Twenty-Three Rideshares

I have come undone. Admitting to these vulnerabilities over the years has been therapeutic for me in a closeted way. I’ve found that despite posting these stories in public places, very, very few people actually follow them and an even smaller number read them through to the end. I am, oddly, perfectly fine with this. I would write this even if no one read it. But when someone does read it to the end, I hope that more than it exposing something about me, it reveals to them something about themselves.

I won’t go into the details of this undoing, but I will say that you find out who your friends are when you come undone, and you also discover their own painful powerlessness, their tragedies, their soft, white underbellies. I don’t judge them, either way. Trauma has a way of either binding someone to you or pushing you away, and I have seen people I love do both, because they saw something of themselves in me or because they didn’t want to be reminded of something of themselves in me.

You can read about my struggles with this situation here. While these setbacks have been ongoing my entire life, each time it happens I feel I get closer to my truth. As it continues to reshape itself I’m starting to realize that truth may not be palatable to everyone, but whatever it is, I will find it.

This time I’m trying a drug assisted therapy. It’s not like the medications I described in the linked essay. It’s different and I’m highly suspicious, but I’m also well aware that “nothing left to lose” is an erroneous proverb. Everyone knows that the last thing you have left to lose is, arguably, the most important thing you have.

This therapy doesn’t allow me to drive to or from the clinic. As such, I have taken many Uber rides in the past few weeks. By the end it will be twenty-three rides, and while we’re not at the end yet, I’ve heard enough stories and dished enough advice to make anyone think that a life coaching upcharge on an Uber ride might be a profitable venture. I think when you have nothing but your raw self left, being picked up alone on a ranch on the outskirts of Austin and then being asked by your driver where you’re going in casual conversation is a strange question to consider.

Mostly though, I listen. There was a guy who had moved from Colorado to Texas a few months earlier and was attending flight school to become a commercial pilot. His family raced drag cars and he was enamored of my car racing stories, particularly autocross, which I told him he definitely could do in his Passat. There was a guy who moved to California from Texas to start his own clothing line, but then was interrupted by the pandemic and had to return to Bastrop. In a karmic twist, his fashions took off after a collaboration with a friend’s shop, and he could no longer hand make enough shirts to keep up with demand. Another driver, a stand up comic by night, spent most of his time writing stories and comedic screenplays which he said he was better at because he didn’t feel like he had a lot of stage presence. We talked about flow, and what inspires creative energy, and he said, “I like that you are also a writer.” The driver from Cuba asked me if I spoke Spanish, and I told him, in Spanish, that I did poorly, and we spoke for a while in bad Spanglish about his splendid, heartbreaking homeland. The avid gamer told me that he drove for rideshares full time, and that he liked driving late at night because there was no traffic and it was very quiet. He then said, “I hate traffic, but I guess it could be way worse.” Yes friend, it could definitely be way worse, I comment.

Some of the drivers say nothing to me at all, and play their bachata music or speak in Arabic to their friend on the phone the entire time. Then I’m left with my own thoughts, and the awareness that a hundred million lives are happening at this exact moment, including my own, and if a genie granted me wishes I wouldn’t wish for wealth, but for the ability to demagnify my perspective, to pan out and experience all the lives and hopes and dreams I’m missing.

In something akin to lucid dreaming, I discovered I have some ability to do this during therapy. I could take that scene I’d been replaying in my head for weeks, and instead of seeing it from my point of view, I could be that person who smiled at me, who caressed my shoulder, who told me it was over before it began with an absolutely cool countenance.

In one session I was never able to recreate, I was standing at the edge of the pool and I saw myself, from where he was wading at the shallow end. He spoke to me.

.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.

“You’re so beautiful,” I said.

She posed for a moment by the pool with her hands on her hips and looked skyward, and I laughed.

But the next day with our eyes locked and her agony palpable, I said, “It would never work out, I know it. I can’t be responsible for someone else’s happiness.”

“You’re not responsible for that!” she pleaded.

“But that’s how I feel,” I said.

Over years of toxic relationships, I had come to see this as my role, and whether it was true or not I thought it didn’t matter anymore because I couldn’t shake the feeling. I had responded to yet another insult on my benign decision making seriously. When I returned to the house that morning and she made the accusation that I wasn’t prioritizing our brief time together, I knew that whatever I did, I would be judged yet again, and I didn’t feel like I could be at ease or myself if I entered into another covenant where my efforts simply to live would have a cascading effect on someone else’s emotions. Like all roads lead to Rome, all the love I had output over the years ended in disaster, so why not this one as well? Maybe correlation does indicate causation, maybe fate is real and telling me I’m on the wrong path.

