The Quiet, Creeping Deaths of Stability

Stories and their costs

The Mask - Rozzi Roomian

Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.

Ocean Vuong

I.

I met a girl some time ago - almost two years now though it doesn’t feel like it.

I’d run into her late in the evenings because we lived close by and both had puppies. They particularly liked each other, as if brother and sister, and would play as long as we let them - tongues dangling, coats wet with saliva, taking breaks when forced by exhaustion but never fully stopping.

I’m awkward around people. The first time I interacted with her I’d been carrying empty boxes out to the alley as she was going down my street. I tried not to look at her too directly - I generally expect people don’t want to be bothered and feel like that’s what I tend to do - but I made a small greeting to her dog and remarked as if to myself that I had one just like her. We’d mostly passed each other but she turned, taking an ear pod out.

Her dog liked me and was pulling at the leash while we talked. “They’re just boxes, what is so interesting” she’d said as she continued on her walk, as if to her dog.

That was the second time I’d seen her. The first time I was coming back from the airport and caught her out of the corner of my eye as I was getting out of the car - in almost the same spot now that I think of it, asking a teenager to roll his skateboard to show her dog it wasn’t scary. There was something odd about it, as if I couldn’t have missed her. I’d been planning to move and had actually come back in town early from vacation to tour an apartment I’d applied for on the other side of town. But when it came time to sign the contract a few weeks later I would have an abrupt and hard to explain change of heart.

I was having lunch the day after I first saw her with a friend and told him about this mysterious girl. I didn’t know her name yet but was resolved to learn it. He could see how interested I was and looked at me with an expression between concern and laughter, gently but thoroughly cautioning me not to be a creep.

I’d texted him when she was right outside my building - I live on the ground floor with my desk looking out onto the sidewalk over some shrubs and trees - talking with my neighbor for almost 30 minutes. He was a young single guy as well, and I was happy that he seemed to be making himself laugh more than her. I wouldn’t let myself fully eaves drop but learned much about her in the fragments that came through my window: she avoided swearing (“shut the front door”), had lived in Virginia, and could indefinitely carry conversations with anyone, it seemed, and find a way to bring a kind of magic to them. Girl next door comes to mind, but I don’t even want to use a concept like that, it feels too reductive in light of what she was really like.

It’s hard to remember exactly but I think it was a few days later that I had my first longer conversation with her. She’d been on my mind since that first encounter, and every time I left my apartment I hoped to run into her. I’d often see her passing by as I worked at my desk. You could feel her emotions from far away, and most days she was familiar to me. Other times I saw something i hadn’t seen before. She felt darker, charging through life almost in defiance; resentful to take up the space that she did, not wanting to be seen at all.

That first night we really talked I’d known intuitively I was going to see her before I even left my apartment. It was often like that. She hardly ever walks on my street anymore, but when she does, I see her. And I don’t go anywhere near her anymore, but in the rare times I meet a friend at a restaurant or coffee shop near where we live, she seems to see me.

That first night we talked I was nervous - I may have even been shaking a little bit, a subtle tremor in my hands and voice. With another person I think it would have ruined the interaction - the awkward, halting conversations I was used to having - but she wasn’t put off by at it all. She was curious about me, as she seemed to be about almost everyone. I could tell she was very sensitive. Good natured; even a little rambunctious. She knew how to meet me in conversation in a way that I’d never felt before.

We talked for about thirty minutes. I’d mentioned that I often could hear her out of my window - was <silly nickname> her dog’s full name? She could barely stop laughing to explain. I’m not sure I could convey to you what it was like to make her laugh. Sympathetic joy, maybe, in a way I’d never really experienced it except maybe when interacting with young children. Happiness for her happiness that had nothing to do with me and counted more than mine ever did.

She’d mentioned to my great and suppressed delight that she’d broken up with her boyfriend eight months prior. She also said she’d had to move across town to avoid him - her family was afraid he might do something. I thought about protecting her.

As our conversation ended and she walked away, she joked she’d try to keep it down when she walked by. I told her no, I love it. I speak so quietly that people can almost never hear me. She always could. She was slow to leave, lingering, almost glancing back a few times.

Over the next few weeks I ran into her more. We would talk for hours outside late at night. Nobody was ever around, the air gentle and still as if it didn’t want to interrupt us. It felt like time had been paused everywhere outside of our little corner of the world.

I started telling more friends about her.

After a few of these long conversations I asked her her name. I’d felt lots of urgency about her between our conversations - I’d already seen some other guys pursuing her, and I knew there must be more - but whenever I was around her it all dissipated. It just felt so natural and easy to talk to her. Anything else just seemed like interrupting and distracting from something much more important.

