May 2007 RantRhapsody

Friends, acquaintances, co-conspirators, cohorts,

THE BROOKLYN RAIL PRESENTS RANTRHAPSODY #10
MAY 20TH, FREDDY'S BACK ROOM, 7:00PM

We just can't seem to sit still. We go north for one evening of odd
tales of criminality, then turn back and head south again, to Prospect
Heights and the ever-cozy cool of Freddy's Back Room (495 Dean St., at
6th Ave. in Brooklyn). If you haven't seen one of the readings here,
the room alone is worth the trip. Admission is free, the beer is cheep
and the crowd unruly. Please join us for the edifying, amusing,
anecdotal, analytical, political, polemical, and poignant musings of
the following angry and/or euphoric writers:

Andrew Boyd, author, Daily Afflictions, and essayist extraordinaire.
Katherine Sharpe, editor, 400 Words, a
literary-journal-meets-sociology-experiment, 400words.com.
Doug Cordell, Brooklyn Rail contributor, TV Writer, National Public
Radio Essayist
Keith Miller, Artist and Filmmaker.

WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE ALREADY THERE
Andrew Boyd

[The Mekong, Laos, February 19-21, 2005]

It's a funny thing: you come half-way round the globe to experience exotic Otherness, only to find that the Other you're defining yourself against is much closer to home.

"Tourists don't know where they've been," Paul Theroux famously claimed, while "Travelers don't know where they're going." This oft-quoted remark elicits a wry smile from most of us; it immediately hits home. We see the difference; we get it. It describes an ethics of travel that allows us "travelers" (because, of course, I'm a traveler, not a tourist) to feel superior and unique and cool, compared to those sheep-like squares, those "tourists."

We budget backpackers set up "tourist" as the Other. We see them everywhere, and we disdain them. They are the ugly Americans, the deep fried farang. They are the packaged mob, the superficial horde; the clueless ones, the inauthentic ones. We say: that's not us. We're outside of that, or at least trying to get outside of all that. We're roughing it, we're real.

We are not like them, and so: we are real. And we're here for the "unspoiled" Thailand, the "authentic" India, the "real" Laos. But once we're here, we find that this prized "reality" is pretty thin on the ground, because, inevitably, we are tourists too.

Sure, we may not pal around in loud-mouthed groups wearing loud-mouthed shirts or stay in hotels that are like transplanted malls. We may not always look at everything through a camera viewfinder or have the instinctive bad taste to buy an official stamped & signed "These Sneakers Climbed Diamond Head Peak" certificate at the top of Diamond Head Peak. But we all have the same damn packs on, and we all walk around with the same damn book — The Lonely Planet Guide to Whatever Fucking Country You Happen To Be In At The Time — and for the most part we're all going to the same "real" places to have the same "real" experiences. And by the time we get there, everybody's already there, and it isn't so real anymore.

This was more than apparent when, one early morning, in the sleepy border town of Hue Xai in Northern Laos, I got on board a cramped and rickety cargo boat headed down the Mekong river. Me, that is, and 65 of my closest backpacker friends.

The day before I had taken a bus North out of Chiang Mai, through hilly forests, past patches of still smoking slash and burn agriculture. The stewardess (yes, Thai buses have stewardesses) had great legs and served us little plastic cups of Coca Cola™ with ice that you could slip into little rings that hinged down from the seat in front of you. The captain of the turquoise long-boat that ferried us across the Mekong from Nong Khai controlled the rudder with a string run around his big toe. His legs couldn't compare with the bus stewardess, but in the world of big toes, this guy was the Jack Lalane of South East Asia. The Lao customs officials who took our passports on the other side seemed very very communist in green drab army uniforms with little red bars on their shoulders and manners perfected in finishing schools in Siberia.

A small army of backpackers must have trickled across the Mekong in two's and three's that day and secretly hidden themselves away in various guesthouses because the next morning, like clockwork, a strung-out platoon of bright green and yellow and blue and red clumps of Nylon and Gore-tex emerged from doorways and breakfast sandwich shops and processed through the town, all heading to the muddy berth where the boats were tied up.

