TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

It’s a few days after Easter and I’ve been trying to figure out the significance of this hoiday without consulting experts. I know about the cross thing and the thorny headband, but Good Friday is lost on me. I haven’t actually wondered what Good Friday is until this year. This may seem impossible, but when your parents raise you to believe that the only thing holy is Bob Dylan’s Blond on Blond, it’s easy to reach your mid-twenties thinking of religious holidays as little more than get-out-of-school-free cards. Good Friday means as much to me as Rosh Hashanah, which I thought what one word until I just looked it up.

The company I keep is equally muddy on such matters. Even though many of my friends were sent to Sunday school and Bible study as children, they have largely blocked out these monotonous and/or terrifying church visits and forgotten what such holidays mean. Our spiritual education comes each Sunday around noon at at the Church of the Bloody Mary. The question of Good Friday, however, has come up a lot recently due to a three beer bet that one of us can figure it out without Wikipedia. My favorite explanation for Good Friday comes from my friend Brandy, who said that Good Friday is the day Jesus rolled back the boulder and saw his shadow. Six more weeks of winter!

Even though none of us have come up with a plausible explanation for why we would get the Friday before Easter off if we had office jobs instead of bartending or waiting tables or telemarketing or collecting unemployment, the three beer bet means we’ve had Jesus on the mind. The following is a voice mail I received from a dear, nameless friend on Easter Sunday:

Yo boo, I’m calling to see what’s what and also to tell you about the the crazy motherfucking sex dream I had about our lord and savior Jesus Christ. I think it was in honor of all the Easter talk we’ve been having lately. It was kind of a sexy dream but he was on the cross and I was putting my hands on his face and also into the… what’s it called? The crown of thorns. But it was going into my hands instead of into his head. Hope you’re doing well. See you Tuesday. Happy Easter.

The reason I’m not celebrating Easter with my friends over eggs Florentine and mimosas this year is because I’m in my hometown, a small rural cluster called Cullowhee, North Carolina, with 1300 registered voters and no place to get a bagel. I don’t visit very often, maybe three or four times a year, even though it’s only a five hour drive from Carrboro. I just don’t really like it here. I have no nostalgia for my hometown. No teenage memories of young love or mischief, just a vague memory of high school torment because I didn’t shave my legs. There are things I like about it—it’s beautiful, for instance, and quiet, and my parents have cable and an entire fridge filled with just Perrier and sharp cheddar and good beer. But it’s boring and the good beer means nothing to me because I don’t drink with my parents. It’s not so much because I can’t drink in front of my parents—they certainly drink in front of me—but a glass or two of wine seems awkward considering I called them in a moment of desperation three years ago and told them that I was an alcoholic. I’ve since Indian given that self-diagnosis, but at the time I was distraught because my girlfriend found out the I cheated on her and I needed an explanation for why I had done this terrible thing to someone I loved so much that I would easily have sold several minor and one major organ to take her on a nice vacation. There had to be a reason for my sociopathic behavior and alcohol seemed to be the thread connecting all the lies I told her. It’s better to have a drinking problem than be a bad person, I thought, and so I told this thing to my parents and now I can’t take it back.

The forced sobriety of Cullowhee is good for me. I think of my hometown as a health resort, a sanitarium, a rehab center. It not the effort of adjustment, of changing my lifestyle, but simply mountain air that will renew me. I just need a break, a rest, a reprieve and then I’ll take the peace and the sobriety and the will to change back with me.

When I go to my hometown for more than a day or two, it’s usually because something black mold and speeding ticket has happened in my life. This time is no different. Within the span of one week, I caught my porch on fire and was fired from my job. I lost my keys and my wallet and my phone, three things you need when you have to pay the locksmith you called to get inside your house. It’s not even that I lost a bag containing all three vitals. I lost them separately. The porch and the job weren’t all that surprising, but losing the necessary necessities at three different times made me feel like I was losing pieces of my brain along with my worldly goods, so I left for my hometown and a break from my messy life.

This flight from daily life happens about once a year, always in the spring. I spend one last night at the bar before I pack my bags and kiss my friends goodbye. I tell everyone I’ll be gone for a month, maybe more, because I really believe that I’ll be gone for a month, maybe more. After I get home and unpack my bags and spend my first night eating outside and drinking Perrier and watching a sky that is bigger than the sky I’m used to, I feel regret creeping up. The first few days are always hard. I turn into a teenager. I get resentful that my parents want to have actual conversations instead of leaving me alone with my books and my thoughts, like I’m seventeen and just want to be left alone.

After the first few days, however, after a few days of being sober and smoke free, I start to calm down. I remember the good things about living in a non-town in the mountains. I wake up early and ride my bike along the river. I go hiking in the afternoons and mow my parents’ lawn and wash their cars. I eat ice cream before bed and don’t feel guilty about it because you deserve ice cream when you’ve gone running and cleaned the attic and remembered how to tell your parents that you love them. The people here are charming and nice. You can be a complete bitch in a town like this as long as you say bless her heart before calling someone a fucking piece of shit cunt. Bless her heart, I just wish that bitch would die a slow and painful death at the hands of a rapist with bad breath.