And also, I am angry.

After she went home she called me and said, “Are you punishing me for not loving you all these years?” Her voice was shaking.

I said definitively no, but it’s a knee jerk reaction, my horror at this allegation. But I am angry, or I would never respond like this. She said that she didn’t even know who I was twenty years ago because I didn’t talk to her. I told her she could have looked me up, and the fact that she never tried means she was never interested. I said this to reiterate to myself what I believe I already know, and to rebuff her. She never loved me, never wanted me. Now she’s trying to prove this years later? Why? Because I said no? She says I never asked her out and just moved away. That part is true. I hate that part, and I’ll admit to it, but I’m still angry.

I don’t want to be upset. I want to be at peace. I don’t want to keep trying at things and failing. I just want to let those dreams go. She might be right, and I am sabotaging this, but I also don’t want to be right and get hurt again in a decades old missed affair.

“I just want it to go back to the way it was,” I said.

I just want it to go back to when I thought I knew that she never loved me, to that time I knew I was rejected, to when we were always distant friends, because that’s the life I understood. If I call it fate then I never failed, because I was never meant to succeed. Her suddenly loving me does not fit my narrative. I want to continue the reinvention of my life without this twist.

.·:*¨༺ ༻¨*:·.

This imagery fades into darkness. I see my hand in his in my lap, as we drive to the airport, and I can’t look up, and that was the point of view I remember. And then I sat up in my chair and I was in a dimly lit room with no windows but I could hear loud rain on the roof. I picked up my phone and the light hurt me and I texted my friend, “I think it’s worn off.”

Each time I go, the duration of my ability to see the unseen shortens. I worry that eventually I won’t be able to take this journey anymore, that I’ll be reduced to my limited, prosaic vision. But maybe that’s not what’s happening here. Celeste once told me that everyone has clairvoyant abilities, but most people never figure out how to channel them. I don’t think I’m psychic. But every time I hurt someone my empathic intuition has flowered another bloom, and sore tendrils have wrapped themselves around my amygdala, and for others I cling or I love or I weep. I had hurt him, and other people had hurt him, and his sorrow haunted me. He had sacrificed his quest for love in the belief that he would never be hurt again. But when we cut off our passions to spite our heart, we only steal from ourselves.

Years ago before my second breakdown in Texas, an Uber picked me up at my house. A young woman with pink hair and a big crystal swinging from her rearview mirror turned to face me in the back seat and gushed about the horses she saw on my ranch. She then asked where I was going and I told her I was headed to pick up a rental SUV because my friends from the UK were visiting.

“I’m single and I only own completely impractical vehicles that I can’t drive my friends around in,” I said. When she heard this, she gleamed in a way that reminded me of being in love.

Part way through our ride she noted that her front left wheel was making a strange noise. When we got to the rental car place, I hopped out and we both inspected her wheel. I noted that her fender liner had come loose, and all she needed to do was buy these plastic retainers and pop them into the holes in the liner and it wouldn’t rub anymore. She thanked me profusely and wished me a great time with my visitors.

A little over a month later someone would call the police on me and have me kidnapped to a place that I had to use all my empathic powers to escape from. Whether my going to this place was justified or not was irrelevant; the devastation it caused my psyche at the time was absolute. My compassion had overwhelmed me, and I felt everything too hard, too intensely, too vastly for this limited space. There wasn’t room on this earth for my love or my anguish and I was backed into a corner as grief slowly spread across the floor, staining the white tiles black. Most people don’t understand those of us who feel too much. There’s an unspoken upper threshold to how much you’re allowed to feel, and while no one can pinpoint exactly where it is, they always think they know it when you’ve crossed it. These are the same people who, to avoid crossing it themselves, lock those emotions away as they would lock me up. Because if you deny its existence, it can’t hurt you, can it?

When I walked free from that place thirty-six hours later they had called me an Uber. I was standing in the shelter of the turnaround when a maroon SUV pulled up. I got in.

“Oh hello!” the woman driving said. She peered into her rearview mirror with curiosity. The crystal hanging from it was still swaying.

I mumbled a greeting, but had my head hung low, hoping we could leave as soon as possible.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said. She then grabbed something from her center console and held it out to me. “Look what I got.”

Cupped in her palm was a bag of plastic retainers for a fender liner. In my anxious state, I couldn’t immediately piece together that strange coincidence had brought us together again. Then I said, “Oh!”

“Are you ok?” she asked as looked at the building signage and slowly pulled out of the turnaround.

“Yes,” I said, “yes, I’m going to be ok.”

If you’d like to read my essay about my UK friends’ visit and their observations around human relationships, love, and friendship, it’s here.