Foggy Outlook

11/05/2022

“What do you believe in?” Isabella asked, taking a sip of her Diet Coke. “Like, with God and, sort of, what happens after?”

It was two o’clock in the morning on what was now a Saturday. We were sitting in the back parking lot of Skyline College, eating In n Out and peering through the windshield at the fog. All we could see beyond 30 feet in front of us was the eerie glow of yellow, incandescent street lights, illuminating only the mist around them. 

I took a deep breath and followed it with a sigh. “I… I don’t feel the need to explain things,“ I said. Isabella was staring blankly out the window, feet up on the seat and knees pulled towards her chest. I spoke slowly. “I feel like if you were to ask me like, uh, ‘What was there before the Big Bang?’ I would just say ‘I don’t know’ and feel fine about that. I wouldn’t really have a problem with it. Like, all the unanswerable questions of life, What is love? What is time? Why are we here?, I don’t really have an issue with not knowing the answer.”

I reached for a fry from the basket sitting on the center console. “And like, with God, I- I get why you would believe in it. It’s comforting to feel like there is someone looking out for you. When… When I feel really alone sometimes, I look for some sort of God too, just to sort of help push things along, but I can’t really ever get myself to believe he’s actually there.” I stared out the windshield, scanning the fog for things I couldn’t see. 

“Huh,” she said. She was staring too, blindly, watching the mist twirl around the lights. “I’ve never heard that one.”

“Really?”

“Nope.”

Isabella put her cup back into its holder and looked up through the open sunroof. “There’s something I gotta do with you sometime…  I’ll get Alex to drive us there and back.”

I turned to look at her. Her glossy eyes reflected the spots of yellow light from outside. “What is it?”

“Go to the beach with your blankets and get all cozy and just…” She brought her thumb and index finger to her mouth and took a breath in.

“Get high?”

She smiled and her body shook with a slight, contained excitement, the kind one might get from a good memory. “Yeah,” she said, softly. “You bring snacks and blankets and just look up at the stars for a while.”

I paused. “What kinds of snacks?”

“Oh,” she looked over at me and smiled, “you gotta get the good stuff. Cheese and crackers, fruits-“

“Ah, charcuterie!” I said, mocking my own pronunciation.

“Yes!” She laughed, “charcuterie!”

We shared a brief moment of joy. “That sounds lovely,” I said. “Really, really lovely.”

… 

I dropped her off at her house at around 2:30 and slowly made my way down the empty, forested highway back to mine. In some places, the fog was so thick I had to slow down to 30 to give my sleepy eyes the time to scan out as far out as they could. I had to work to keep myself awake the whole way back. The highway wasn’t lit, and there was no one else for miles in front or behind me. Getting off and turning down the road, I could feel my eyes trying to close. It was almost 3:00. When I finally did arrive home, I didn’t so much get in bed as fall, face first, onto it. 

I got seven hours of sleep, waking up at noon to the sound of my dad arriving home and slamming seemingly every door in the house. I felt filthy, my mat of hair weighed down by oil and grease, my legs sticking to each other as I walked, but I didn’t care. The moment I opened my eyes, the only thing that was on my mind was Nate.

I had dropped him off at the San Francisco Airport the night before. Isabella was dropping off her sister, and they along with six or seven other students were soon to depart on a flight to Sao Paulo for an exchange trip. They had been planning this for a long time, Nate had applied nine months earlier in February, but still I found myself devastated. The following eight days would be the longest amount of time I had spent without him since we started dating the previous year. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” one of the students asked when I arrived at the meeting point after having parked my car. 

“Hello to you too,” I said, and turned my back on her. 

Nate was wearing a small, black beanie, sitting down next to Isabella’s sister. Isabella was standing behind them when I joined her. I spent the next 10 minutes just staring at him, unable to wrap my head around the idea that we would be a continent apart. He had been out of the country in the previous year, but that was with his friends on a college visit trip, and they were only in Vancouver. Now, he would be with a rag-tag bunch of high schoolers, staying with a family he had never met, in Catholic-majority country not known for being friendly towards meek, trans, gay men.

