A Year of Borrowed Hope

Don’t know who that is next to me either. Don’t know why my hair looks red. That goddamn year.

It’s weird that I only remember my first roommate’s name. Or maybe it’s not. That year, 1996, it was a long time ago, and it was a strange year. I have memories like student films, fuzzy and obscure. A driving scene. A car I borrowed from Airman Brightwell or maybe Airman Carver, windy roads with the Pacific surf crashing below. A makeshift seat just down from Cannery Row, my jacket on the rocks, a novel in my lap, or maybe it was the Vietnamese textbook I should’ve been reading. Walking barefoot, chasing the tide, flipping up sand dollars with my toes. The seals barking at night. Walking to class, a shortcut through the pines. A heat wave steaming me inside my over-starched BDUs. Looking down at my boots, pissed off at the dust and how I’d have to shine them again. Running in formation up that goddamn hill, some short-legged airman in front of me, forcing me to cut my stride, my tendons screaming.

There are other memories. The reason I hate the smell of sandalwood and wet leaves. The corners I took too fast, then chickened out. The sign the guy carried outside the clinic. The picture looked like something from a plastic menu at a shitty Italian restaurant. But I wrote what I cared to write in a book, and I don’t need to write any of that again.

It’s the upside I suppose. You work so hard on learning to write it and worrying about how you’ll write it, and you do it again and again then one night, you’re driving from Pagosa Springs back to Austin. Maybe you took some drugs. Doesn’t matter. Even sober, driving through New Mexico fucks with your mind. The sky isn’t right. Or it is, and you aren’t. I don’t know. I was playing my old Ipod and a song came on and I pulled into a truck stop outside of Tucumcari and wrote it one last time in a notebook and I knew I got it right. So it’s done.

But that was twenty years later or a few years ago. Now it’s been near thirty. Fucking hell. And I only remember one roommate, Debbie Delacruz. We were in basic together. We weren’t friends. I don’t mean that I didn’t like her. I didn’t have anything against her but that she was married and in a few months, she’d get to move to base housing with her husband on Fort Ord, and I’d get another roommate. She was short and mousy and she cried every night because she missed her husband and her baby. For reasons I cannot comprehend, she found comfort in a Bone Thugs CD, of all godawful things. So every night, until I went to bed, I’d hear the tinny sound from her headphones until I put mine on and played what gave me comfort, or something like it.

My brother said I’d like her, not Debbie, I mean Sarah McLachlan. My brother tends to be right about these sorts of things. We were flipping through the CDs at the Base Exchange at Lackland. Family day after graduation before I left for Monterey. I had the Discman in my basket already. I don’t remember what it cost but I think a CD cost around fifteen bucks, maybe less at the BX. Either way, we had to choose carefully back then. I picked up Cowboy Junkies. My brother handed me Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and said I had to buy it. I did because we were out of time, and like I said, he tends to be right about that sort of thing.

I probably bought other CDs eventually. I don’t remember. I remember lying under the grey wool blanket that smelled like toasted wool from the industrial dryers, my discman on my belly, flipping the buttons in the dark. Play. Reverse. Play. Reverse. Play.

I don’t remember other music that year. Or I didn’t. Not until my book came out. I got a DM on Twitter, a guy I used to know. Daniel said he remembered me and he wished he’d known, that he should’ve known and been a better friend. I remembered a motel room we’d rented to drink. Passing a bottle back and forth and the Presidents of the United States on MTV. Lump. I told Daniel it wasn’t his fault. We were kids. I didn’t know how to have a friend.

I had people I walked with to class and people I walked with to town. People I drank with on the beach in Seaside where we didn’t have to worry about getting caught. We’d scrounge what change we had in our pockets for Taco Bell. But I don’t remember much about any of them. I remember the music of one CD.

I’d lie on my bunk and want to be someone else and somewhere else and wonder if my life was already over and if someone could ever love me. Maybe if I just held on. Maybe I could have friends and maybe my mom would understand someday and maybe someday I wouldn’t be so afraid all the time. And as long as I listened to those words, I could almost believe it. But goddamn believing was hard. I wanted so badly to disappear, and I was terrified I already had.

And then, I don’t remember when, I put the CD away. And I never talked about it to anyone. I knew she had other fans. I’d hear them sing along, the one song they always sang. And I’d hate that I never had that, a moment in my life that made a song about love and chocolate mean a goddamn thing. I was happy for them and jealous of them and also the kind of asshole who judges you for liking the cheesy song. Because I was the kind of asshole who thought my pain was somehow special. Congratulations on your happiness I guess. Go fuck yourself.

I was sitting on a towel in the grass the other night and it was funny. I was at a Sarah McLachlan concert, goddamn thirtieth anniversary of the CD that got me through when hope was so hard to find. It’s funny because we’re all older now and we’ll still find a way to light up at a nonsmoking venue but we draw the line at littering. Funny that I put my shrooms under my right tit and my preroll tube in my crotch, but I’m a middle aged woman and no one bothered to search me or anyone else.

It’s funny because I can see it now what was so fuzzy then. How she tore out her guts to write songs that were so fucking specific and not even a little obvious. So that someone like me could hear them and find my own meaning and it would help me through the night. So I could survive a year I thought would end me.

How fucking delusional, to think that you might write something that might help. How delusional and how necessary. Because what’s the point of anything if that isn’t true. And it was true. A nineteen year old kid who was never alone and more alone than she’d ever be could feel something that wasn’t pain and start to understand.

Thirty years later, a little more or a little less, on a Friday night in Austin, a place I dared to hope I might get to live someday. I sat in a crowd of strangers with friends and wept to the songs that helped me survive the shit I didn’t think I could.

It was a long time ago in a different time. I’ve had a few people love me and I’ve got really good goddamn friends. My mother might understand or might not, but when she doesn’t it’s pretty goddamn funny. I’ve had better than average sex, thank fuck, because I stopped being afraid and if there’s one clear damn upside to what scared me to hell, lesbian sex is fucking great. I haven’t been afraid like that in a long goddamn time. And these days, when I’m alone, I’m rarely lonely, and I tend to enjoy the silence.

I went back a year ago, back to Monterey, and I walked the beaches with my dog. And someone called my name. A couple DLI students, sitting on the beach. A couple who were a couple and not afraid because they don’t have to be anymore. They read my book. A student gave it to them and they read it and they gave it to someone else. Thirty years after I drank on that same beach in that year I don’t much remember. They said they read my book and it helped them through the night. I don’t often let strangers hug me but this time I held on tight.

The craziest goddamn thing. I’m exactly who I was so scared to be and who I wanted to be more than anything but to get to here at all, to get through those nights in Monterey, I had to borrow a little hope from someone else. That was long time ago. I’d thank her if I could but instead I’ll just write this down. Maybe it’s enough. That I’m okay.