I don't need to be forgiven

He gave me a ride to the airport which, I’m sure, in his mind was absolution. Water beaded out of my skin and out of my eyes and tiny rivulets of liquid Me floated up and away, like balloons, to heaven. I was lightheaded in an unfamiliar way. He had met my parents. I had met four of his six brothers. And, now, in my hour of need, he needed his freedom? We didn’t speak for much of the drive what with his foot on my neck and hands on the wheel all the way to the edge of Ohio. When we got to the airport it was our last good-bye. I was sure that I was dying of a broken heart. It was Valentine’s day, 1986. The snowstorm across the tri-state area had been intensifying and my Father correctly assessed that the freezing rain was too wild and crazy for me to be on a seven hour journey home by car. My parents provided the plane ticket for me, via the student travel agency, so I could regenerate in my own room, at home, where my Mother could take care of me. College was not the place to heal a broken heart or failing lungs.

Mother Nature had other plans for me though. Her wind grounded People’s Express flight 120, a pip and a jaunt from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh, suddenly, by way of pitstop in Newark, New Jersey. Nature needed to blow off some snow and sleet. It was not my first stranding but the sensation of this particular glossary of lonely was a Lady of the Lake kind of wet and unfair. First I was stranded by a boy, then stranded by an airline… the trip had become the Valentine’s Day Bermuda Triangle. Snowstorms and consumer holidays are quaint holdouts in the “shared experience” thread that used to sew the American flag of US- together. The decentralization of everything delivered us from evil with more individuation, more personal power and less sheeplike sameness. Hmm. Now that we’ve curated ourselves into our own little private Idahos we have much less in common to trust. The digital domains unintended to make us care less by having less shared experience to think about the same things differently but, they have driven us to distraction. On purpose? On purpose. Thankfully we can still rely on weddings, funerals, cruise ships and the Super Bowl for some old fashioned forced or falsified comradery.

Before smartphones, airport delays and strandings were test kitchen approved secret ingredients for brewing some spontaneous comrade tea. Casual mass strandings were relationship opportunities (camping or war game fighting exploits are obviously exempt) or a chance to fake your own death and begin again. Accidental group exiles typically start out as exhilarating, some dangerous fun before the ‘two types of people’ start to show themselves. (spoiler: 1.those who are grateful for the pause and life itself and 2. those who get irritated at how long it takes for the stranding to come to an end) At the start of a group stranding people strike up spontaneous, unlikely relationships that follow along the lines of friendship, but they rarely go all the way. But, still, it's a shared experience and philosophizing ensues and that makes for great tea. For me being stranded, group or solo, has been universally changemaking. In this case, at the airport, on this Hallmark holiday, I remained solo in the crowd, seeing red.

After all the passengers had been commanded to disembark and began weaving the comforter for mammalian survival, the self beading prayer knot of small talk, the stage directions holding all the what ifs, buts and candied nuts, interrupted the intercom's rush of instructions delivered by Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty's school teacher. The script played out while the big bird got her wings de-iced. And we, the actors, collectively listened for a crack of coherence in the sentencing, a reversal of our shared misfortune. The soundtrack to our winter day's change-in-plans was a Sonny and Cher fabulous, plain and fancy. The Valentines paid the rent on the departure/arrival theater in front of me awash in I've got you Babe prime time. Except, nobody had me. Cupid had dry fired. I was not got. I was stranded with my own heart skipping beats. I located a gap, a patch of wall being vacated by a woman, floating into the arms of a loyalist (perhaps) bearing gifts and expressions of “I found you!” she flashed me a look of complicity. Women. I silently gagged myself with a spoon for the sight of that limpid heart on worn on the outside, on her sleeve, but thanked her anyway in my head for the warm imprint on the wall, this bulwark against the storm of love swirling all around me, drowning me with every embrace.

The congestion in my head muffled the squawking loudspeaker, but I decoded “overnight” and "cancelled" in the news echoing across this settlement I found myself trapped in, this strange portal that had been colonized by lovers. I descended. With my coat tied around my waist, clutching nothing but a wad of used cocktail napkin I fished around in my backpack for my trusty terrible towel to serve as the final levee against the dam that had broken inside my 103 degree body. I thought the drowning would be more comfortable from the inside so I closed my eyes and tried to cheat death by simply sleeping. Everything was sorry and fetid in me and it was uncomfortable so I opened my eyes and concentrated on my current job which was to hold the wall up with imaginary tape made from the love notes I was writing and rewriting to him in my head. I was making myself stick with a lick of the onion skinned red white and blue letter/envelope all-in-one that I had metamorphed into with the words par avion stamped across my forehead so everyone could see I was going places. No matter how lugubrious I was towards him I could only unfold enough of myself to spell out an SOS in perspiration and tears. Salvation quickly became irksome and my rancorous thoughts returned again and again to sadness because they had to. My thoughts were knowingly useless and outflanked by my carousel of mood so I let go of the string and waved aloha to them. I was now living in an airport terminal. I was a college co-ed, a traveler, an adult. I answered to no one, trumpets, and my spirit animal, the woodpecker. I was really sick, a goner, a waif. As such, I remained pinned to the wall not willing to lose my spot to hunt for a payphone. I hounded my prayers and hid from the gawkers camouflaged by the lies I was telegraphing through pink and green embroidered greek letters festooned upon my chest. Poor little sorority girl. She’s probably going to a funeral.

