a Line of proximity
“I just don’t really get it,” my friend said. She went on to tell me about the status of her dissertation, or lack thereof. She had hoped to be further along, but nothing had propelled her forward in the process. She felt that, as time went on, she had learned that she did not have the will to remain in academia. “I’m trying to get into the nitty-gritty, to respond to all of these disparate articles simultaneously, as if I’m actually good enough to do it all within one essay. I’m not. I’ve figured that out by now. I’m not good enough.” She had been attempting to write a sort of aggregate essay tracking global perceptions of abortion through the past thirty or so years, primarily considering the statements of those protesting against the procedure’s legalization. She tried to negotiate with herself how so many people could seemingly be in what she deemed, as many other people at that point did, the “Dark Ages,” choosing (she always chose an operative verb) to maintain some sort of hegemonic this or that that few of the people she actually wrote about would be interested in mulling over with her. “It just infuriates me. I tell my mother all about what I’m doing and she eggs me on, as if she just assumes that what I do is easy!”
I told her that that probably wasn’t what her mother meant.
“Oh, I think it is,” she said. “When I graduated from college and began to assure her that all my talk of grad school over the last two or so years hadn’t just been something to pass the time, she didn’t really believe me, and now it’s been a few years, and I still think she doesn’t believe me. Whenever I chat with her over the phone, she speaks only in resigned yeah’s. I tell her I’m stressed, and she seems to think that telling me how I’m so intelligent and so intellectually above most other people will pacify my anxiety enough to suddenly actually have a dissertation. It makes me sick!” She took a few seconds to breathe, look down at her knees, and recover some sort of malignant dignity that eluded her. She looked up at me and asked how I was.
I told her I was fine.
“You always say that. It’s not very reassuring,” she said.
I told her I was genuinely fine. I felt neutrally about my day and apathetic about the past couple days, but there was nothing to complain about. I wasn’t sure if that were totally true. I told her that maybe all of the research for her work was taking a bit of an emotional toll, that all her writing about anti-abortion political action was probably not something that would lift her spirits. She laughed, which surprised me.
“It’s true. I guess that makes sense. I just, I don’t know, I feel like I’m wasting my time doing all this if it’s not actually something I’m good at. But then, if I’m not actually good at this, I really don’t believe that I’m any good at anything.” She looked down at her knees again for a moment. “You know—never mind,” she said. I asked her what she had been about to say, with both a genuine and performed sense of eagerness. “It’s nothing,” she said. All she was doing was attempting to worm her way into having me plead for her to keep talking without having to put in the work of telling me that that was what she wanted out of our exchange: a listener, not an interlocutor. I told her that I wanted to know what she had pseudo-redacted. “Fine,” she said, letting out a withheld breath so as to complete her charade. “I feel like all of the people reading through the chapters I’ve written thus far are all kind of against me. They’ve all reached this consensus that I’m too discursive, and, not just that, that I’m too obsessed with making my presence known within my writing, that my use of the first person has a memoiristic edge to it that doesn’t befit the content of my work.”
I told her that their commentary, with the caveat that I hadn’t read any of her work thus far, seemed useful, considering the political incorrectness of writing herself into the narratives of people less fortunate than her, women who didn’t have access to safely administered abortions.
“Sure, I guess. But what if I was actually a woman who had had an abortion myself. Would that suddenly make my inclusion of self less solipsistic?” She had decided to speak without the use of the subjunctive, which made me a bit surprised.
I asked her if she had had an abortion.
“Does it matter? Why should I have to disclose that to anyone to validate my writing? A little tidbit about myself does not reshape my work. No one who reads it would know regardless. All they would be privy to is my name.”
I told her that that was true, but that I wasn’t talking about her work in that moment, but that I was asking the question as a friend, as someone who would be there for her either way. I asked her if that were the reason she had been so on edge with her mother.
“Are you kidding? Why can’t I just be angry with my mother and her belligerent lack of interest in what I do?”
I tried to change the subject by asking her why she was sad in the first place. It seemed as if something had happened prior to her mother’s call that had set her off, something with a bit more gravitas than work stress.
“It’s just the dissertation. That’s all. Genuinely. I think I’ve reached the point where I’m
on the verge of giving up on it, and that makes me sick. It just makes me sad.”
I told her I was sorry. My reply felt oddly staged, as if my condolences were routine and impersonal. It felt even stranger considering I had only just averted my attention from her possible abortion, as if there were a bomb under the table that I had seen but could do nothing about but feign ignorance of its existence. I told her that it was okay to have gloomier periods, and she interrupted me.
“What are you going on about? ‘Gloomy?’ Why mince words? I don’t really understand why everyone seems to casually use all of these synonyms for ‘sad’ in whatever context, and they just keep changing them up—my mother does the same thing—and then you’re left with this scattered totality of sadness, but it’s described with all this ridiculous fluff. It’s all so indirect. I’m sad, okay! There’s nothing more to it.”