I told him earlier in the day that if he ever found himself in need of anything, I’d be on the next flight. I told him the same thing when he went to Vancouver, but that was different. That was more feasible. The fact is that if he really, truly needed help, I couldn’t get to him. He was too far away. He joked about it all, like if Bolsonaro supporters started a coup d’état he could make his way down to Uruguay and be safe. But I wasn’t joking, I was scared.

…

After we said goodbye to them all in the terminal, Isabella and I walked back to my car. I was immensely glad to have her there, if only for a distraction. I hadn’t seen her in weeks, but that was fairly typical since she graduated. We’d go a month or so without seeing each other, then get together and spend some inordinate about of time talking, usually over coffee. It was nearing 11, and everywhere that served good coffee was closed, so we settled on a 24 hour IHOP attached to a Travelodge near the airport. 

When we arrived, we found a tattooed man with fake dreadlocks sitting by the front door, staring out at passers by.

“What is he doing here?” Isabella asked once we were seated.

I looked back at him through the window. “Waiting for his dealer.”

The place was surprisingly lively. Most of the tables were blocked off, leaving only a small open section by the front door. The smell of cleaning chemicals emanated from the nearby bathrooms and mixed with the dirtier smell of the customers. Every other table was occupied by groups or couples. No one sat alone.

After perusing the menu for what I do not know, we both ordered water and decaf, along with enough creamer to make the coffee palatable. Normally, I’m a stickler for coffee quality, but there is something oddly appropriate about bad coffee at night. It fits the mood and the need perfectly. 

Cup after cup of the murky brown liquid came and went as we talked. I asked if I could read some of the things in journal to her and get her input, and she agreed. I read about some of the more recent things: the vulgarity of the underclassmen, the people at my work, normal stuff. I think she liked it, but I can never be really sure. No one I ever read to actually feels impartial, so I don’t think they are really being honest with me.

When I finished, Isabella asked me about my college applications. I’d gotten 11 out of the 17 I was doing completed, and she, like everyone else, told me I was insane. 

“I’ve already been admitted to two schools,” I countered. “At least I know I can go somewhere.”

“Okay, but 17? Really?” she asked. “How many of them would you actually go to?”

“I don’t know… Oregon, Davis, UBC… “ I trailed off listing them, counting off on my fingers, “6, maybe?”

“Then why are you applying to 17?”

“Eh, I get bored,” I lied.

“Ha!” She laughed and sat back in her seat. To her the idea of doing college applications out of boredom was ridiculous. I mean, who actually enjoys filling out forms and writing essays about experiencing diversity? Wouldn’t you rather just do nothing?

Truthfully, I did enjoy filling out the forms. It gave me something to focus on and think about. Plus, it was nice to think that I was ensuring an expedient escape from high school. That’s all that college really is, after all: a way out. The essay writing was annoying, but you only really needed to do it once. Then you could just recycle over and over and over again. Although every prompt used different language, they all wanted the same response. How can we use you to prove to the armchair warriors on the internet that we are not, in fact, a shithole, brimming with nothing but the blandest of crackers?

In reality, the only reason I was filling out those applications was to quench my thirst for praise and attention. I wasn’t applying to Harvard and Yale, I was spending all that time sending in applications to lowly state schools and non-selective liberal arts colleges. I was sure I was going to get into almost all of my 14 backup schools, and although I was never going to actually attend them, I wanted the email. The email that said in big, bold letters: Congratulations! 

“What about you?” I asked, trying my best to turn the question back on her. She was smart, and I knew if I didn’t change the subject as soon as I could, my ego-protecting lie would crumble at my feet. “Where are you reapplying?”

“I can’t even talk about all that right now,” she said, pressing her palms to her face. “These last few weeks… do you ever have those days or weeks when you feel like nothing can ever go right? Like, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, everything is just going wrong?”

“And then you can’t actually go to sleep, so you just lie in bed thinking about how everything is shitty?”

“Yes,” she said. “Exactly. It’s- It’s been like that for like, a month or something.”

Thank god, it worked. 

She went on a long time, starting with her stressful debacle with a community college, trying to get records expunged so she wouldn’t have to reapply to college as a transfer student, and moving through the current stage of her longtime struggle with endometriosis, a disease where the type of tissue that normally lines the uterus starts to form elsewhere.

I sat there for an hour, just listening. 

“Sorry, am I trauma dumping on you?” she asked.