I disappeared into the seam between the wall and the floor for upwards of 16 hours feverish and cold. Patient zero. These being the pre-cell phone, pre-pandemic, pre-terrorism days of meeting and greeting, helloing, good-bye-ing and breathing all over each other and everyone else at the gate, passengers and friends of passengers and friends of friends of passengers continued the parade of roses, oversized cards and teddy bears wearing bow ties, raining down on one another with confessions of love wrapped in heart shaped boxes of candy. Valentine’s Day is for suckers. I displayed polite despair and proof of consciousness through a sob and a nod just to reassure the nice uniformed lady who levitated over to me from her kiosk wearing a Motherly brow of concern. She offered me a blue bob of cotton candy. Maybe it was a pillow, in any case, I accepted her sympathy. We had tea party with only words, the small short ones and she patted my back. Women. Night fell and made morning, in glory, I assume. The fluorescent H-E-double hockey sticks that was known to me as Gate B7 remained the same idea of going places around the clock, no matter what the sun was or was not doing to all that frozen water on the frozen ground on the other side of my wall. I was really stuck.

I did not own a credit card, I was only 20, and like in Heaven and Las Vegas, my cash and luck both ran out without being missed in the shadow of more important things. I coughed up a thorn laced memory of him, and my heart fell all the way through the webbing of my ribcage and landed on the airport floor. A tall, hurried man walked by and kicked it down the hall until the little red vibration from my insides disappeared into one of the cement chips in the polished cement terrazzo where a piece of it will stay forever, a piece of me in Newark. Like the self inflicted piece of lead that was wilded into my knee, I didn’t want it anymore. I was going home to be Mothered by my Mommy.

Eight months later I would do something wild and reckless with one of those six brothers. I somehow knew that we would keep the secret, take it to a cave to be buried. Revenge is like that, the surprise at the bottom of the trunk underneath the gold coins and the jewelry. I had bet the house on it. Irish Catholic boys are solid liars. Besides, it was unimportant. The secret served as a phosphorescent windbreaker wrapped over the Anahata reef in my chest. I had let wild out rather than summon the more truthful trident of acceptance to plug, javelin style, the hole that caused all the sinking in the first place. Of course, I can visit it now, like a tourist, the dry socket inside of my coral heart of mistakes and bad decisions, all chalky and changed from too much acidity. I don’t need to be forgiven.

Nature is not dishonest in her selfishness, nor does she apologize for her wildness. She is what she is made for and she mends her own heart. She doesn’t have anything to prove. She doesn't peck holes for nothing. She is a tonic for my feminism scavenger hunt. The bitters for my fizzy water. Nature and danger are sororal twins who know what they want. One of Nature’s spectacular places I’ve visited briefly, that I really like, is in Hawaii. It is a land meets sea kind of wild-er-ness. Truths are buried in the sand there. I think I would even like to be stranded there, for eternity or a few hours, nothing in between. My mind’s eye can see my silhouette on this small far away island and I can say that in seeing it over and over there is a feeling of perfection in the wildness. In person, even up close, Nature can shame you just for looking and for punishment, turn herself inside out to be disguised as if her natural dimension is really just a 3-D stereomaster viewfinder. So unreal IRL. The untrained mind’s eye’s inability to see through without assistance, without progressive lenses. Nature’s wild did speak to my heart there on that beach and what she said is this: I am pure feminine energy. Visiting her alone feels just like being in love. Maybe that's why everyone loves the beach.

I went to this small Pacific island as a tourist. I was not alone. I traveled with a native because that is the only way you can really get there, to be ferried by a guide. The story of this actual, real life, particular island mountain promontory is a real oral postcard potboiler (OPP), the wish you were here kind with tall tales about the long ago hearts of kings and queens who afterlife from there, comfortable and in secret with all their buried treasure. The journey to that lonely beach unfolds in two dimensions. Warnings gallop across the sky, handwritten by God in clouds while a sinkhole mouthing a sonnet from the devil appears below the horizon and swallows the sun in a flash of green mist. The mountain is a volcano. Only nature, in her wildest, thinnest layer of dusk and seafoam can pick sides here. Everyone else is just visiting, enjoined into the flat colored viewfinder, getting laminated and sealed into the moment with the light leftover from the missing sun. That light from below ripening the moment, aging it ever so imperceptibly, just slightly older moment after moment. Darker. Stiller. Newer. Older. Frantic atoms mothering over mountains of still. The loss of light is made visible in order to blunt the sting of overwhelming and total feminine power. She, who shushed the rocks into sugar underfoot, being impatient all the time. She who is worshiped and feared in a perfect stop motion moment of both sides in harmony. The chicken and the egg ovulate as One. God is a woman. The devil wears Prada. This kind of wild made me realize that I don’t need to fight. Lonely is the heart in purpose.

I have often behaved like a tourist through my own adventures, through my own body. Only the front of a scene was visible to Me for lots of my own moments. Some of them not visible at all, some in my dreams, some clouds in a memory hole. My two dimensional life has seen a lot of fighting. Then, just like that, menopause asked me to give up proving I’m right. The exodus is here. Suddenly, without warnings or sonnets I am here in the wilderness of my advancing years, marching in extra layers to think in, looking for ways to be uncomfortable on purpose. Everything expanding and stranding in menopause. Everything. When I was on the little strip of beach at the end of the world, she hinted to me to grow a home in my own heart, instead of looking for love in someone else’s. She's probably right.

Wildness is necessary. I want Me-d to remember that in real time. She’s still closer to it than a memory of it. I hear her singing in the fields, in the shower, dancing in her room. One day she will get left somewhere, by someone, sometime. She will find the fathoms of the stranding exhilarating and painful and I know she will do the right thing by her heart because she is my hero and she is wiser than a woodpecker. She is wise like Woodstock. I want her to know that the road to that secret place is broken and booby trapped but it's worth it to go through some danger and depth to come out the other side where the light is like glinty like treasure. I want her to know that she is love already and that the search for comfort destroys love, that comfort is the enemy of the wild. There's truth in them thar hills. Inside and out, where the wild things are and sometimes on a card.