her INTERIOR DIALOGUE

in the winter of her forty-third year

It seemed logical then, she thought, since she was squarely middle-aged now that she finally had the courage to put her thoughts on paper for the world to see. Don’t they say that women become braver as they grow older? Although she hadn’t found that to be the case, exactly. She just found she grew more tired. But, as she had only so much energy to care, she did find herself less hung up on the opinions of others, if only due to limited bandwidth. She wasn’t brave. She was just too exhausted to care what strangers thought of her anymore. She still cared what the people close to her thought. But as her oft-read book by Mark Manson had advised, there are only so many fucks one can give. One must prioritize.

The idea had come to her at the concert. A “secular-by-genre but Christian-by-faith” band, it was a confusing merge of her evangelical upbringing and secular music, which had been at war since she’d watched the Hell’s Bell’s: The Dangers of Rock ‘N’ Roll documentary in her parochial middle school class. The high/low points of this war had included battles such as cutting up CDs, because of course, they were instruments of the devil, and a constant battle with her parents about whether she could watch MTV, which had actually played music videos then. Her first concert had been the Newsboys at the Mammoth, a Christian group which probably isn’t together anymore at a venue which doesn’t even exist anymore, all of which had made her feel old. A lot made her feel old these days. But as her mind wandered, she thought about writing, which she hadn’t done in forever. The same objections arose: she had nothing unique to say and no one would want to read what she would write.

While she stood watching the band, her feet had throbbed, even with the inserts in her Chucks, but she realized she had bought those inserts years ago and they probably should have been replaced by now. When her mind was able to think about anything other than her feet, which were now going numb and causing her to shift her weight from one foot to the other, she was trying to decide whether this felt more like a concert or more like church. She wasn’t sure. But the struggle between God and music had been a perpetual theme in her life, until she had stepped away from the God thing which had pretty much resolved that conflict. She wondered if anyone else in that crowd was similarly torn between a past in one which one had whole-heartedly drunk the Kool-Aid and a present which felt like a disinterested observation of that past.

It had felt a lot like other concerts she’d been to at the Ogden, though as she looked around, she had to qualify that statement, since the crowd definitely seemed different. Men still wore earrings, but they were crosses. Tattoos were usually Bible verses. There was a lot less drinking. The lead singer with long hair crooned earnestly into the microphone. The spotlight shone on his Christ-like figure while the audience was swept up in the emotion of the moment. She started having passion play flashbacks. Every year, often multiple times a year, she had watched a crucifixion reenactment, a sect-wide wound-dousing in alcohol, because how do you know you can feel unless you can feel the pain you’ve inflicted upon your savior? The crowd beamed at the stage, the band beamed at the crowd, and the music connected the strangers with an engrossing intimacy.

It was a whole different experience if you didn’t know the song. She watched from the outside, a sociologist analyzing the bizarre behavior of this once-known species. She remembered crying in the past, being overcome by music in this kind of situation, sure she was being moved by the Holy Spirit. But she had felt it later, too, after she had stopped believing. She had felt it when Obama won, and when she was in the women’s march, and any time she had a sense of community with others and hope in humanity. She didn’t care what you called it. Admittedly, she had felt it less frequently these days, though she wasn’t sure if she was more jaded, or if the pandemic had broken everyone just a little bit, or if she had just forgotten how to put hope in humanity.

“Now, some of you are thinking ‘That’s not the order those tracks were on my CD,’” the lead singer said, his voice resonant and sure. “And others are thinking, what’s a CD?” Rimshot.

“You weren’t even born,” the loud girl in front of her exclaimed. “You were not even born.” The younger girl smiled and giggled and sucked at her straw. The older woman was not that old, but was clearly self-conscious about her age. The younger woman was not that young but also exhibited an aura of insecurity. They were both feeling the same unsureness, both unwilling to speak it aloud, afraid that if they spoke about their fears it would also give them power. So they nodded to the music and raised their drinks to the chorus, and they all pretended they didn’t feel so alone.

Before another song, the singer told a story about wanting to impress a girl. “We’ve all been there,” the loud girl said, and the bearded heavy guy next to her said, “Not me.” Adamantly. She was waiting for a punch line but another song started and she never heard it. If there was one. Was he just being a dick? Or was he gay? That’s the only way she could have justified the attitude in his response. She wondered if it was still a thing that Christians don’t always accept gays. Is that why he didn’t finish his sentence? She had known some churches were accepting, but some churches definitely weren’t, and while she hoped the younger churches were more accepting like younger society in general, she realized she really didn’t know since it wasn’t a world she traveled in anymore with any frequency.