The "slow boat," as it is called, is a retro-fitted cargo boat, and I’m sure that everyone of us had this romantic notion of being thrown into a raw cargo hold alongside sacks of rice, scampering chickens, soft-spoken Lao families, and a second-mate drunk on cheap Thai whiskey, and slowly plowing downstream on the flat, muddy waters of the Mekong, the Queen of South East Asian rivers. The river was flat and muddy, but that’s about where romance and reality parted company. The boat was a backpacker sardine can, bristling with fresh white faces, bright patches of Ultrex and copies of the Da Vinci Code. Barely a Lao was to be found. Minus the leg-irons, this was the Middle Passage for the Lonely Planet set, industrial-strength backpacker tourism's finest hour.

"I vas ere nine years ago," said Hermann, a red-faced German 30-something squeezed into the seat in front of me. "I vas ze only von, zen. I, unt vun ozzer. But zis—" implicating the rest of us with a toss of his head, "all zis, eez zo not vat eet eez about." All of us, no doubt, had read the same blurb in Lonely Planet Laos (or a similar blurb in Let's Go: Laos, Moon's Travel Guide to Laos or Laos: The Rough Guide), and as our Lao handlers debated the finer points of how-many-backpackers-could-fit-on-12-hard-wood-benches-and-hey-why-not-the-aisles-too, everyone was having some version of Hermann's This is so not what it is about thought. Between the lines, of course, he was making the added point that because he had been here before it had been "discovered," he was much cooler than the rest of us, and that he was the kind of guy who traveled on the edge, always one step ahead of the curve, always hunting down Alex Garland's "next island," that elusive undiscovered place that was somehow still "real." In fact, though, I think it was a bit of bluster on his part to cover for the embarrassment he felt to be caught and seen here amongst all of us. The truth of it was that everyone felt a little embarrassed — and not just for themselves, but about the whole enterprise of adventure backpacking. Embarrassed, and resentful. How had these rough edges gotten so softened up? Who had beaten down this off-beaten path? Was this my beautiful slow boat? How did I get here? The inauthentic Other was no longer those "tourists," but our fellow "travelers," and each of us wished that all the rest of us would go away, so we could go back to *really* being real.

In a way it's similar to how we feel about yuppies or hipsters. Nobody ever self-identifies as a yuppie, ever. Yet there seem to be tons of them. Who are they? They're "them," of course, but actually, they are us. And we hate them/us. We might like having the health food place around the corner, or the new boutique down the street, but our attitude is still "die, yuppie scum!" A more appropriate slogan, however, might be "save the neighborhood, kill yourself!" When I arrived at my first Burning Man a few years back, I wondered, as a contrarian, who am I now, in a city of 25,000 contrarians? In the same way, we disdain tourists and all things "touristy" — and yet who are these tourists if not us? In fact, it might be other backpackers that unnerve us the most because they remind us that we are not as unique as we had supposed, that we are, in fact, far more like "tourists" than we'd like to believe. We have met the enemy and...he too is on a slow boat down the Mekong.

And underneath all of this, there was something else: a creeping sense of dread that the world was no longer what it once was. That there was no elsewhere anymore; that everywhere had become a kind of nowhere anywhere.

Then again, so what? The river was beautiful, the breeze was lovely, the slowness synched up perfectly with all the becalming alpha waves still soothing my psyche after 10 days sitting in the Buddhist monastery, and there were lots of people to talk to, even if none of them were from Laos.

They were from France and Sweden and Canada and Germany and England and Spain and Australia and I did my fair share of talking and flirting and befriending among them, including some practicing of my anemic Spanish and French. Soon enough though, the chatting gave way to long stretches of quiet. The world slowed down a couple notches. Dangling my feet in the water, I watched the river go by: water buffalos grazing along the muddy banks, a scattering of bamboo-framed fishing nets among the rocks, every once in a while a cluster of huts. I had a sense of Time stretching out before us, and all around us. The world, or so it seemed that afternoon, moved in streams and eddies of Time; the world was built of invisible time vectors. As we slipped along the quietly sloshing waters, in some unreal other place, Internet Time was slinging hot light around the world, and New York Time was quick-stepping back from lunch. As we puttered along, an underwear-clad Lao fisherman who woke with the sun, and set his holidays by the fullness of the moon, would look up from his nets and wave us on. We might be moving in some existentially-benighted The-Journey-Is-The-Destination Time, but he was living in Already There Time. Finally, blowing past us every hour or so, furious little cigar-shaped speed boats scudded along in Motorcycle Crash Helmet Time. Throttles growling, they’d materialize out of some Doppler-compressed noise portal, churn up the air, and then dematerialize somewhere around the next bend. Watching them from out of our envelope of quiet — so dorkish in their oversized helmets, so set on getting there — we felt just that little bit like true travelers again. Watching them hold on tight as their bows slammed away at the water somehow gave us back our moral edge, however imaginary it might have been. They were moving too fast; they had chosen the wrong Time world; they didn't "get" Laos. Oh, but we did.