“Oh, no, no,“ I said. “Unless you’re dead or doing porn, I’ve heard worse.”

“Thanks, Steven. That’s really comforting.”

These exchanges are sort of what I’ve come to expect when we meet up. When we get together, all the crap from our lives just spills out on the table in front of us, and all we can really do is sit there and laugh at it. It’s always the same things, but every time it feels fresh. Once laid out and sufficiently laughed at, the problems evaporate like a shallow puddle after the sun comes out. They always come back, but for at least the drive home, we get to live without them.

… 

My bed felt unbelievably empty that night. Nate’s plane took off at 1:15 am, and by the time I was in bed, he was flying over Mexico. Over the past several months, we had fallen into a comfortable rhythm. When he was scheduled to stay with his mom, who was appropriately loose with him, he would sleep at my house. When he was with his dad, who was inappropriately not, we would stay with him. We shared a twin bed at my house. He would sleep on the right, his head in front of the pillow and his legs curled through mine. Even with him as far towards the wall as he could go, my shoulder still hung off the side of the bed. Neither of us could ever move, but that was perfectly alright. The one time we had shared a larger bed, a king, we slept exactly as close. On the weekends, I would get up early to make coffee, leaving him behind to get an extra hour of sleep, curled up on his own with his head tucked into the crock of his arm. On weekdays, he would get up first and slowly coax me out of bed with lights and noise, hoping that I would be ready in time for school.

I didn’t really mind when he was at his dad’s. The break was sometimes nice, but by the time he was back at his mom’s, either two or four days later, I was eager for his return. That kind of alone never felt all that bad, because I knew he was only a few miles away, sleeping soundly. This time, however, he wasn’t a few miles away. He was a few hundred, thousand, even, struggling to sleep in a Copa Air economy class seat. Soon, he would arrive for his layover in Panama City, and later he would touch down in Sao Paulo, awaiting a week of adventure in the center of a bustling city in a brand new country, six and a half thousand miles away from me. 

Talking to him on the phone didn’t really help. I thought it would, but sitting in my car outside my work, crying loudly and uglily, painfully reminded me of what I needed to forget. I need him, just as much if not more than I need anyone else in this world. We talked for only 10 or so minutes. I had just got off work, and with the time change now extended an hour by daylight savings, he was getting close to checking out for the day. We were both exhausted, and now sad. His voice through the phone always sounds higher than it does in person, so it always throws me for a loop when I pick up the phone, expecting to hear a nice soft voice and instead receiving a loud, high pitched “Hello?!”. Today, however, his voice was low and hanging, cutting in and out amongst the noise of the miles of undersea cables carrying it to me; long, thrumming. 

The people he is staying with are keeping him well fed, he said when I prodded him about it, and Isabella’s sister is providing appropriate reminders to eat when they’re out. The apparent Brazilian tradition of drinking coins amounts of espresso after every meal isn’t helping him. He tells himself that caffeine doesn’t really affect him, but a sugared ristretto shot after dinner certainly isn’t helping his sleep. While the evening meal isn’t taken quite as late in Brazil as it in, say, Spain, where the primary method of inducing sleep is the food coma, it is still much too late for espresso.

Much of the time was spent in silence, trying to enjoy the calm inherent in the connection, the white noise that meant he was there. It was hard to find peace in it, though. The silence felt existential, as if with its simple presence it asked a set of questions that I was unable, or really unwilling, to answer. How am I going to feel when it finally does end? How much am I going to have to sacrifice to keep our relationship together? To keep myself together if it ends? If we do leave, find each other hundreds of miles away and without the ability to nearer, how am I going to handle my own, warped sense of self? One where I can no longer be so thoroughly attached to another person and so reliant on a consistent home?

When we hung up the phone, it was nearing 10:30 his time. He went straight to bed, revealing later that he spent an hour and a half staring at the ceiling, trying to convince his heart to slow. My car was parked at the edge of the lot, in the shade of a giant evergreen tree. I drove slowly and intently, eyes forward, mind elsewhere. Picking up my mother from the airport that night, I couldn’t help but think about the time I spent just a few days ago delivering him to his group, and imagining the day to come when I would pick him up again. Delivering him to his dad’s, I would rather be staying the night, but I would be okay, just knowing that he was nearby.