I had an affair once. Wait. That's not really true.Someone had an affair with me once.
Or perhaps, at different times, we each had affairs with the other.
He was my best guy friend from high school. He was comfort to me in so many ways, but not once was our timing right. I was in a serious relationship (my college boyfriend) and this other guy--Comfort, I'll call him--was the one I'd see when I went back home. On one of my visits home for Christmas, there was one night that we stayed up til 3 in the morning looking at the stars on the sidewalk in front of his house. I got in so much trouble with my parents; they didn't understand that I was no longer used to living without curfew. Another night I remember sitting on his sofa and realizing I was in love with him. And that I couldn't hold it in anymore. We kissed. And it was something that had been building for years. I went home to Austin and ended things with my college guy, told him what had happened. But I wasn't strong enough to stay away from the person I'd been basically living with and loving for over a year, so I tried to ignore Comfort and got back together with my guy.
Another year passed. One day the phone rang, and I picked it up. Comfort was calling. I heard the warmth in his voice and went cold all over, standing there with my guy just a few feet away. I hung up the phone, saying it wasn't a good time. I broke up with my guy, this time for good, a few days later. Another year passed until I called Comfort. He'd gotten a girl pregnant in that time and now had a baby.
The story goes on and doesn't have a happy ending. Comfort and I ended up only having a handful of days together the summer before I moved to Maine. He moved to the conservative east Texas town his parents had relocated to, dropped out of college, and found God. Suddenly this person I had always respected for making his own path became unrecognizable to me. The last time I spoke with Comfort, he'd moved to Florida for work. He found it quite charming and was excited about his son coming to spend the summer with him and going to Disney World. This was two years ago. I remember thinking, who is this person who could love sunny, awful Florida? For years, the only thing I'd been able to associate with the state was the horrendous documentary "Domestic Violence." His politics had changed and, somehow, even as I listened to him laughing the same laugh I'd known so intensely for so many years, it was clear that he'd lost his openness to the world and spouted so much bile.
So the strange thing is, what I realized the other day is that I'm surrounded by this other version of Comfort, the latest one. The one that seems sunny, that smiles, that preaches love, but that hates and distrusts and is closed. The people around me, the people who were born and raised here and never move away, become Cold Comforts. They teach classes, tell students they'd like to see someone try to come to their house to take their guns, or tell their class, made up of both black and white students, that dreadlocks are gross and unkempt. There is so much code that they don't recognize it as code. They have lived so long in this place surrounded by only those like them, or those they never want to be, that they turn. It's chemical, biological. Nothing and no one is stirring them; there is no oxygenation. I fear this fate for my students--my wonderful, wide-eyed, loving, kind students--that they will stagnate and go rancid. One of them asked me yesterday how I like living in Lake Wales, and I, in my aggravating honesty, told him: Not much, Bailey. I love you guys, all my students, so much, but not the town. I far prefer a city." A couple have asked me lately how long I thought I'd stay, and I try to remain vague. I talk about next year as if it will actually happen the way they envision it. But the worst part is that they recognize all the reasons I might want to go without me ever speaking them. And the worst part is: I'm the one with the ability to leave. |