Day Zero and Some More To Go

I'm a woman of routine through and through. Compulsive, ritualistic, and entirely wrung dry of a day's worth of principle. Some would argue that, as humans, we're all designed to identify patterns and that when thrown into chaos it's only natural for us to find solace in the reordering of it. And I'd say that it's true, but if we can be honest for a minute, let's. There are a few of us whose dependency on structure got cranked over several times past normal, and we're the obvious spokespeople of consistency but, more loudly than that, we live as adversaries of the things that disrupt it. 

My starting semester at UNT, the routes I walked to first find my classes were the routes I walked the rest of the year. They weren't the quickest ways to get there, but they were the ways that I knew. I have specific and unfond memories of the day that campus construction had blocked off one of my streets. I swallowed hard and glanced at my watch and thought that I could probably miss class just this once, and then I got my wits about me and remembered that there were literally a hundred alternatives. My day felt undoubtedly null and void at that point, but I still announced aloud to anyone who would listen about my inconvenience. And it's to this inconsequential degree which turns a good day right on its head. 

Getting older, I've noticed that even events indirectly having to do with my everyday will throw me into a tailspin. I had a conniption the moment Ryan left school to do hair, and it was only because life would look different for him. Imagine wearing an extra pair of antennae for empathy, detecting another's feelings and exacerbating their suffering because of how much you share in it. Latching onto those that change hardly bothers and saying, "Here, let me do that for you." Leave being bothered to the experts.

The other day, he and I hopped onto our own phone plan. We've been excited to do so, but the night before we switched over, you'd have thought we were forsaking our families and leaving the country. I spoke in jibberish about backing up our wedding photos and text threads that I've had for six years and how my current case definitely won't fit anymore and, most importantly, I wonder if we're really called to be Sprint people. His knee-jerk response was to steady my shaking shoulders and smile through his famous lecture about how many times I've been sure that the world was ending versus how many where I just went on living. Talking through the lopsided ratio of anxious times to real ones. I need somebody like this.

. . .

A lot of you know about my job, because if I'm not there, I'm at the least talking about it. I've worked as a barista for four years at this place that's called upon for coffee but makes room at the inn for those that need it, which means we engage in study and church and business and friendship - and stewarding a space that strangers continue to call home is just as hard as it is rewarding at the end of a day.

You invite them in to eat at your tables and drink from your spout. You realize that people come home to tell stories of Portugal and second dates and their sleepless nights with a newborn and fishing on the Amazon and the oldest son at band camp. You partake in graduations and promotions and engagements, but then you realize that people also come home to bear their cuts and bruises. To sob in your shirt after spreading her kid's ashes. To offer up an empty school yearbook, betting that the names from home might make it less bare. They shuck their shoes and clear their pockets and find relief in staying put for the night. We must first become believable characters in their narratives, willing enough to lend an ear and care. It's only after the fact (and if we're lucky) that we can collect their bags and try again with them the next day.

Three weeks ago, the team and I opened the doors to our second store, and I think I've not been able to sit down and mull it over until forty-eight hours ago. We were so busy dreaming and planning, making and building, designing and decorating - letting the place come to life exactly as we wanted. But then we let people in, and I had to make it run. I was prepared, but I wasn't ready - are you familiar with this feeling? Maybe it's like when you go to take a leveled step down and you've severely misjudged the depth. There's a split second of betrayal knowing you'd braced yourself for the impending transition and somehow still lost your grip. Months of learning to walk and walk boldly toward new responsibility and flailing every which way as it dances back at you.

It felt nihilistic, spending fourteen-hundred days over here, exerting all of your energy another direction and then beginning at day zero over there. A new crop. A different beat. And day zero.

Spotify recommended I listen to this song last week, and I was caught off guard to resonate with it so deeply - not the lyrics or the message, but the way that it explained, or rather, gave rhythm to a season quite hard for me to articulate. It starts with a simple, underlying melody that's strummy and mechanical, giving the listener something familiar to cling to. It speaks plainly at you until the second level comes. And then another one with cymbals, and another on top that whistles, at least three or four deep. There's a moment of harmony and pause and one where they miraculously align, and then it goes on interrupting itself but hearing happily as it's supposed to.

It takes you from comfortable to squirming in your seat, weaving together threads of sounds that mock the trajectory of where we think the strokes should fall. The whole thing's enjoyable and quick enough to see it all the way through, but the layered syncopation points out the same palpitation your heart's been having and you pick at your bloody cuticles until the final note's drawn out. I listened to it over and over again, giving myself permission to feel it freely, rightly and wrongly, simultaneously and compartmentalized. Breaking every rule in the book and figuring out on the fly what to do about it. 

We had been open about a week and one of our regulars was packing up his stuff. He's a middle-aged, married man - soft spoken and discerning. He saw me flying around in a frenzy and stopped to ask how I was doing. I couldn't look him in the eye, because he'd easily see my high-pitched, "Doing good!" and raise me one filthy, "No, really." So I kind of fumbled about and wondered if I should tell him about the hives that covered my chest and back yesterday. Or about how it had been a whole seventy-two hours since I had slept through the night or how my husband and I have been passersby the past two months, hoping to catch each other on the way out. I skipped all of those things but still told him the truth about the living dichotomy that is managing your own store and caring for this town's hopefully home. And he seemed to know. He said that it looked natural, and that in barely knowing me, he could tell that I was overflowing and fulfilled.    

I filed that one back with the others that needed time to marinate, and it wasn't until later that I would revisit those words and know them really to be true. That within the tension, there's still space for cooperation - a good will - that's recognizable and pleasing to the ear. That without either, you lack a tune and without both, you resign to safe life, a mediocre one. I wondered what it might be like to let newness scare the shit out of us and to dance at it anyway. To lose our nerve and wait for the chrous to bring us back. To bite our nails down to the quick and see it all the way through. To reconcile the relationship between calm and commotion.

You and I bear a most striking resemblance to an enduring line of song, and to nullify his presence in what appears disjointed is to inherently disregard his power when it pauses. Go ahead and let it play as it may, and I think we'll all be surprised at the freedom that comes with feeling this one freely.