The idea to put her thoughts down on paper came to her again yesterday morning when she was listening to an audiobook on loneliness. Philosophers and psychoanalysts have tried to explain the ache we have to feel whole, and as she learned from the audiobook while sitting in traffic on I-25 that morning, ancient myths posited that humans were born with four arms and four legs and two heads until the gods split us in two, causing us to always search for our other halves. Romantic comedies tell us that once we find our other half, we will never want again, but no one relationship does or even should make us whole. Growing up as an evangelical, she had been told it was a God-shaped hole that she was seeking to fill. Everyone had different answers for it, but the one constant was the need. She understood that we all needed something, we all felt a lack, an emptiness. It was kind of taboo, she realized, to actually discuss the emptiness, even though she was pretty sure everyone felt it, the loneliness of life. Whatever the answer, loneliness is what tells us we are lacking, the lab test with the red flag that reveals we need our vitamins. For some, church filled that role. For her, it was live music. Or coffee or a pub with a friend. Being understood. Comfort food and drinks. And, she surmised, we all need something sometimes.

Those who know her know that one of her biggest pet peeves are people who think of themselves as “self-made.” Every single day, the world works because individuals get up to do individual jobs which make a communal difference. NOBODY does it alone. We all rely on the people who came before us and work beside us. The pavers of the roads, the constructors of the buildings, the designers of the buildings, the traffic coordinators, the baristas, the electricians, the servers, the fuelers, the mayors, the garbagemen, the teachers, the attorneys, the cops, the judges, the doctors and the aides. Americans especially love to think they have struggled over adversity, the more the better, unless the adversity were to actually cause a disadvantage. They love the idea of struggle, just not the reality. Other societies understand the value of community but the American ethos loves to idealize the solo struggler, so that is ingrained in us that asking for help is a sign of weakness. Our politics mimic this structure, so that anyone needing help should be ashamed to ask for it, since need is a lack and a failure in itself.

During the pandemic, the thing she had missed most were live concerts. She would dream of a time after, a time when she would once again be able to be wrapped up in the energy of a crowd, to be caught up, inspired, by live music. But her venture back into ticketed events had so far been tricky. She had bought tickets to the Violent Femmes, a band she had wanted to see live since first hearing of them in a Juliana Hatfield Three song. They were going back to their roots, playing their first album from start to finish, and she had been excited to see it. But when the show came around, she had driven six hours in the 24 hours beforehand and a lawn seat sounded less appealing than a nap. Because, y’know. Old.

The next concert she had gone to was interrupted when she was wheeled out in a wheelchair to the medic room where they took a medical history and her blood pressure before giving her a glass of water and letting her return to the show. Looking back, she realized that passing out, or “syncope,” as the paramedics termed it, along with the near-syncope events at Water World later that month, should have been signs of her dangerously low hematocrit and the fact that she had been slowly starving to death for several months. Instead, she had ignored the signs until she ended up in the ER where they had performed an emergency removal of her lap-band.

Her relationship with food had always been problematic. She had actually felt quite powerful in the last year, like she finally had the upper hand, as food no longer had any appeal for her. Even though hunger still came and went occasionally, the slightest mistake with chewing or food choice would immediately make her nauseated. See? she seemed to say to food. You have no power over me. (At this point she heard those words echo thunderously, pictured the world collapsing on all sides, and mirrors shattering a la Labyrinth because, well, she would always be an 80’s girl.)

Of course, the power was an illusion. Once the band was removed, she started gaining weight again, although to be fair, some weight gain was likely appropriate, given that her anemia was arguably severe enough to justify transfusion, and she was overall malnourished. She read her CT report which noted “intraluminal debris” in her stomach and suddenly it all clicked: she had not slept a full night in months because she would wake up coughing, a situation made worse if she ate within several hours of sleeping but was never able to avoid altogether. She had been coughing up undigested, or at least only partially digested, food, she had realized with disgust. So the months of fatigue made sense: she had been malnourished and sleep-deprived and should have put two and two together months ago but instead she had been patting herself on the back for the long-earned success in her fight to control her appetite. What’s the difference, in the end, between dieting and starving to death? Nuance? Control?

