Have I told you about the time I reached enlightenment?
I was always a child who “spaced out,” but if you had asked me where I’d been or what I’d been thinking about I wouldn’t always have been able to tell you. I had spacey friends and am drawn to this sort, but my impression was that each of them spaced out because they had a particular kind of life-calling or focus. Usually, these friends of mine were going away into the worlds of their stories. I treasure storytellers; they are my favorite souls, but there were also other manifestations of the type—people who thought about art, shapes, and who imagined figures in 3-D; people who were detangling the politics of the world. My spacings were floating images and fragments of conversations; they didn’t have consistent output. I always felt a bit embarrassed that I was a daydreamer without product.
There were consequences to spacing out. I remember with shame-hued vividness being the only member of the elementary school choir who showed up on concert day without my uniform not because I had forgotten the concert was happening but because I had no recollection of ever being told about it in the first place. I just wasn’t there at the time. This scenario repeated on the day of my first piano recital. There was my father, oddly present in the church building he so rarely entered, in his good shirt, hair slicked back, and I had not even chosen a piece to perform; I hadn’t known the recital was happening. It was like walking through a nightmare. If you wonder why I ask insanely specific questions; why I seem so tension-driven, it’s mostly because I’m willing myself to show up when required.
I didn’t use the negative language of “spacing out” until I was older. If you’d asked me at the time I would have said, “I went away.” Going away had its benefits, though they’re now less sharply imprinted in memory. I could go away and come back with what to say to a friend who was hurting. Sometimes I would go away and imagine I had lived someone else’s life from birth to now, and it would help me to understand their facial expressions and be less frightened by them. I could go away and come back able to articulate some specific truth or lesson. I could come back with a series of images that better explained what was happening. Sometimes I felt pulled into the Away suddenly, with a specific vision that wasn’t for me, and I couldn’t be okay again until I’d delivered the message to its intended recipient. The Away is a place of messages.
The most difficult aspect of being a person who goes Away is that the world won’t let you go. I remember always being slightly outside of time. It helped me to be just a few beats behind the group. Last in the lunch line. Last to leave the room. Those pockets of aloneness I caught let me step in and out of the Away. I’d take anticipatory breaths of air in that place, like a swimmer before a plunge, and then I could survive in the Now for just a bit longer. The Now was persistent. I remember the feelings of particularly gone days in middle school. A bell would ring.
“What are you doing? Aren’t you going to the next class?”
“Oh. Yes. Sorry.”
This would repeat throughout the day and I’d find that I had missed everything, and missing things made me aware of looming consequences, and waiting for the consequences to reveal themselves was exhausting. I think we imagine that spacey kids are being lazy. That they lack some kind of important mental discipline. This was certainly the impression I got from adults. Now, when I see this in children, I try not to interrupt. Maybe what they’re doing in their heads is more valuable. What’s so very very important about this particular hour of Now anyway?
Enlightenment visited one day when I was thirteen. I had skipped eighth grade, so it was my first year of high school, and after being sent on some errand I was making my way back to class the long way, walking around the outsides of buildings, out where they store the air and sun and grass so that kids can’t get at them. A giant cement planter appeared in front of me, and since no one was watching me I jumped atop it to walk along its ledge, as any self-respecting young person does when unobserved. Suddenly, to my left, was a flicker. A kind of undoing of a blur. I turned my head and felt time stop. There, just to my left, I saw the pillars of the Earth align. I could see down a long colonnade of time and space. The architectural perfection and unity of all birth and death. It was beautiful, and I thought, “Oh! I see!” A grateful laugh bubbled up in me—and then I fell sprawling onto the pavement in front of the planter. Enlightenment is like that, I suppose; it walks hand-in-hand with humility and skinned knees. The vision was gone, but its tingles remained in my cells, singing in my DNA as I schlepped myself back to Now.
I forget that moment when I saw through the pillars. Then I see a picture of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, and I remember.
I met my future husband that same year, and one of my favorite things about him is that he, too, goes Away. David goes into a place of laws; he detangles the threads of morality, God, mathematics, patterns, and codes, in a kind of personal language I do not speak, and I love him for it. He can be quiet for an hour and then ask a telling question, and it lets me know where he’s been. “Stephy,” he’ll ask, “What is the telos of a child? Does it remain consistent through adulthood? How does one know if he is righteous? Stephy, what do you think about the nature of humor—how would you define it?”
Adulthood has its many tiny tragedies; little losses that feel like stabs. Lack of play. Lack of friends. Lack of Away is most piercing.
I speak of this other place of mine as if it is entirely good (and perhaps it is), but I would not say it is entirely safe. There is always a danger of going too far. I hover just above the surface of Now like a floating Chagal figure, and in my most emotional and frustrated moments, when my husband and I have been sprawled on the floors of the various places we’ve lived around this earth, I have begged him hysterically to hold me down and not to let me float away. My attachment here feels so fragile, as if I will one day, as a matter of course, drift upward and never come back. I remember times when I left my body. When they slaughtered my childhood cow and I rose out of myself and watched my body keep moving. I remember having to decide if I would go back, and arguing with a detached (and English) version of myself who thought we were jolly well better up where we were.
Tonight the children went to sleep on time, and I fell asleep myself in an overheated unplanned way. It meant that when I awoke, David and I could steal a few moments to talk seriously in the dark—the way we always used to when we were young. I tell him about these Away moments, how I miss them, what they mean, how they are dangerous and good. He tells me I am a person of waking dreams, more than anyone he has met, and that he loves me for it. He tells me that he, too, feels himself getting pulled to another shore on the opposite side to mine, a place of gears and metal. He tells me I keep him from getting lost in this place. “You see?” he says, “We’re tethered to each other—we’ve each got one side of the rope.”
Perfectly Conspicuous 