But it’s difficult for me to be here for long. When I spend enough time without the distractions of friend dates and date dates and happy hour and dance parties, I start to think about the past. And, inevitably, about my ex-girlfriend, the one from years ago, the one I lied to over and over and over. The clarity that comes with sobriety and time to think makes me remember her and remember that I miss her and remember all the things we felt and did. I remember putting photobooth stickers of ourselves happy and in love all over our house for each other to find in books or cds or underneath the wine glasses in the cabinet or frozen into a piece of ice in the freezer. I remember that she was braver than me, that she drove the tall and winding copper-colored roads of Yellowstone while I sat in the passenger seat with my head between my legs, terrified to look over the edge. I remember how she walked, slowly and purposefully, her hips low. I remember the names we called each other when we were happy and the names we called each other when we were angry. I remember the Easters we spent together, trying to poach eggs and make bloody Mary mix in our kitchen, stickers of ourselves on the fridge and in the pantry. She would have known what Good Friday is.

The more time I have to think, the shorter the peace lasts. I tire of thinking about her and tire of thinking about myself. Even though it’s barely been a week, much less a month, I want to go back to a place where she doesn’t exist, where the memories are all my own.

Good Friday might not be the day Jesus saw his shadow and Easter might not be the day my friend pulled thorns from his crown, but when I go back this afternoon, these are the things I will discuss about over bloody Marys and eggs Florentine. I won’t think of her and I won’t wonder what went wrong. I will sit on my porch and win three beer bets and wonder who our savior is. And when it’s next spring and the one after that, when I’ve destroyed another house and lost another job, I can always go back to the safety and the quiet of my first home, go back and try to do it again.

I live in Carrboro, North Carolina. There are 17,931 of us here, but it seems smaller, like the size of a camera hidden in the light fixture of a seedy motel and monitored at home by a registered sex offender. That’s also how living here feels sometimes—like people watch each other through windows and tell their friends whose beds have chains on the headboard and who sleeps with a teddy bear and who cries at Adam Sandler movies.

In a town where the co-op lawn is the hub of activity—the place where hula-hoopers in backless shirts and bare feet spin circles and beat the grass into dirty submission, where children run into your shins and then cry like babies when they fall on their diapered butts, where the rest of us grudgingly buy our carrot juice and hummus and talk about how coagulated the hot bar is—of course your neighbors’ behavior is public domain. There’s not much else to talk about. It’s like we’ve all given up on doing things and resigned ourselves to thinking about doing things. We all know each other, at least by terrible reputation, and we all talk. And I’m as guilty of stirring and spreading and meddling as anyone. More, even.

This didn’t bother me at first. I moved here from Portland, Oregon, where I was completely anonymous. I was every other early twenties gayelle, holding hands and working at coffee shops and riding bikes and reading in bars when there was no one to talk to. There was nothing about me that deserved attention, and I like attention, so, at first, Carrboro was a pleasant reprieve from anonymity. When I first came here, I planned on taking just a short break from Portland, just enough time to recalibrate after some significant life changes (i.e. falling in maybe-love or at least pitter-patter-love with someone who was not my girlfriend; subsequent break-up with said girlfriend; subsequent week of homelessness without pillow, clean socks, phone charger, or wallet; subsequent final fuck you; subsequent teary goodbye.). I thought I’d be here for a few weeks, maybe a month, and go back to Portland and find the girl I had fallen in maybe-love with and deal with the strangers and the anonymity and be happy and changed. That was two and a half years ago.

I stayed in part because my sister lived here and it was nice to have a built-in friend, someone who had to go on walks and split meals with me, if for no other reason than DNA and guilt. I also stayed because of the people. I made more friends in the first weeks of being here than I did the whole time I was in Portland. My friends have become my family. We spend our days and nights together. We talk about how someday we’re going to have a house that’s actually a lot of houses, one for each of us, with a big courtyard and an outdoor kitchen in the middle and mango trees and family supper and a sun that shines when we want to surf, which we will be able to do because we will have a beach and because we will know how to surf, and rain that rains when we want to stay inside and watch movies. So I like Carrboro. I like our fantasies and I like our fun and I like our nights that are like no other nights and our nights that are like all other nights. Or, at least, I did.

But now I’m done. I have no job, no money, and absolutely, definitely, unequivocally, no chance at ever, like ever, finding a girlfriend. I have ruined my reputation to the point that some anonymous Craigslister wrote that I’m “shady and everywhere” for all of Missed Connections to see. I once met a girl at a bar and our conversation naturally deteriorated from books and politics to sex and love. We agreed that men are stupid and women are crazy. I said something about how this person I had slept with the night before talked about furniture all the time and then the blood rushed from her face to her heart and she jumped off her bar stool and ran out without paying her tab and, yes, the person from the night before was her person. And even though I didn’t know that person had a person and was so drunk that I can’t even remember if we had sex and or maybe if we ate popcorn and cuddled, this is the story of my life in this town.

We are full of boredom and drama and we let things that aren’t real become real. I recently learned that I fucked a homeless man in an alley while still with my ex. And while it’s not implausible and maybe is entirely true that I did cheat on my ex, I can’t even sit on other peoples’ furniture, much less fuck someone with scabies and a shopping cart. I accidentally touched a dreadlock a few nights ago and had to bust through a crowd of sweaty people to get to the nearest bathroom and scrub my hands so hard that I no longer have fingerprints. I’d wash my sheets twice even if someone in a full-body snowsuit slept on them, so even if I liked to sleep with men and even if I liked to get shoved against brick walls, my neuroses make this scenario impossible. It wasn’t reality, but now it is.

I’m at the point now where I can laugh at these rumors, be flattered, even, that I’m the subject of stories and gossip in this small town, but my friends are trickling away, to New York or LA or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle or to husbands and wives and jobs and children. Why be here, in this place of so much comfort and so little potential, when my family is leaving? I’m ready to be anonymous again.