She remembered a friend asking her one year what she would wish for her birthday if she could have anything she wanted. “To weigh less,” she had answered, but of course the wisher never understands the caveats. If she were wishing now, she would say “To weigh less and have elastic skin.” Because while she looked okay in clothes these days, her skin had never recovered from the fat years, would never recover without surgery. It had stretched upon the rack of tortuous life like taffy and would never shrink back to its original size. Admittedly, there were few people who needed to bear witness to this, but she carried the knowledge with her like a shameful secret. They would be horrified if they saw underneath, she whispered to herself. “I could have dealt better with you being fat,” one man had said. “Larger women can be attractive but the extra skin is . . . unsightly.” She hadn’t been sure what do with this, so she had laughed it away in the moment. But she had tucked it into that place we all have, where we keep the replay button, and it had been on repeat intermittently in her echo chamber ever since.

So now the battle with food was back on after several years’ intermission, but at least she wasn’t passing out in public anymore. So there was that. She had been catching up with people from her past this year, however, and as her friends’ children turned into little capable humans, her choice to be childless became a starker contrast. “That’s not our journey,” her husband had comforted her, although by the time they had met, biology had pretty much made that a foregone conclusion. And it wasn’t their journey. That was okay, she had decided. She had just felt like it was never really the right time, and then there wasn’t any time at all. Which was not to say she regretted her choice. Just that she had never made a choice and in failing to take action, the decision was made for her.

There was a scene in Wonder Boys where Michael Douglas’s character’s manuscript is being criticized by Katie Holmes’ character, who had been a student in the former’s class. The gist was that he had told the students that writers make choices, but when it came to his own work, well, he didn’t make any choices. At all. He bristles and takes offense at the critique, sputtering about an award he had won. But the point resonated. She had watched the movie and remembered little except that scene which had been tucked away like the skin comment, replaying now and then unexpectedly. She feared doing the same, making no choices at all in fear of making the wrong choice.

She had a personal Debbie Downer, a pessimistic version of herself who saw the worst outcome of everything, and could always imagine every scenario going horribly, terribly wrong. She presumed (hoped?) she wasn’t the only one who battled against her self like this. Debbie, an imaginary version of herself, would presumably be immune from such realities like viruses, but she couldn’t help envisioning her with a sinus infection, her voice whiny and nasal. “But what if you reveal your deepest secrets, hoping for acceptance, only to be met with derision? Why, after all, would anyone care what YOU think?” Debbie whine-slur-mumbles then stops to hack-cough.

“Maybe someone else has gone through the same things, or felt the same things. We’re all trying to feel seen and be understood. I have felt seen when others have shown their vulnerability. Maybe I can do the same thing for others.”

Sniff. “You must think you’re pretty speeccciiiaalll.”

She didn’t like how Debbie dragged out the word, almost like a taunt. She was considering how to respond but Debbie had more to say: “But why are you calling it a dialogue when you’re only talking to yoouuurrrseeelllfff???” Sniff. Sneeze. Snort.

“Well, I think it’s great,” Sam jumped in. She was grateful for the interruption, although not sure she was ready for this other version of herself. Sam, short for Samantha, was the idealized version of herself, the one she could have been if she’d made the right choices. Sam was successful and courageous and self-assured in a way she wasn’t, which is why Sam was named after the daughter in “Who’s the Boss,” who was, of course, perfect. “You haven’t been creative in soooooo long and you’ve missed it.”

“It’s true. I have. And I’m so busy this may be all I have time for.”

Sam no longer seemed so pleased. She never liked measures by halves, any hint of diminished ambition, or anything less than perfection. “Wait. Let me get this straight.” Sam paused for effect, never needing to scramble for words but knowing her listener may need the time to focus properly. “Despite having a degree in English and a Masters in English Literature” –Sam had emphasized and drawn out the Masters part, which she had thought was over the top and unnecessary — “you aren’t taking the time or effort to hone a craft, to learn world-building, or to create compelling characters? Instead you’re just using the internet as your personal diary? Because you’re prone to overshare and often veer into TMI territory?”

“Could we frame it differently?” she asked. “What about, I’m playing to my strengths?”

Silence.