When I finally gave her my number - I didn’t have my phone to take hers - we’d been talking for about an hour. There had been a few weeks since our last conversation in which I hadn’t seen her at all, and I felt like this was my chance or I might miss it.

I wasn’t nervous, and it didn’t feel forced. It was the most natural thing in the world. She was funny about it - almost businesslike, matter of fact, a concealed excitement that you could barely make out in her tone and slightly too quick movements. I wonder if she’d been waiting for me to ask.

There wasn’t even a moment of awkwardness afterwards. We just kept talking for another two hours. We talked about family dynamics. I said that it was good she was figuring all of it out early and that I hadn’t started until a year or two before. She didn’t like the framing: I’m not that much younger than you. At one point she’d made an excuse to touch my neck. Did she feel the same way I did? An older couple eventually walked by and it was like they were infected by the magic too, and we all talked for a few minutes. I felt calmer with her than I’d ever felt in my life.

When we left to go back to our apartments it was around 1am. I texted her right when I got back - I can’t stand to look at those messages again but I remember almost every detail. We had a few inside jokes; she was so funny. She’d told me she felt like garbage in the mornings - residual effects from an environmental poisoning years before - and I offered to make her a juice that helped me with similar symptoms. We made a plan to meet up in the morning. I think that night we started exchanging music as well. I loved her taste, maybe more than my own. Eventually we went to sleep.

Things felt off from the start when we met up that morning. She seemed uncomfortable. Even in her texts it’d felt like she was overriding something, forcing in some way. It’s all clearer in retrospect.

The conversation was a bit stilted. I remember she’d said that she wasn’t online much and I tried to make a small joke about being terminally online but it didn’t land. She’d almost cut me off as I said it - that’s okay, I’m a quick learner.

I was absent-mindedly playing with her dog as I listened to her but there wasn’t quite the same easiness between us that there had been. She asked me what I was up to the rest of the day and I mentioned I’d been working on a piece that I was going to release soon, maybe that evening. She asked what it was about and I started to talk about it - identity, status, how the internet’s accelerated all of it - but she interjected, uncharacteristically, with an odd tone of something like anger that didn’t at all match the content of what she was saying. I wasn’t looking at her but my eyes widened, and there was a reflexive pull to smile in a kind of questioning surprise. I don’t think I meant it in an alienating way, separating from and reducing her, but was there a part of me that did? Some subtle shame I was putting on her for deviating from my story about us?

When I returned my eyes to hers I’d suppressed all but the last trace of that smile - some misplaced reflex of politeness - but I hope she could see the lack of judgment in my eyes, and when I replied there was something like friendly concern in my voice. But I just continued the conversation. Why hadn’t I just said something? Hey, do you feel okay? I actually knew exactly what it was like to accidentally and involuntarily communicate things I didn’t mean to and which didn’t at all reflect how I felt, and had suffered a lot for it. I knew what it was like not to feel like myself in ways nobody else could ever understand. Why wasn’t that my first thought? Why had I suggested for her to come out even though she said she felt awful in the mornings?

She must have thought I was judging her for what she said - she was as sensitive to these things as I was and there was no way she’d missed it. It had nothing to do with why she stopped talking to me, but I would turn that incident over in my mind again and again in the months to come.

She texted me a few hours later to say that she liked the juice. We started talking again about music and art, sending songs back and forth. It was easy again. She asked me if I liked Wes Anderson (I do). She told me about Moondog. It wasn’t quite true anymore and I’m not sure why I said it, but I told her I tend to focus on the melodies in songs and don’t always register the lyrics. It had annoyed her - lightly but with tiniest hint of bite - and she told me I reallllyyyy had to work on that (I agreed) and sent me some songs with lyrics that were rather hard to miss. She seemed to feel things so deeply and couldn’t help just blurt it out. Somehow she’d been able to hold onto that spirit you really only see in children, a curiosity and exuberance and fire that the world buries in most of us. Everything felt so different when she was in my life.

We texted for hours every day. She always responded within a minute or two. I did too. 

When I asked her the next day if she’d want to get dinner or coffee sometime she said yes, I absolutely would :-). She’d hesitated, typing and then stopping before starting again. Maybe she was in the middle of something and was just caught a bit off guard, but I swear I could feel her emotions through the phone. It’d felt again like she was overriding something, being what she thought I needed or what she needed to be.

It may seem odd that we talked so much but didn’t see each other in person. The night I’d asked her out she’d mentioned to me that there was a theatre playing a double feature of some of her favorite movies. I’d asked her if she had time and we almost made a plan to go but realized you had to show proof of vaccination at the door and I told her I hadn’t been. She tiptoed, working hard not to come off as judgmental and instead curious in asking why. There had been an initial moment of tension, conditioned fear of offending the other, but it dissipated instantly as we talked. I never really felt worried sharing anything with her. There was this odd sense that we already knew each other pretty well on some level, a strange and familiar energy between us since the moment I first saw her.