That evening, probably long after the speed boats had reached wherever they had been heading, we put-putted into the tiny fishing hamlet of Pak Beng. A far cry from hyper-urban Tokyo, I thought as I hauled my pack across the teetering walking board and up the town's one dusty road in search of a guesthouse. Again, the town witnessed a procession of brightly colored Nylon as each of the 65 passengers had their packs fished out of the hold or unlashed from the roof and trudged up the road to ferret out a dwindling supply of guesthouse rooms, probably doubling the town's population in the process. Our guesthouse did not have its own bathroom, so at 3am that night I found myself crossing the town's one dirt street to use a shared squat toilet, its spigot and plastic bucket a world away from Tokyo's touch-button Western-style seated-toilets with their multi-directional bidet-like water spurts and built-in virtual-flush audio (designed to mask any unpleasant human sounds). What better illustration of the continent's socio-economic antipodes, and yet Pak Beng's lowly squat toilet, its simple primalness illuminated by candlelight, more than held its own. It had presence, if you can say that about a toilet. Dignity, even. Was this the prized authenticity and "realness" sought by us adventure backpackers? I wasn't sure, but I photographed it, weighing the merits of doing a photo essay of Asian toilets, a project that would end abruptly a month later amidst deadly smells and ugly stares in a public washroom in Bombay.

Early the following morning we returned to the river, boarding a another boat, that was, if anything, slower and more densely packed than the one the day before. I was content to again let the world drift by and catch up on some reading, but for many of us by this second day the novelty had worn off. Folks were ready to lock Dan Brown away in some bone-dusted crypt and arrive already. Some even blasphemed about strapping on motorcycle helmets and doing a quantum switch to another time vector. But no one did, and soon the sloshing waters and soft put-put of the engine enveloped us again.

For long swaths of that second day I was tucked into the pages of The Life of Pi, a novel about an Indian boy castaway in a life boat in the middle of the Pacific. Needless to say, he desperately scavenges anything that floats by. Coincidentally, when water buffalo die along the banks of the Mekong, farmers often push their dead carcasses into the river where they bloat up and float downstream. Not just water buffalo, but other animals, even humans, it seems. A fellow backpacker I would meet a few days later who had just come down this same stretch of river told me she had seen a human corpse in the water, floating by, naked and bloated. Their boat did not stop. We never came across a corpse but we did pass several dead water buffalo that day, and at one point, as I looked up from the book to stretch my neck, I saw a pig carcass floating by. Why are we letting such good meat go to waste? I wondered. Until I remembered: I was not a castaway in the Pacific; I was a backpacker on the Mekong. I was not lost at sea, my life in my own desperate hands, but rather lost in a good book and, other than a sore buttock or two, quite comfortable and safe here on this slow boat with my 65 best backpacker friends, as kilometer after kilometer of muddy water and tree-covered hills and the occasional bloated carcass slid by.

That second afternoon slowly dissolved into evening. Long-angled sunlight bathed the river gold. And, finally, the curved temple roofs of Luang Prabang pulled into view.

Once again we disembarked and hauled our packs off the boat's roof and onto our shoulders, this time dispersing into the gentle lantern-lit streets of Laos' ancient capital. Once again, a multi-colored battalion of Ultrex fanned out in twos and threes, keen to find a cheap room in a guest house recommended by Lonely Planet, and curious to see this beautiful town of ancient temples and French colonial architecture we had traveled so slowly towards for the last two days. Luang Prabang, however, was already full of people who'd read about it in Lonely Planet. In fact, all the guesthouses recommended by Lonely Planet were already full. And so, Lonely Planet in hand, our index fingers place-holding the "Where to Stay" section, we walked from one guesthouse to another, stopping here stopping there, each group of us looking at the same little map on page 234, circling back one upon the other, crossing off guesthouse after guesthouse as we found them filled. Filled, no doubt, by those who, the day before or a few days before that, had, like us, come down the Mekong on a slow backpacker-filled cargo boat looking for Laos and beauty and adventure and solitude. It took me two hours to find a room.

