Gatekeeper, et. al.

I’m not here to talk about the hard stuff. I’m not here to ply your sympathies with a song of redemption (though my redemption song isn’t half-bad if I may say so myself); nor am I here to share with you intimate details from my life’s nadirs, such that ‘if only one person is impacted by my story, it’s all been worth it’, or such that you’re tempted (obligated) to meet my flaws with mercy. No, I’m here to tell you about being healed. Or more aptly, healing.

My dad, mom, and I are driving up to Cape Cod to visit my grandma. Well, Dad is driving up to Cape Cod while Mom and I look out the window and reap the benefit of his uncanny ability to conquer the Woodrow Wilson bridge. He chooses the first podcast – that week’s Ruminant by Jonah Goldberg – in exchange for his troubles.

We greet Grandma at her front door, everyone relishing the joy of reunion after two years of pandemic-induced separation. She’s shorter than me, which I think is new. The August air still smells like spring, and the blue hydrangeas adorning the front yard are in bloom.

Grandma picked up some quahogs from the fish market down the road in preparation for our arrival, and she bakes them while the rest of us settle in – Dad watching the Red Sox on the grainy TV, Mom unpacking her bags and getting her things settled, and me enjoying the rocking chair and the Cape Cod living room smell that somehow manages both musty and magenta.

After the quahogs, we eat vanilla ice cream from coffee mugs on Grandma’s back deck, sitting in lawn chairs and ignoring the way these mosquito bites we’re getting will itch tomorrow. Edit: Mom and I ignore the mosquitoes and their looming, itchy punishment. Dad and Grandma are immune to mosquitoes, apparently.

The week goes by slowly, gloriously. I listen to a romance novel on audiobook from the top story of Grandma’s deck, about a gay couple in a woodsy area of Wyoming who bond over dogs they love and fears they overcome. Grandma tells me how that top deck was my favorite place in the house when I was little, too.

I take morning walks in the neighborhood with my current cadre of favorite songs cycling in my ears, my eyes scanning deep blue horizons and sounds shifting with the force and aim of the breeze. Pierre by Ryn Weaver is a spontaneous and intimate joy, as of yet alien to me:

And then I found me a lover who could play the bass;
He’s kinda quiet but his body ain’t –

her body, my body, whatever. Perhaps my future wrapped in her body, if I ever learn how to be embodied. Human. Monster, by Imagine Dragons is a promise:

I’m only a man with a candle to guide me
I’m taking a stand to escape what’s inside me,

because I don’t know much about my humanity yet. Only my wolves (my monsters); the things inside me that I take my stands against. A shuddering and ongoing discovery; that I know shadows better than the suns that light them, and I’m not sure how to turn it all the right way up.

Mom and I go to Mashpee Commons, where we can choose between a Starbucks and a Panera for our dose of AC and chai-priced Wifi. We’re there to work, of course, because she’s a teacher and I’m a student and contrary to popular belief, summer is sacrosanct for neither.

I’m taking a summer creative writing course. As a religious studies major, this is ‘oh, just to fulfill a core arts requirement’ and perhaps also a series of letters to the butterflies dancing in my stomach when I take time to choreograph words. I need one more poem for my portfolio, so I throw together some haphazard quatrains about a werewolf. To avoid writing about myself.

On our way home, Mom and I are in a Sirius XM Channel 15 Coffeehouse Radio mood. I choose Gatekeeper by Meg Hutchison: an ode to today. Mundane observation and unanswered questions:

How are you feeling? What are your plans for tomorrow?
Will you let me make some? And after, you can do as you will.

Furthermore,

See how the sun shines on the bay, the islands over there
You can make it through today, if you dare

to stand still. To let your sun-squinty eyes become a smile instead of a grimace, to take a picture of the rainbow newly formed at your left arm and trust that this memory won’t turn painful when the people you love finally agree that you take too much without giving enough, to whisper to yourself (yes, out loud!) that you’re loved and have everything you need.

In the car, sharing favorite lyrics and folk guitars with Mom, I dare with conviction; though such certainty was unthinkable just a few months ago. Not because my family didn’t love me, or I’d actually been left alone or unguided – neither are true – but because I didn’t understand why they would stick me out.

At each turn I’ve been a childhood phobia, bedroom-turned-yard-sale, and blowfish teen red-faced and yelling, all because I didn’t know how to turn towards the people I loved and ask, if you have a moment, could we spend a little time together with the energy of life?

It’s easier to nurture my unworthiness, to believe that any sane person would leave such a tangle behind save for some outside (resented) obligation to stay put, than it is to open myself up to joy. To really feeling it, and really losing it. Perhaps my deepest formations are flawed.

I digress; I know I said I wasn’t here to talk about the hard stuff. Except maybe that’s not true, because we can’t heal what’s not broken open in the first place. And no, that isn’t because God gives His hardest battles to his strongest soldiers. The God measuring the strength of your love in units of pain is not a God who loves you.

Yet I cannot share with you the beautiful and life-changing risk of christening joy when her dust is so close you might sneeze, without also sharing the risk of naming joy for the shift she is, and the whole other layer of bonus joy that comes with the thrill of the dare.

On the last night of our trip, we visit Dad’s high school friend and his husband for dinner on the rooftop deck of their Boston brownstone. I didn’t think to pack dinner party clothes, so I’m wearing loose, mustard-colored pants with a white shirt tucked in that I bought at the TJMaxx at Mashpee. I do my makeup (a rarity) while listening to an old favorite: Somewhere in Neverland by All Time Low:

Wendy, we can get away
I promise if you’re with me, say the word and we’ll find a way

on. With time I’ll come to think of this week as my send-off into the adult world. For now I ride the backseat through Boston, on our way to dinner; I turn away from the siren call of writing the things I’ve not yet lived.