After an hour had passed, I finally broke the silence in a van full of strangers shuttling to Phoenix from Flagstaff, where I’d been living for the month of February.
“Guys. We never talk anymore… I’m worried about us.”
Somehow, the van became even more quiet despite a lone and forced “heh” from the woman sitting to my right. Now, in addition to not talking, they’d also stopped moving and fidgeting.
I’d laughed to myself at the idea of saying it a few minutes before and decided that even though it would probably go over as awkwardly as it actually did, I would regret not trying it out; the possible payoff was worth the risk. It almost certainly came across as socially tone-deaf, evidence of a discomfort I didn’t actually feel very strongly but was still probably the main reason why the joke didn’t take, and I laughed all the more to myself later, shamelessly reveling in its lameness and stoic reception. It reminded me of my first day as a freshman at Brigham Young University in the dorm lobby where I was no longer a big fish of my high school social scene. A group of fellow freshmen who already seemed to know one another were watching a beauty pageant on the television and lobbing snarky comments among themselves about the host’s unusual dress. An outsider looking for a way in, I offered my own jab at the presenter by likening her dress to a lampshade and was met with silent glances and a brief pause before their conversation and friendship resumed without me. That hurt. The comedic failure on the shuttle, on the other hand, delighted me the more I thought about it. A sign of growth!
All this to say, “Dear Reader, we never talk anymore.”
It’s been a month and a half since my last post and even that was a delayed addition as far as accounting for the travels of my body and soul. Since then, I’ve been all over the Southwest, from West Texas to Mexico to Arizona to Southern California to Mexico again and then back to SoCal where I am currently house-and-pet-sitting for friends in Los Angeles. Over the past couple months of blogging silence, I’ve learned lessons, thought thousands of thoughts, made new friends, reconnected and reconciled with old friends, and well and truly fallen in love with the desert and the edges of civilization it cradles. As far as writing, though, I’ve been stuck in Silver City. Between the people I met there, the bonds made, and an other-worldly final Saturday night in town, giving a worthy account of it seems beyond my ability. I’ve written a few versions of that week, broken it into chapters even, but it’s not quite coming together. So, in the meantime and as a place-holder, the next post will, with a handful of paragraphs eked out to my almost-satisfaction, confidently fall short of conveying the gist of the last day I spent in that vortex of a town.
This is my favorite post. You are now a free man.