Sometimes, the path requires you go fast

Amber says that she should be coming home about the time that I would be leaving to see Veronica. She's almost never home on time on Fridays. I have a conservative hour of wiggle room before the animal hospital is done with her.

Veronica ostensibly wanted to talk about writing. I didn't suspect this topic would last long. All the same, I brought supplies. I don't like to force things, but there is little harm in being over prepared.

National Novel Writing Month is in a few days. I have already been mentally preparing myself for writing fifty thousand words in half the time because I know I can and am not a coward. Our conversation is to motivate her or at least give her a forum where she could express her hesitations. When I ask her what she might write, she says she hasn't decided. She hasn't even decided if she's even going to do NaNoWriMo this year.

I have a plan, but it wasn't the project I wanted to do. I wrote a list of possibilities from which my friends could choose, including "don't choose this option." Veronica reiterated that option again when I ask face-to-face. It is the most tempting, being hidden, though she assumes it is smut.

I care about Veronica and consider her one of my friends with whom I can be more myself, as we have had a few congruent struggles. Despite this, I don't know her well. This time together, at a table outside Taste Budd's, a white cafe with candy purple trim, underscores this.

Veronica is younger than me but has three children in their teens and an ex-husband, the former of whom live with the latter across the country most of the time. (He is significantly better off financially and, in the custody battle, threw her mental health in her face.) The three children changed her velocity and focus in life. Another Veronica who did not meet this man may have ended up as a Japanese translator and expatriate instead of an underpaid and underappreciated library director. She had options. She loves her children, of course, because how could she not? Every time I’ve encountered them, I have found them charming, if sometimes too energetic for my thirty-something bones.

While I am considering the roads diverged on this late October evening, it becomes so palpable that some Bard kids -- all about the same age but the ringleader looks twelve and the stragglers have long beards -- come in reciting Robert Frost. I am embarrassed by the gods calling out my evident mental triteness.

The litter of the paths they did not take in the lives they did not lead surrounds people my age. I've tried to ignore these, or to put them in the trash where they belong, for my own mental sanctity. I am unable to time travel back and step on those butterflies, or stop myself from stepping so freely. I don't know if Veronica regrets the choices she made. She's made a few that were painful, then as now. One can't have an ex-husband without that.

Inside the cafe, there is a CD party, older women playing guitars and singing music that grates on me. Looking through the window at them bopping, Veronica suggests this is drug-induced. When I think of middle-aged people, I envision people like them. I'm at least on the cusp of being middle-aged, but that doesn't seem right to me. I am not those grey-haired people inside, dancing to obnoxiously folksy music. So, I cannot be middle-aged, whatever my body tells me, whatever looking at attractive peers with gray hair suggests.

How do I look to Veronica? I am dressed as well as I'm inclined to be, with a stretchy dress shirt, jeans, and motorcycle boots alongside a leather jacket -- which is meant for a woman, but fits me well. (I assume that any clothing I wear can't be women's clothing, because I'm not a woman and I own it.) The motorcycle boots are not for fashion. I sprained my ankle the day before, and I've been wearing them all day as a sort of fashionable brace. Having an injury makes me feel enfeebled, which makes me consider my age. I did not sprain my ankle darting away from some danger or an intense exercise. I was walking down the street and hurt my ankle in a stone. It is not a wound of bravery.

I don't know how to act around Veronica outside the buffer of our respective partners. I don't excel at being around people one-on-one, though I can be gregarious with further additions. I need that option of listening and not speaking, even if I am not apt to use it. Last year or the year before, she came over to my apartment to write together, and I did not feel the ease of doing that. I still feel the need to be entertaining to her. There's a friendship echelon that is impossible to reach if I still feel like I'm responsible for the other party's amusement.

We talk about when we were in our twenties and both had young lovers with whom we could not stay. Mine was a lesbian about to graduate from college, which gave me those excuse to mute hard feelings. Hers was an immigrant dishwasher where she worked, who wanted to marry her at eighteen to stay in the country. It was in her court to let him down as easily as she could in the circumstances.

There's still much about Veronica I do not know and I am not privy to know. Despite this, she is one of my better friends, whether she knows it or not. I wondered for a long time why we were not friends in high school. I cannot imagine we would not have gotten on well. I met her at least once, if not a few times then, as she was friends with a girlfriend of mine. Veronica and I did go to separate high schools and so that might give some excuse. While I accepted my mental illness around 2015, she realized it much sooner and was in treatment in high school. Her need was more acute, but what isn't more acute in high school?

I don't have all the pieces to understand Veronica, but those I do snatch up kaleidoscope the picture. I listen, rapt, as she offhandedly mentions the affairs she had in other countries. I don't know that I envy her life back then, but it was different than mine. I've always been a bit staid.

She looks different in the dim light of the cafe windows. I tend to fix in my mind how people looked the first few times I met them. This made things easy with Daniel, since he tended to try to look the same. It didn't require me to update my picture.

Tonight, I think a few times that this is a holy moment, a place where I would want to write that I had been. This is a scene, not merely something I am living. But the moment I realized this, I've broken the experience of it. You can't be aware of the moment and in the moment.

We talked about podcasts because it gives us an easy grounding. We have converging interests such as spookiness and serial murders. It's not the healthiest overlap, but it is what is available to us.

I tell her that I used to be so hungry for companionship. I lost the proximity/existence of three people in my life I valued a few years ago. Now, I don't feel that hunger as much. I would rather spend a smaller amount of quality time with people whom I appreciate than more time with people who afterward make me feel resentful, sick, or upset. I have even fewer friends now and I don't expect that to change. I don't know how it would, short of a radical change in my life, such as moving far away. For the most part, I know the people in the area whom I should know.

In saying goodbye, I tell her that I enjoyed this, and then then add that it was not a phatic statement. It's easy to give these little glib phrases -- it was so nice to see you -- but it was nice to see Veronica. I don't often feel I get to connect with other people. When I am given the opportunity, I always feel better afterward. I don't have the easiest time talking to people in my life. Maybe that's because I use an online journal to purge myself of thoughts instead of their company.

Soon in Xenology: Writing.

last watched: Schitt's Creek
reading: Trying Not to Try