As I told her, she understood and even agreed to an extent, saying she was just relieved I didn’t think there were microchips or something. I told her of course not, that’s ridiculous - it’s the mark of the beast. We talked about other conspiracy theories she was going to have to convince me out of (there were many) and planned to watch the movies another time. She told me I was very sweet. I agreed.

That had been on Sunday. Over the next few days she was busier with school but we’d talk late into the night about art and music and life and meaning. I’d sent her the draft of the first piece I had been working on and would release that Wednesday - she loved it and asked me to send her any updates. She sent me an article about Martin Buber’s I and Thou that my piece had reminded her of. I loved it. She seemed to care, really care, about these things in the same way I did - really seeing others, in their own terms, wholly and fairly and without self getting in the way. She was kind in a way that wasn’t merely conditioned or some abstract intellectual commitment and belief about herself; but a real, feeling, fundamental quality that was just part of her. She was amazing in every other way but it was this good naturedness that would come through in some moments that made me understand why I felt the way I did.

She’d said unprompted at one point that Wednesdays were better for dinner because she didn’t have class that day but she could do coffee other days. I don’t know why I didn’t schedule something right then. It just didn’t feel quite right - everything else had felt as if the universe were conspiring to bring us together, but that energy just wasn’t there anymore. Looking back I wonder if it was that we weren’t meant to connect more than we had - maybe it was better that way. Easier.

That Wednesday I’d prayed for it to go well, for things to go for the best for both of us; later that night it fell apart. It should have been obvious to me why - I didn’t have my life together and was nowhere close to figuring that out - but somehow I’d be unclear about that for months. I think it was because she’d still talked to me, effusively even, after I’d volunteered it. I thought if that had been it, she would have just cut off from me the minute she figured it out. I’d known in the very beginning before we talked that that would be important to her - how couldn’t it be? But it had just been going so well that I somehow lost sight of it.

She stopped replying as quickly. I didn’t say anything, trying to assume the best. Maybe she’d gotten really busy. It would have been impossible to keep up the way we had been and maybe she was just trying to catch up on things she’d fallen behind on. Maybe she was avoidantly attached and needed to cool off for a bit. I tried to let her have some space.

After a few days of not really talking she made a point to run into me. It felt off from the start but I didn’t understand why. I tried to talk as we had before but she was reluctant to laugh. Tense; angry. I could feel her emotions from a block away.

She avoided looking at me directly. In retrospect I think she had thought I was intentionally deceiving her. She’d come prepared to catch me in a lie I think, approaching with a guarded and cagey friendliness that had an edge underneath. She asked me a few somewhat pointed but still indirect questions, trying not to let on that she was upset. But I answered innocently each time. Eventually she looked me in the eyes, and she could see it. I didn’t know. She stared a bit too long, her mind somewhere else, hurt welling up inside her.

I still didn’t get it. As we talked she abruptly sat down on the grass, and started talking about her relatives, how they only talked to her to ask her if she was bringing the edibles for this wedding and didn’t seem interested in her at all. I didn’t know why she was telling me at the time but I get it now. “Why do people always just want something from me?” She was close to tears.

That was the last time we talked in person. I sent her a text the next day with no reply, and waited a full day to say that it seemed like something had changed, and that whatever it was it’s okay and that I was there to talk if she wanted to. She responded the next day to say yeah sorry have been busy with everything. And honestly yeah I’d rather just be friends.

I really tried to figure out whether I could genuinely just be friends with her. I said okay and we didn’t talk for a few weeks. I eventually sent her another message to say that I just wanted to be clearer, I would want to be friends and that I was sorry that I really seemed to have misread some signals from her. When she avoided my invitation to talk about it again in her reply, I just couldn’t do it - I think you’re a great person but to be honest if we can’t talk about it I’m not sure I could do this. I just couldn’t stand this feeling of being held at arms length and like we would never actually be close again. I told her not to feel like she needed to reply; she didn’t.

Over the next eight months I thought about her constantly. Going over every detail of it, again and again. I couldn’t stop. My whole world turned on whether it seemed like she might talk to me again.

I’m grateful she didn’t.

II. Surrender

It only got better after about a year when I began to realize it would never have worked - for a hundred other reasons beyond the ones that were obvious to her.

I’d sent her a voice memo about five months after we stopped talking saying that we didn’t have to talk about it and that I understood why she didn’t want to, that she didn’t have to decide any time soon but I just wanted to talk to her again. It had been so hard not to text her.

