Parents Weekend, or the time I smoked on the MTA to New York to meet my folks for dinner and successfully pulled myself out of a panic attack. (and even saw an angel)
There is still some day left even in this night. The words echo in my head with no apparent source or invitation, but I welcome them now like wedding crashers. This has been, I remind myself – unburdened, the black waves rising from the top of my skull and starting to curl now for the first time since the buzzcut season – a good day. I am fixing my gaze on the dying twilight’s deep electric autumn blue, bright like night only ever is in the movies, and feeling a rare sense of kinship with the nature of things.
And, as I now remind myself with a glance at my watch, waiting for the arrival of a train that will take me to meet my parents for dinner in New York. I take a hit from my pen and practice my breathing, which had eluded me for most of the day but now snakes in and out of my throat with the impassioned fortitude of a pearl diver. It’s a terrible thought — I think in Sufjan Stevens’ Javelin — “to have, and to hold.” But for now it feels good. My mother is probably doing her makeup in the hotel bathroom, my father sketching on blank pages littered across the bed with his father’s patience and precision.
I imagine the distance that exists, presently, between myself and them, and this thought is – finally – what strikes a chord in that wild-eyed terror-struck part of myself I have been fending off all day. I begin to imagine the time it will take to reach them not in stops but in steps and I start to get achy. And I think of the rockets over Israel, and the ones that will fly over Gaza. There is no limit, I remind myself, to the miles that can stand between mothers and fathers and their sons on this dirt I have inherited and yet I stomp across it and am able to forget. I think of that arrogance. And, in my sobered humility, I return to the fear.
And what fear! What fear. Many moons ago, when I came out as gay to my friends in Monterrey, I wrote a stupid little something that said expressing that part of myself felt like a long exhale after a lifetime of holding my breath in. The five years of mental strangeness and strain that have followed that first crack in the dam have been, to my own mind, symptoms of that necessary release. What images return to me on the exhale? There is the cat sleeping on my windowsill at home in Mexico, and behind her – in the distance – the mountain. There are tectonic plates shifting against each other in balmy weather – that dance, that kiss, that world-shattering erosion. And there is darkness most of all; a night sky in an electric storm, that big Nothing interrupted by brief flashes of brilliance. I am still in it, I realize. Still breathing out. This realization feels urgent, and laced with an inescapable despair.
But just before I am again crowned prince of shadows I look up, and the landscape begins its incantation. On the left and right sides of my periphery, twin trains storm the station in parallel trajectory but opposite direction, and their groans and clashes sound —to my hyper-honeyed and rattled brain — monstrous and guttural. And life continues to get louder, and the blank faces of the people peering out from inside the trains’ windows have eyes like nets: that porous blindness, the iris dotted with the dead ink of black holes. But at the center of my vision, separated only by an iron pole holding up the NEW HAVEN STATION sign, the prophet-angel positions the centerpieces of its tableau:
Left of the pole, a rugged, beautiful man in stylish workwear realizes his harnessed dog is frightened by the oncoming train. I begin to pre-grieve for the dog’s next thirty seconds of existence, and in my prejudice condemn the rugged and beautiful man as too rugged and too beautiful to provide any comfort to his pet in this moment of need. “He forgets himself,” I think to myself when he surprises me by kneeling to meet the frightened dog’s eyes, kissing him and rubbing his belly from behind. I can’t help but think, then, of the pup’s blamelessness and perfection in the midst of so many forms of human machinery. I marvel at the leaps and bounds we must take to drag our weight to what is sacred within us, to see with the power of the dog – that impermeable iris, sturdy and vital. I become aware of the mental architecture I have mapped out and built in my head, the vast bridges and metal valves and nets that I have tangled myself up in. I begin to forget myself, in all this breathing and watching. I tear down a city in one fell swoop.
And to the right, a family of four: man and wife and two toddler-aged daughters with outfits only they themselves could have put together. The mother jokes with the father, wagging her arm at him and holding a rainbow-colored tote that fills me with the vicious sort of aesthetic pity I know I am capable of. But I feel warmly for them, then, and smile as the father holds back his fidgeting baby girl who gestures and jumps in salutation of the oncoming train. They are, in my eyes, too close to the yellow line. I think of the fear he must feel then, her fate not just resting on his grip but gently pulling from it. I imagine how many times my parents have felt that sharp pang, the degree of fear I too will come to hold when I have children of my own. I cannot imagine it ever truly leaves you. The father’s steady arms and hands over her belly hum with what strikes me as an elemental force of nature: that proximity to unimaginable fear and yet also the triumph of love over it. It seems so natural to me then, as buzzing and blue as the steady hum of the third rail.
We shuffle in once the train arrives and, as I sink into my seat, I remind myself to hold my fear with the closest feeling to my father’s love I can muster. I believe in times of unspeakable horror there are only two kinds of people: those who are doomed to hold it forever, and turn it over – dumbfounded – like a stone in their hands, and those who surrender it to grace. For love exists in matter, if not always in mind, and grace is a feeling the body remembers. My life is defined by the moments where it finds me.
I stare at the QR code on the virtual ticket app before the train operator comes over to scan it until a voice inside my head tells me that fear is the only form of lovelessness, and that lovelessness is by nature a misapprehension. When I look up at her, she returns my smile.