GIRL, LIGHTLY MEDICATED
Katherine Sharpe

I:
It’s 1998 and I’m sitting on the long front porch at Kate Simpson’s house on Cora street in Portland, Oregon. Freshman year is over. The end-of-year parties have stopped and the Pacific Northwest sun, shy at first, has grown hot enough that we can sit here languidly, our feet up on the dusty railing, drinking amaretto sours and fanning ourselves in the golden afternoon. ‘We’ is me, Kate, and Kate’s three glamorous housemates, one our year and two older. They’re brilliant, and picture-perfectly Portland hipster. Lauren and Helen, the older two, rock the vintage-librarian look, thrift-store dresses and old-lady glasses frames. They study serious things like anthropology and linguistics. They know French theory and a dozen tasty ways to prepare seitan. I came to college hoping that women like this existed, and I’m flushed with pleasure to be sharing their porch, like a little sister who’s been indulged to stay up with the cooler older kids.
The hanging out is easy, and talk comes and goes; we wave away flies, wiggle our toes, and smoke. Then the moment comes that has made me remember this scene for almost ten years. Lulled into a feeling of safety by the sunshine and good companionship, I say something about antidepressants. Like how I’m on them. And have been since fall break, when I came back to college sobbing and addled with dread for no clear reason. Zoloft put me back together again and I finished out the year with friends, a boyfriend, good grades, new interests. But I felt strange about my chemically-assisted recovery, as though I harbored a secret, or had gained my happiness by means of a trick, possibly a dirty one. Was I a false pretender to collegiate success, to feeling good? A big fat phony? Maybe even a traitor to myself?
I don’t remember why I made the confession about my Zoloft secret but I can’t forget what happened next. Helen started to nod, slowly. “I take that too,” she said. “I was on Prozac earlier this year,” added Lauren. And on down the line we went; every person on the porch was or had been on antidepressants. Surprised, we all stared for a minute at the street. A couple stray weeds poked through the cracks in its pebbled surface, where the asphalt pushed together and up like volcanic strata.
“This is so weird,” somebody said. I must have known the statistics already, about how some garishly high percentage of college students take psychiatric medicine, but those numbers had never crossed into the reality of my own life. I would not have guessed that these attractive, admirable, flat-out cool older women could have felt the same kind of lacerating alienation that I had earlier the same year. Were we all, actually, sick? In the head? Could that be?
I thrilled to the dawning idea that perhaps whatever was wrong with me was not entirely a private disaster. I’d always thought that my depression, my prone-ness to fall apart, was a dark inheritance from my father, or maybe both my parents; I’d thought, or been raised to think, of our family as uniquely cursed. Only now it seemed maybe we weren’t. The individual had just become social, and I didn’t have to think of myself anymore as a mentally troubled kid, or just that, but as a member of a demographic—white female college students—that was being handed a psychiatric diagnosis and prescribed a pharmaceutical treatment for it at an alarmingly, no, suspiciously pronounced rate.
I’d been swallowing some Foucault along with my Zoloft, and that afternoon on the porch I thought I could almost begin to see the faint, but unmistakable, webs of power and capital and discourse that entrained us all in their subtle grasps. I imagined them as golden threads, twining around our wrists and ankles in the late-afternoon sun. How could we all be taking drugs? What was going on here? This suddenly seemed a story bigger than the question of personal misery, though it certainly involved that. This was the place where the rubber of personal misery met the road of culture and society and history. This was an interesting, freaky place, a Mystery Spot whose secrets I vowed, then and there—on behalf of Helen and Lauren and all the other bright, admirable undergrads sitting on their halcyon porches, taking Prozac and feeling weird about it—to try to understand.

