1.
Years after Thomas left me – or didn’t leave exactly as he was already gone, lost from the start – he called me up and I met him late that night in his hotel. He was in his work slacks and a loosened shirt. He was barefoot – and when I realized he meant to seduce me, the years of my loneliness opened like a crevasse in the earth and inside this crevasse was another world into which I would fall if I allowed this to happen. In short, I felt my body turn first to hope, then hopelessness, then stone.

Loneliness – it takes us away from people. They become startling as daylight. There’s no going on with our lives. We take the ax to them; we call the inspector to nail in the red X of the condemned. We become drifters, loiterers – filling up the world’s empty spaces, setting down phones in guest rooms, shared houses, cabins in the hinterlands. Plus: churches – we are in back pews, or discomfited in the ashram, lurking in the monastery.

2.
I have been out. I saw: farmland of corn, orchards of apples, boys in pants and white shirts and suspenders dressing miniature ponies, a tall young Amish mechanic who removed his straw hat to slide underneath my car to make a repair. In his office, where he waved away my offer of payment, his bride smiled in a homemade dress from a photo in a frame on his desk. Other occasions: older Amish farmers wincing at my sight, one passing me nectarines from his aged hands, a deep smile. In winter, a young couple stepped from a red barn in pursuit of each other, over banks of snow, the sky above black and blue with a coming storm, and both oblivious to me.

And at the Byrne Dairy, as I went to work at the mall, watchful Amish girls loitering at the dining booths, their blocky bare white feet and toenails streaked with dirt. The Amish are not baptized until they are adults and in their youth, before choosing either Baptism or to leave the community, enjoy a period of rumspringa – or running around – tasting freedoms of the Western world that they might choose or reject the Amish way of life.

Rumspringa – was not this the only life I had ever known?

So misguided do the Amish believe the knowledge of the world they refuse to study it. They study in their own schools until age fourteen. Any Amish person who enters into higher learning is expelled from the church.

A colleague of mine, who prepares students to sit the state examination for the High School Equivalency Diploma, is herself part of the ‘homeschool’ teaching community, which is code for Christian homeschool. These Christian students may be forced to learn, for the state qualification, science that they do not believe nor wish to learn, but, my colleague has told me with a beatific smile, “we teach them how to deal with that.”

Surety – it takes me back to an educator in the Australian outback, who when I complained, over shrimp cocktails at a meeting at the Commercial Inn – that my American degree was not recognized there, said to me “People have to have their own standards.”

At that moment, as we anticipated our plates of hot beef and pink salmon warming under the kitchen’s heat lamps, the female chef was suddenly taken away in handcuffs by a set of police officers. Apparently, she had several outstanding warrants.

“People forgive the mistakes you make,” the educator continued, “because you are American.”

3.
Across our backyard fence in outback Western Australia, my neighbor hung laundry on her circular clothesline. Her name was Lia and she was thirty six and had the body of a child: she wore hoodies and shorts. Her small face looked as if some God had pressed his palm against it one day, fracturing it, leaving her short blond hair spiky with shock, her bright blue eyes reddened at the rims.

Those pale blue eyes did not match her face, yet when she smiled, her face drew itself up so she appeared almost young again. Each day in her yard, Lia let loose an assault of death metal through a set of jumbo black speakers. She hung a stream of laundry: her husband’s oversized fluorescent orange mining gear, her three children’s clothes indistinguishable from her own. She smoked cigarettes that looked mannish in her hands.

Some days, when the weather was hot, or cooler than usual, or the mail late or the milk turned or a child banished to a room, she stood out in the yard and screamed that she could not deal anymore.

Inside her house, a tin prefab thirty years old, she held back with outstretched arm her almost naked six and seven year old sons; stared a warning at her eight year old daughter in a ragged peach colored dress, and led me through the half-wrecked house.

It took a moment to recognize what she was showing me: on a table in a backroom, a small rough dollhouse fashioned out of ice cream sticks and rocks she had picked up in the desert and polished in a tumbler so they gleamed translucent white and rust and champagne rose. Set out on the grass, this dollhouse shone in the sun: fancy, folly, proof of life.

4.
In the hospital which I think of sometimes as church, one is always enduring, also known as waiting: for consultation with the doctor, for a meal, for the rec building to open. We wait and wait for these things, but also for ourselves and the world to seem bearable again. We wait as I waited for Thomas until my waiting for him created him in absence, so he was always with me.

In the hospital, freedom was represented in code. Level 5 meant a person could leave the hospital in a car, if one had a car. Level 1A mandated rest in one’s room and fifteen minute checks by the medical staff, also known as suicide watch. I was out walking the lush green hospital grounds when I saw a scratch of graffiti at the base of a chestnut tree: 1A 4ever.

To me, 1A 4ever was a rallying cry, and protest. I was not in the hospital because I thought the world a reasonable place. 1A 4ever was a mantra, for those of us who found life on earth impossible, or hated our own thoughts – whose mission was to get out. An adolescent dream. Just yesterday, however, all these years on, the man I am married to suggested that 1A 4ever referred to ‘the eternal.’ As in, once you suicide it’s forever.

One train may hide another, as my professor from college wrote. ¹

You were mine, but you were God’s more.²

For to me, to live is Christ, and too die is gain. But if I live on
in the flesh, this will mean fruit from my labor; yet what I
shall choose I cannot tell. For I am hard-pressed between
the two, having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which
is far better