Chapter 20

He spent the whole evening at the Big Texan, and, to his amazement finished the entire steak and all of the trimmings in the allotted hour. It was an affirmation of life. He had also met some fellow travelers from California, and they spent the whole night drinking Tequila and swapping stories from the road. There were a lot of laughs and good conversation, and John forgave himself his continuing regression in light of the fact that he had a wonderful time. He was learning how to reconnect to people.

     He took a look around his shabby hotel room, and for a moment could honestly not remember if he was 22 or his current age of 40. Psychologically and emotionally, he was beginning to think he had actually traveled to another time in his life. Looking in the mirror however quickly dispelled him of this idea. He was looking a little rough.

     He found himself getting excited about his trip to the Grand Canyon, and vowed to get on the road and make it as far as he could today. All of the drinking was starting to catch up to him, and he realized he didn’t relish the task of another day driving across the barren dessert. He wanted to spend a day and think about why he had turned so quickly back to alcohol during this period of duress, but today was not that day.

     Getting into his car to start the day, he popped in a Ray Charles Cd to keep him company during the drive. There was a wistful quality about his music that John had always loved, and by the time “Georgia” came on, his mood had improved considerably. He thought about Ray and the life he lived in the dark, and how he had numbed the pain of being in the dark with drugs, alcohol, and sex for most of his life. In an odd way, he could relate. 

      Stopping off in a little coffee shop outside Albuquerque, John found himself drawn to a poster on the wall of Mark Twain, it read, “What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible, thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water--and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden--it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written."

     He was surprised such an appropriately wise bit of information would present itself to him now, and he wondered for a moment if the universe was coming back around to his side. There seemed to be a kind of synchronicity to the way things were unfolding, and he reminded himself to be more cognizant of signs that he was perhaps supposed to be noticing. 

     He spent the next couple of hours thinking about the quote from Twain, and wondered if perhaps he was supposed to be alone in this life. He had spent more time than most in the company of his own head, and for better or for worse it was certainly a devil he was well acquainted with. On the other hand he had experienced a kind of intimacy with his wife that he doubted few people ever really got a chance to share. Sharing his most vulnerable pieces with another human being had given him a kind of confidence he had never really experienced before, and he wondered if perhaps he would ever feel that way again. Right now it didn’t seem likely. 

     He though specifically of a story his wife had once told him about her first bike when she moved to a new town. Her parents had recently been divorced, and she was given the bike as a consolation prize to ease the blow. She had spent the time on her bike trying to escape the life she had inherited, and found herself going further and further each day she had a chance to ride.  She had described it as one of the most vulnerable periods of her life. 

     He found himself thinking about this particular story because it had conveyed a kind of longing that he had felt his whole life, and another human being had shard with him that she felt the same. She had made him feel understood in a way that he had never experienced before, and it made him feel real in a way that felt intensely powerful. As Lao Tzu had said thousands of years before, “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.