II:
It’s 2007 and I haven’t been feeling good. I know the signs by now, but I’m always surprised by how real it feels. I’m going down. I know it because New York City is changing. I gauge my progress to a Bad Place by the proliferation of sadistic headphone-listeners on the morning subway. You know: the ones who are listening to reggae-tone at tinny top volume in a packed car just to fuck with me. Right: not just to fuck with me. I know. Nevertheless I find myself wanting to rip the earbuds from their ears and scream, “What’s wrong with you? You’re wasting your lives!” But I haven’t got the energy. And a small voice inside whispers that perhaps what I’m truly irritated with is myself. So I move to the other end of the car where, inevitably, another headset or three beat their staticky monotony into a carful of brains. And that’s how the days go, lately: Like an irritable robot I move from work to train to home, box to box to box.
No, things aren’t going that great. These last couple months I perceive with what feels like crystal clarity that my life has been a series of mistakes. They’ve flowed together like the tributaries of a giant river, to form the greatest mistake of all, which is the present. My flaws surpass my ability to understand them. I sit on the train gritting my teeth against the headphones, and I stew about myself. I know that this stewing is self-indulgent, a further mistake. I can’t stop it, though; I can only take note of it, and add it to the roster of flaws, errors, and false starts. Off this homebound, evening-rush-hour train is a street that garbage stretches down the length of. I’ll get off the train and walk the street of garbage to my room, above which lives a neighbor whose television set drones through the floor like a malevolent insect. I hate him. I hate myself. I’d like to leave this place but I perceive that my problems are portable, ingrained; I’d take them with me like a hermit crab who carries her home on her back. I only have about ten thoughts anymore; they repeat in the world’s boringest shuffle in my mind and there is, essentially, no volume control.
And then, a day comes when I do not feel this way. I wake up and instead of the sluggish clanking-on of the fear machine, there’s…a pale wash of green outside the billowing sheer black-and-white curtains that I bought at Urban Outfitters months ago because I liked them. Good choice!, I think. Pretty. The trees outside the window are leafed out. I wonder what kind of trees they are. Maybe my mother would know. Maybe I should ask her. My upstairs neighbor is walking around and his feet still fall heavily on the floor, and it’s still annoying, but not in a makes-me-want-to-die kind of way. More in a makes-me-want-to-look-for-a-top-floor-apartment-someday kind of way.
How do I explain this, feeling OK? It’s sweet, wonderful, and anticlimactic. I talk to a friend on the phone. I say the same things I said the day before: my job has ups and downs, my love life’s…ambiguous. But my voice is bright this time, and it isn’t just an act. The tone of my voice says: things’ll get better! I’m doing fine! There’s so much to be grateful for!
It’s a well-known fact about depression that depressives tend to see their lives, when they’re down, as thoroughly depressing—unmitigated failure from beginning to end. When the depression lifts, so does the monochrome life-assessment. Depressives are all revisionist historians. They know what it is to stretch wildly divergent interpretations around a single framework of facts. It’s a disconcerting feeling, knowing that the life story that seems like a laundry-list of errors one month will scan as not too shabby or even something to feel real proud of the next. We tend to like to think of ourselves as rational beings, our mental states as a set of sensible reactions to external circumstance. Given that, mood swings are humbling, and depressives know it better than anyone else.
One of the ironies of antidepressant medication is that they can make this phenomenon even worse. When you wake up one morning, without having taken anything, and feel better, you can preserve a sense of autonomy by falling back on the unconscious. You can tell yourself and others that you must have worked through it in your sleep, had an epiphany, weathered the storm. You can pretty much maintain that there’s an entity called you and that you somehow deserve credit for having turned things around. Add antidepressants to the picture, and it’s harder to congratulate oneself for figuring things out. They can knock you sideways, place a bold caesura in the middle of your story. Your fatal, well-planned, fully-substantiated beef with life evaporates—remembered but as un-feelable as a toe you stubbed last year—and you may feel relieved, but also a tad humiliated. And you’d invested so much in feeling bad. You had reasons, deeply held beliefs about how terrible the world is. And you took a pill, and they went away. Antidepressants can make you wonder whether your most painstakingly worked-out thoughts are just a scaffold thrown up to lend an appearance of objectivity to something as wispy and senseless as a mood. They can make it hard to believe in the reliable character we like to call the self.
During the Bad Period, I made an appointment and went to a psychiatrist with a little office off Union Square. Her cramped waiting room overflowed with knick-knacks, doilies, and an action figure of Freud brandishing a cigar. She wrote me a prescription for Celexa, but not before considering whether I might not have a wan, penumbral form of bipolar II. “Do you ever get really excited about things?” she asked. This was one of her diagnostic questions. Nevertheless, I liked her.
I haven’t cashed in the prescription for the Celexa yet. I’ve been relieved not to need it, glad to have avoided the knocked-sideways-ness of antidepressants for now. Still, it makes me feel safer—strange, but safer—knowing the prescription is in there, its crabbed handwriting nestled next to the ones and fives in my wallet.