I told her that she knew I didn’t mean it like that. She had taken my completely inane verbiage and contorted it into some sort of flagellation. I told her that I disagreed with her. Unlike her, I didn’t believe that there was a real way of communicating the emotional reality she was experiencing through language but that, if she would allow people space to work with what they knew, words other than “sad,” particularly when uttered in tandem, could very well be of value to her. Her sudden outburst toward me made me feel unwell.
“You look ill,” she said. “Are you okay?”
I thought to myself in that moment that I would have used the word “unwell,” while she had just revealed that she would use the word “ill.” And I thought to myself in that moment that those two words mean the same thing and yet mean two entirely different things altogether, but I would never be able to articulate what that difference actually was. So I was a failure of sorts. I, in that moment, was a failure in that I had no idea how my own native language worked after all these years. My language remained a perpetual enigma to me even though I had worn it down enough to give it contours that only I could recognize. While I had been thinking to myself about nothing of import, she had been looking at her phone and must’ve received a message, because she suddenly appeared bemused, simultaneously enervated and frightened.
“I was taking a walk around my apartment building a few days ago,” she said, “and I felt strange, like there was something uncanny about it, it being my stroll, not the building, of course.” She went on to describe why she had felt so oddly, but I never felt that she actually went anywhere with what she said. It was as if she had begun to speak to me and proceeded to loop back, sentences returning to her before reaching me, and, as such, I allowed myself to dissipate. I allowed my attention to wander while making eye contact with her. I could not keep track of time.
“Did I already tell you that I saw Maeve and Connor a few days ago?”
I asked her why she would have met them somewhere after all this time.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant that I literally saw them. I was stopped at an intersection, and I looked over, and, out my window, they were there, walking together.” She told me that they did not seem as if they had aged. She did not greet them. She simply ogled from the safety of her car. “It wasn’t necessary to say hello. It’s been so long. What would even be the point?” She looked around the restaurant in such a manner as to make it known to me that she believed that Maeve and Connor could possibly be here among us as we spoke.
I asked her what was on her mind.
“Nothing,” she said. We moved on, decided to actually begin eating, and remained silent for a moment. I listened to the table to my right at which sat a woman who appeared to be in her early twenties and a man in his early forties. She looked youthful, athletically muscular, and said not a word. He looked less so and said more. He was describing to her how he had recently read some company’s 10-K from front to back yet felt as if nothing stuck. He hated it. He hated the way it was all such shoddy writing. But he told her that he felt like all of the financial writing he sifted through had become second nature to him, as if other literary forms ceased to be valid, not because they lacked anything in particular but, rather, because he had developed in such a way as to find them utterly illegible. I could not for the life of me decipher what type of relationship they shared, whether it be romantic, erotic, or familial, a dangerous trifecta of possibilities. They never touched each other, never gave each other a look resembling an amorous gaze, and yet they seemed too intimate to be a father and daughter. Before I could come to any grand conclusions, they departed.
My friend broke the silence and asked, “How’s work going? I remember you telling me it’s been tough recently. Has the workload lightened up?”
I told her how work was going.
“I just think you should be paid more for what you do,” she said.
I told her I disagreed, which made her visibly nonplussed. She went on to tell me how my work was essential and that not that many people could do it as well as me and that I, per usual, was underestimating myself. I told her that that was a tad melodramatic. I was an asset for the company, and that was enough self-aggrandizement for me to internalize. She stiffened at the sound of that, as if my statement had a false ring to it, a frequency that only she could make out.
She leapt toward another subject, asking with a soft chuckle, “Do you remember that guy we met in Sarajevo? The one who thought you were a Bosnian Genocide denier because of your broken attempts at communicating with the little bit of broken Croatian you knew? That was Insane.”
I did not remember any of the episode she described, but I told her I did. I shared in her chuckling.
“I wonder what he must’ve been talking about while all you could do was answer him with yes’s and no’s and those common phrases you learned,” she said. She seemed to blame the Sarajevan for my forgotten inadequacies. It frightened me that I had no recollection of any of
that ever happening. And it frightened me that she would remember that as something to find comic. And it frightened me that I chose to laugh with her rather than say anything. We chatted about the happening.
She fell back on her academic woes. “I feel like I’m better than the other people in my cohort, but the comments I get back seem to say the exact opposite. Am I delusional?” She thought back to moments during undergrad when she would write essays that felt of particularly well-constructed aesthetic stature, but she would later receive the grades for those papers and find that she had seemingly lied to herself unconsciously, that there had been a clear disjunction between her concept of the work she had done and the reception of that work. The internal and external realms rarely, in a sense, functioned in tandem. “I don’t think I’m meant for this.” She began to tear up. I had not brought her recent struggle up again of my own volition. It felt like her catastrophizing was going nowhere, and my comments in regard to her catastrophizing were going nowhere. It felt as if anything I said would have been blocked by plexiglass. I did not wish to waste my breath.
