluctance — I rest.
That is something Gran was never able to do when she was alive: let the thing go. She was constantly slowed down by how comfortable anger and resentment felt; her total lack of compassion, and complete refusal to seek remedy for her own self-inflictions caused enormous chaos. But somehow, in my teenage memory, I see Gran happy in Virginia. Peaceful, loving. Just her and her mountains, and me. I decide to keep the memory as it is, and again, I choose to let the rest pass.
While I’m on my walk, I might as well think about the person I went to be with in Baltimore. I miss the familiar water, the way the winter was there, and him. All that sweet, pink air I breathed in when I ran down an Atlantic shore. I exhale. The desert relaxes around me, and I swell with a strange pain of wanting someone. These Marylanders.
Better that I’m without for now, though — and better, I tell myself, that I’m not looking for the dead in the Blue Ridge Mountains, either.
When I go on these walks, understand that I find fullest solace in the vastness of far West Texas. The ancient, dry ocean that is this desert has plenty of open distance for me to kick a fossil; to grieve; to trust process. Nothing is hidden from me, I can see the whole thing.
(I tend to like the irony of my solace in being alone in the space, with space. Not just generally alone, but being out on this stretch of dirt road is really the most physically alone I can be here. Somehow being by myself with the land — what my town, where I am really is — I feel the least isolated and the most with myself; the most ‘you and you’.)
This desert is undisturbed as I cry, and look out at it with disappointment. Colors in the sky change anyway, as they did yesterday and will again tomorrow; whether or not I’m on another walk to see it. The beauty around me keeps its peace, the elements the same. This desert wants me to be wise; to be brave and accept. I imagine a murmur: you’re as much you as you were running down ahead of him, on the sand, washed by that sunset, as you are now, walking without anyone, in a different natural majesty. Consider this beauty, too?
Better that I’m here, I sigh.
A year ago I wrote a love letter. It was a thank-you and thank-God for my friendships; very specifically with the women who live here, too. It was also me attempting to keep my head up. I felt so much shame about how physically a past heartbreak was affecting me. Despite community and good days, it still took weeks and months after to wholly reconcile with my own heart and feel a ‘you and you’ again. The adjustment to suddenly becoming a single person living only for yourself is overwhelming, especially when your environment is small; everything, everyone is known. I did not want how miserable I really felt known. I did not want to be miserable, because I saw that feeling as a problem that would be so awful to solve.
The beauty and wide romance of the Texas desert that I understand so much more intimately now, felt constantly mocking for a long time. I have a memory of myself from this past June, in a friend’s garden watching a rainstorm. I’m likely already low from nights and days of alcohol and oversleeping. Instead of enjoying rain for what it is — good, needed weather — I spent the whole afternoon believing the rain was some kind of poetic, personal gesture from nature. “It’s raining today for me. Too bad rain makes me miss him.”
That’s the pain of loneliness and the exhaustion of loss: it makes everything about itself.
My friendships guided me to slowly reconnect with myself and my strengths — one of them being writing. Writing is my prime ‘you and you’ state. To write is often a solitary act of process, which is intense when you’re resisting solitude. Most of the time, however, writing creates an extraordinary reminder of dialogue: tell someone a truth and tell it well. You write, and you remember how much we can share. Sadness is not a problem to solve, it’s a process to understand.
My friends, the women (and the men) in this desert, taught me how to walk with my sadness as though it’s a friend; to match its pace, understand it, accept it, and continue. Now, a year later, I am walking fast and you’re reading what I write again. I move on from what slows me down.
I opened my phone and saw a picture on social media the other day. It was of a hotel notepad with a kind of retrospection written across it in thick pencil: “love is all around you, even if it is not about you.”
Now, a different evening, when I think about Gran as I write after a walk on the dirt road, a thought comes to me: maybe she did notice me in her living room that night through the screen door. Maybe she wondered if I’d seen the light of her cigarette and thought, “Shit.” That image makes me laugh a little now. But I know she didn’t realize I was there. If I was in the moment again, I’d like to think I would choose to go out on the balcony anyway, ignore the cigarette, and join her. Be alone with our mountains.