III:
It’s 2007 and I go out to dinner with an old friend from college days. Like me, she now lives in New York City. She has a boyfriend, a cool job, a difficult boss. She’s half a dissertation away from a totally sweet PhD. I look at her across the table and she looks the same as she always has, right down to her body language and her way of dressing. I look again and see that she is also very much like the person we would have wanted, ten years ago, to turn into.
We trade small talk and then she tells me she hasn’t been feeling that great. She’s been trying to get off Effexor, and is finally off it now but she feels bad. She misses her boyfriend, who’s living in Providence. She’s no longer sure that the museum job was such a good idea. Maybe she wants to go back to graduate school full time. She looks at me with big, kindly green eyes that also seem a little bit tired. “The thought of having to get up and go to work every day for the rest of my life,” she says, “is making me feel really worn out.” She can’t figure out whether the bad feelings are a post-medication hangover that will fix itself as her brain learns to compensate, or an indication that she really does need medication after all, or perhaps, again, if they’re just life—which another friend told me less than a month ago, in a similar conversation, “is supposed to hurt.”
She doesn’t want to be on Effexor because she goes through withdrawal every time she misses a dose. But maybe she’ll look for something else, she says, if she goes on feeling this way. I nod, wishing I were able to give her more, or tell her, with authority, what to do.
Nothing’s changed since Portland, I sometimes think, except that I’m not surprised anymore. Antidepressants still fascinate me, but their ubiquity is no longer a shock. I’m not as fiery or indignant as I once was. Medications are a given now, part of the scenery. It hardly even matters anymore whether we’re taking them or not. They’re a possibility, in the air. Something else to consider. Once you’ve been taught, or told, to think of your moods as symptoms, you’ll catch yourself evaluating every feeling state for possible pathological undertones. When we feel, we consider family history and life choices and whether or not the sun is out, but we also think, reflexively now, about biochemistry and the goop in our brains. So I listen. And I tell my friend that I totally know what she means when she says she’s not sure whether what she needs is a different job or a different pill.
Ten years ago, during the Porch Moment, when I vowed to try to figure al this stuff out, what I wanted—in a very eighteen-year-old-kind of way—was a solution and a conclusion. I wanted to know whether we needed drugs; and if so, why. Even more than that, I wanted to build a world in which drugs would be unnecessary. To think my way out of it. Lately I’ve been appreciating that this isn’t possible. There’s nowhere to turn to for answers, because the questions aren’t empirical; they’re ethical and even aesthetic. No matter how many times the pharmaceutical companies run an ad informing you that depression is a disease “just like diabetes,” it never will be. There’s no pricking your arm to tell whether or not you are feeling the way you should. Within the very wide territory encompassing the relatively normal, when it comes to deciding what’s right for you, you’re pretty much on your own.
And so it occurs to me, as I sit, unmedicated but wondering if I should or would like to be, with my friend who is wondering the same, that this is how it’s going to be from now on. We will return to these questions, this conversation, for the rest of our lives. At the same time, the choice of whether or not to take antidepressants has started to seem less troublingly important to me lately. I’ve been starting to think that maybe the antidepressant dilemma is, at bottom, not so different from any of the other dilemmas of life, all rooted in the fact that we’re obliged to make choices, and in so doing, to foreclose on other things. I can’t know whom or where I’d be now if I hadn’t taken Zoloft when I was eighteen. I can’t know what things might happen to me if I started popping Celexa today. But the fact of not being able to have it both ways doesn’t torture me like it once did. I’m simultaneously less worried about not being myself, and less convinced that there’s a self to be, as in a measuring stick that could be consulted, a composite ideal me drawn up from indices of personality and potential projected along an axis of time.
I’m just me, here, now, taking a last sip of water and crumpling my napkin loosely next to the plate. Looking across the table at my old friend with the green eyes, glad to see her, to still know her after so long. The things I’ve ended up saying to her tonight don’t solve her problems or even define them. They’re just the time-worn things we say to someone we care about who isn’t feeling good, using the information at hand: Give it some time, think about what you could change, talk to me. We pay the dinner check and go outside where the post-rain sky is deep blue; the air heavy and damp. We hug goodbye. I’m not sure I’ve been all that helpful to her; I feel a blip of guilt and worry about friend things: Was I preoccupied? Did we connect? Then red lights slice around the corner, through the dusk, and I’m running to catch my bus, edging away as we call over our shoulders “Take care of yourself!” and “Let’s do this again soon!”