I told her that she would probably be fine, that everyone feels periodically as if they are worthless, but that such feelings are really just that: periodic miseries that would condense and evaporate as time went on. She had become a bit red, red beyond a blush, and she told me thank you for listening to her nonsense, but I knew, based on how she didn’t make eye contact with me and the lilting tone of her voice, that she did not believe what I said. She was stuck in her own head, and her being able to externalize her problems only made them realer, as if putting them into audible speech made them tangible, made them into objects visible to the naked eye. She sighed a tad too briskly to not come across as antagonizing.
I asked her again if everything was all right in the hopes that she would share whether or not she had gotten an abortion and had chosen not to notify me for reasons I did not yet know. She looked at me in such a way as to make her demeanor unknowable. Her eyes appeared accusing, yet her posture was professional, and her hand placement seemed curtly docile.
“Odd,” she said. “Why do you feel the need to ask me that again? I just answered you, didn’t I?” She asked the question with a latent pain protruding from her tone.
I told her I understood what she meant, but that she had effectively dodged my question. She had never given me a simple yes or no. She responded indirectly.
“I’ve been doing so much reading about the various sociological realities of unplanned pregnancies, but what’s so interesting is that I find so few novels seem to want to have anything to do with representations of abortion, as if its territory too sacred or, rather, too volatile to be defamed and oversimplified in the falseness of writing. I’ve come across only a couple names that have really gone into it, one especially, but I forget her name right now, some French write that’s become known for tiny books about herself and her family. It doesn’t matter what her name is. What matters is that absolutely no one seems to want to talk about it, let alone take the time to write about it! She’s the only one I’ve found recently! Isn’t that insane? How can such a common experience be so buried under the surface. And now I feel the need to parse through all of these ridiculous ideas about the emotional turmoil people go through after having an abortion when what is actually the case, based on my research, is that, just like everything else in life, people who get an abortion may actually never experience any regret or remorse or even give their abortion the light of day in their day to day lives while others will never get over it. I’m just sick of it. It annoys me that, because I’m sad, I must’ve gotten an abortion. If I got an abortion, who says I wouldn’t be thriving? Who says I wouldn’t be able to joke about it immediately after? You yourself assume that, if I were to ever get an abortion, I would be brutalized by it. Does that not make you feel infuriated like it does for me? Don’t you see how reductive that is?”
I told her I simply wanted the best for her, and that that very well could be her response, and I would never say otherwise. I just asked a question. She had made me defensive. I knew that anything I said at that point would be used against me in some way. I realized that she did not actually care about my thoughts. In this moment, only I did. So I decided it would only make sense to remain silent and keep my responses short and to the point.
She asked, “Do you really have nothing to say?”
I told her I did not. I told her I felt like I had said what needed to be said.
“Are you even listening to me?” She had become a bit more intense than before, as if the discussion had moved from abstract to concrete reality.
I told her I was obviously listening to her, and that I had responded to everything she said, yet she never answered the original question I had asked. I did not tell her that I felt that, in her mind, I was obligated to be at her beck and call, while she could leave me behind for the sake of a subject less burdensome for her.
“Sure,” she said. She sighed again. She was visibly emotional. Her neck was blotchy. Her eyes had moved to her phone to hide a soft trembling. One of her hands was placed upon her opposite shoulder for support. I looked at her for a few minutes, waiting for her to be willing to talk once again. I did so, but, in the back of my mind, I thought that, no matter how long I waited, the possibility of our communicating whatsoever seemed slim, as I felt it did when we had sat down and began our back and forth. I felt like there was a chasm between us that saw little attempt at its bridging or closing, yet we continued to speak as if we understood one another. We met and spoke in a false context in which nothing among the two of was unshared, as if we were of one mind, while the reality exposed the delusion of such a notion. The thought made me shudder, while she checked her phone, and I said nothing.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, in a manner that seemed to say that all that had happened had not actually happened. “I have to cut this short. Something came up. Can we plan for next week?”
I told her that next week I didn’t have any availability. I could send her a message later that evening about when would be good for me if that were okay.
“That’d be great,” she said. She put on her coat, took out her pocketbook to leave enough money to pay for the two of us, waved, and departed. I sat at the table for a few more minutes, sipping my water intermittently enough that the waiter came over to refill my glass to whom I declined the amenity, and sat for a few more minutes. I didn’t think of anything in particular. Nothing in my mind felt like it was particularly of note. I stood up, made sure to grab my purse, slid my chair under the table, checked my phone for any new messages, saw none had come, and took my leave.