Heartache

on seeing and being seen

Six months after breaking up with me, he called and asked me to lunch.

He was my first big love—a snowboarder named Mike who waited tables at Pasta Jay’s on Pearl Street, and who called cocaine “yay,” as if it were a round of applause. I’d been fantasizing about hearing from him, running into him, love-potioning him. At 21, I had no defenses. The night we’d met, at a Moby concert at Red Rocks, before he’d finished asking, “When can I call you?” I’d answered, “As soon as possible, please.”

We lived in Boulder, Colorado. The afternoon of our lunch was one of those perfect-weather days, Flatirons etched on blue. Outside a hippie cafe, where the waitresses wore dreadlocks and tiny nose rings, we ate sandwiches with avocado and sunflower seeds.

I’d recently completed my college thesis, part of which concerned the Law of Closure, the Gestalt idea that our brains finish unfinished images—a circle with a little piece missing, for instance—that without even knowing we’re doing it, we see what we want to see.

I’d been telling friends I “needed closure,” that timeless lie of the heartbroken. In truth, I saw Mike as the circle, myself as the missing piece. To replace nothing, we must first consider it nothing. But isn’t the invisible something? At times, isn’t it everything? I didn’t want him to ignore the empty space; I wanted him to feel it.

“I was hoping to talk to you…” Mike said, activating my pulse. “…because I’d like to go to your bar with my girlfriend and I don’t want it to be awkward.”

Telluride, not Boulder, but I’m thinking about how beautiful Colorado is.

I wonder if invisibility is the primal wound of conspiracy theorists—if they’ve transferred their anguish about the popular crowd to the elusive rich and powerful. What pleasure to pilfer that insider info. What pleasure to broadcast the cool kids’ dark secrets.

I wonder if invisibility is the primal wound of ghost-seers. Aren’t adults who “see” the invisible externalizing their fear of being invisible? A ghost encounter is a comfort: We’re not so invisible after all.

Family photo. My sister is haunted.

Outside that restaurant in Boulder, I felt as though someone vacuumed up my insides. I pushed my plate away, removed my napkin from my lap, gestures that communicated—to whom, I don’t know—that if Mike didn’t want me, I wanted nothing. I rejected the very notion of wanting.

Mike was either self-centered or socially inept—not that the two are mutually exclusive—asking me to lunch, imposing his new and improved love life on me, later bringing her to my place of work. I was a cocktail waitress in a popular bar called Thirty-Two Degrees and Rising, where I was making wads of cash every night serving Coronas to frat boys. I remember Mike and his girlfriend ordered drinks from me and I remember he said, “Thanks, Sweetie.”

I was so young. I guess he was, too.

This was the night I met Mike. I was pretty happy about it?

Recently, my student who suffers from hallucinations explained to me the difference between dreaming and hallucinating: When dreaming, you might suspect non-reality; when hallucinating, you won’t.

Childhood, then, is one long hallucination. But a year or so after my lunch with Mike, I felt my prefrontal cortex develop. I know that the process takes years, and yet: I was 22 and dumb, and then suddenly, I could critically think. I experienced a physical sensation, a tulip unfurling in my skull.

There was a Before and there was an After. When I was a child, sleepovers were not sleepovers, but Victorian-era séances. We didn’t know dead people yet, but dead strangers spoke through the Ouija board. At any moment, Bloody Mary (the ghost, not the brunch cocktail) would bust through the mirror and kill us. We’d chant, Light as a feather, stiff as a board, and one of us, supine in a nightgown, wrists crossed over chest, would levitate.

*

A couple decades later, when I lived in a village on Lake Chapala, through my window I’d hear a whistle from the street that meant I could go outside with my kitchen knives and a man on a bike would sharpen them for me. In Mexico, where nearly half the population lives below poverty, you see this kind of thing—barefoot buskers strumming jaranas on the sidewalks, people selling flowers to drunk customers in bars, people selling dusty rugs out of pickups, people selling sombreros by piling them up on their heads and walking through the streets.

A man from Mexico City told me that all of Mexico is Surrealist. Then I couldn’t stop seeing it, the dreamlike incongruity of things. It confirmed what I’d felt, but had had trouble naming. I’d been describing Mexico as magical. But what’s magical to an observer can be nightmarish for the observed.

Lake Chapala

At 22, I was sad to be afflicted by a prefrontal cortex, sad to learn that I don’t know is the most honest response to a mystery. It’s sad to stop levitating. It’s sad to stop loving with the door flung open. To stop seeing what we want to see.

Love,

Diana

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P.P.S. My story Reality was featured on Selected Shorts!