I crossed paths with her maybe a week later, obliquely, walking my dog as she was entering a coffee shop. We weren’t going to be within 15 feet of each other, but the energy was intense. I avoided looking at her but don’t know why I didn’t just stop and go the other way, I should have. She was halfway through the door when she turned around, overwhelmed, starting back up the street away from me. She’d stopped with her back to me, anger or pain or both radiating off of her. I’d looked over at her briefly as I kept walking. I wish I hadn’t. It felt like it was crossing a boundary. She couldn’t have seen me, but I know she could feel it, just like I could. I never go on that street anymore.

Later that night it felt like she might come to see me. It was suddenly in the air, this storm of insistent, overpowering energy. Do I really want to see her? Could I really just be friends with her? I genuinely thought so, maybe, but I was being interrogated. I was pacing around my apartment in exasperation. Eventually I put my hands up as if in defense - okay, okay I don’t want to see her!

I put my phone on airplane mode - I think I felt like a message was coming and couldn’t stand to see it - and left to walk Raccoon.

She didn’t come. I got back and went straight to bed.

When I checked in the morning she’d texted me about 10 minutes after I’d turned my phone off. It was so nice to see her name on my phone again even though I knew what the message would say.

hi jamie

i just couldn’t after everything. it’d just be too much for me. no hard feelings

I wondered if it had been her energy that I’d felt that night or something else intervening. But on some level even then I knew it wouldn’t have been good for her to come, for either of us.

I run into this other guy, another of her suitors, sometimes on walks. The first time I’d talked to him it’d been in the early stages of my knowing her and I had no idea he liked her too. I hadn’t run into her for a while and was obliquely asking him if he’d seen her - I’d been so worried that she’d moved away. Later on it was him obliquely asking me about her. He seemed even more obsessed. I was still torn apart by it all but I could almost wish him luck.

It wasn’t until a few months later when I ran into them together that I realized he was married to another woman and had a baby. His wife liked my dog’s collar and gently nagged him about getting one like it for theirs.

I almost couldn’t believe it. But she seemed to have this effect on everyone. My neighbor had been obviously stuck on the fact that she’d chosen me over him, making unprompted comments to me bragging about the beautiful women he’d been hooking up with. I thought about her ex and how she’d had to move. He might do something.

She was beautiful, charming, funny, soulful, earnest - amazing in every way - but that was only half of why.

She’d told me early on one night as we talked that she’d only recently learned in therapy, you don’t have to go along with what everyone else wants all the time. I could have seen it, the way she was still doing it with me, overriding everything she was feeling to be what she thought I needed.

It was why she could strike up conversations with such apparent ease, even with my obtuse neighbor. I don’t think she understood it, this strategy she’d developed a long time ago and that had taken root beneath her awareness. She was so good at it, sensing what others wanted and needed even before they did, seamlessly contorting and erasing all of her needs to become it. A perfect rose-colored mirror.

It was why she was so unhappy. Some days it was too much, and even from far away you could feel heaviness and pain weighing on every part of her.

There’s this thing that often passes itself off as love but is more a kind of egoic fulfillment and completion. That’s what drove these guys so insane - she so convincingly promised it to them that once they experienced it, there was nothing else that could fill the hole they now knew existed and couldn’t unsee when she was gone. The only other way out was to see through that whole structure, to see through and let go of all of the comforting and load bearing stories you’ve built up around yourself over your life and which she was so effortlessly playing into and completing. It was a kind of ego death, and people run from it with more terror than they have of actual physical death.

It was much easier to chase her. And so an ex-boyfriend could be moved to harass and stalk and perhaps even threaten her rather than let go; or a married man to betray his wife and newborn.

She didn’t understand the power she had, and I don’t think she wanted it. She seemed tortured by it. She just wanted to connect with people.

I don’t think ego fulfillment was the whole thing for me. I think part of why she liked me was that I didn’t demand this role of her the way others did, that I was trying to see her for who she really was. There was just more between us - I think we both could feel that this was something else, or at least had the potential to be.

But I think if we’d been together I would have ultimately taken the bait. I can see some signs of it even in the way we were interacting at the time. My stories were too strong, her offer to complete them too compelling, for me to have recognized the illusory version of love and insisted we do something else.

This was the only way I was going to see it.

III. The rare quality of self-possession

We need stories. They’re how we orient ourselves in the world. Stories about how the world works, who we are, the things we think we want. They create meaning and stability; bring order to chaos.

But they grow with time, interweaving and building one on top another. And eventually, gradually, preserving that structure starts to feel more important than the reality it represents. And so we lose touch with it.

Love isn’t about completing and continuing your stories. It’s better than that. Real love is about obliterating them, allowing for something deeper and truer to grow in their ashes.

And that’s how it’s been with most of my pain and disappointment over the years, romantic and otherwise. It’s never clear at the time but when I get enough distance and look back it’s hard not to see God’s hand, shaping and directing me through that process, compassionately breaking my stories apart to let more of the world in.