“Introverts prefer lower-stimulation environments, that’s where they feel they’re most alive. Whereas extroverts really crave stimulation in order to feel at their best…people often equate introversion with being antisocial, and it’s not that at all.”
Susan Cain, author of QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
“Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.”
Jack Kerouac
It’s 1996 at the latest and I’m strapped into my blue linen car seat dangling my feet while my mother, sister, and brother scramble to the car. It’s raining and the drops splash onto the windows and I am three years old and I feel nostalgic. I have memories of those early years during which I wore pink sequin party shoes and big hats with erect sunflowers and watched 101 Dalmatians; there exist some memories born and sustained as surrealist paintings, colorful projections the brain creates to fill gaps – I have integrated many false memories of my childhood into my understanding of those years I was young, but I know that I felt nostalgic the day the rain pattered on the other side of the glass, half an inch from my face.
Two years later and my family has moved to a bigger house in a nicer town where we fight more and spend less time together and have more toys, but the floors creaked then like they still creak now just as the wind cackled and still cackles as it floods through the barren tree branches and all these years living within the insulation of a haunted house. In our relatively new dining room inscribed by deep red wallpaper I dozed in and out of sleep on the needlepoint carpet under the dim light soothed by the voices of my mother and father and their two married friends who were much younger than my mother and father and still soft. “She’s an old soul,” the man with fewer wrinkles and a smoother voice than my father’s said before I fell asleep under the dim lighting.
Listen I tried to find paths through the maze that differentiated me not because of the things I did but the way I thought for a long time. For many rounds of tulip births and tulip deaths and several first days of school and a few graduations and lots of snow days and pillow forts and gossip circles and temper tantrums. And only now if even yet I have begun to accept that these memories in which I sank into thought and lost myself in analyses of the real world with all its whispering floor boards and corridors are not unique to me myself, Adeline. It is not the thoughts themselves, but the memories that have managed to persevere like ancient scriptures. The context whirling around as grains in the desert. The details deteriorated into nature. But in the depths of the chambers buried under the immense pyramids sucked bone dry of all life stuffed into airtight coffins the world’s most powerful men and women rot alongside their most precious belongings. It is not that these empires were grand, though they were – much more so than my one-frame memories. Countless empires pulled bricks into the sky on the backs of bare men and the Pharaohs of these opulent civilizations all swam in riches so it is not the glitz and glamour of supreme power that drops the jaws of diggers but the particular objects that shine next to the rotting bones and breathe into them life and differentiate one pungent, looted, serum soaked elitist from the other. The few memories buried between the deepest layers of my being are noteworthy not because they exist but because they are what I chose to bury. And if diggers found my body, still, in the crevice of a mountain top they could (although it is likely they would not) cut through my layers and unravel the rolls of negatives that outline memories, and the memories worn and simple would be the ones the digger would use to understand who I was, Adeline.
I’m five foot seven and one hundred fifteen pounds, my face is gentle and young and unremarkably average, and I am the trite age of sixteen. I look weak. But I haul the second most weight up and down steep mountain faces with loose rocks scrambling under our feet and I eat less than anyone and I have fewer pairs of socks so the sixty-five pounds I protect on my spine and the sweat and tears and muscle spasms those sixty-five pounds yield account for more than my fare share. I am not weak here in the southern wilderness of Alaska. I am not weak even when I cry.
At the peak of the mountain at four in the morning I sit on jagged shards of rock with my jacket zipped over my mouth and my hat pulled just below my brows. The wind gusts sting my glassy eyes until they water. I can’t feel my fingers. My fingers are blue. The team spouts laughter while refueling and we are all frostbitten and exhausted by the two hour high speed climb and swallowed by the clouds that blocked what we knew would have been a memorable view. My mind is clear. My body is free. Both functioning on necessity and instinct. Where one face meets the other a peak is formed and for all its very long life it divides the ravaging winds like the slash of a sword and it sheds red ancient rocks to their deaths and it’s entirely alone aside from the come and go of the elements. We slide on our backs for thousands of feet like animals on their routine traverse until we reach the base of the mountain, chirping and squealing all the way. The air up there is nicer.
Four thirty in the morning on an earlier day the sun has already popped its head over the horizon and my tent mates are sleeping in the meticulous way that one sleeps on a rock beach. A spider unravels an invisible trapeze upon which it swings back and forth my wide brown eyes swing back and forth back and forth. My heart’s beat shakes the tent and I worry the beast will fall to my doom to its desire. But I don’t shriek or unzip the door and I don’t even breathe as if reliant on a ventilator. I just follow the trapeze artist, floating back and forth.
July 27th, 2010
I’m on the airplane. About to take off. I’m scared. Scared to leave and stop feeling strong. Scared that I’ll forget what it feels like to be happy. Today was a weird day. Yesterday at base camp during our drum circle there was lightning and thunder! That never happens in Alaska! It was fucking great.
I came home after spending twenty-two days in Alaska and for a while I was strong, for a while I felt good. I tanned ran read hiked smoked cooked drank and wrote. I spent some time alone but I never stayed in one place for long and couldn’t sleep through the night and I could feel the energy I had always thought I couldn’t produce, how it bubbled around inside me. I could feel it fizzing it wanted to motor me in the direction of mental and physical stimulation and how we tried we really tried yet still we couldn’t find what we sought in books or boges or beaches. September came and I brought my internal carbonation to school where we spent eight hours a day sitting in rooms with off-white walls and poor air circulation. I bounced my feet under the table and plucked hairs from my forearm and flipped through slides of the orange dome tent and the bushwhacking through thorns and the bugs who ate my flesh; like this I cradled the bubbles so they wouldn’t become bored, flat, dormant but it wasn’t long before all fizzing went quiet on the internal front. I was too tired too weak to rock the cradle any longer; it was easier to simmer them back into my bloodstream, flat. It was easier to cut my losses.
Having felt for the first time in a long time any stimulation, knowing that I could feel attentive and passionate and clear headed, but not here; the realization that something in me had crippled and surrendered to the number two pencils and lined notebook paper and the flashcards and the glossy textbooks that I hated to thumb through, the texture and the squealing of the pages against fingertips… I was ached by the loss.
The raindrops who eased down the window and the spider who made shadows on the tent’s roof and the wind who cracked its whip on my eyes and the man who spoke under the dim light of my living room and the lightning who was fucking great these simple things, the imprints and highlights on the spools of film which line my organs and cushion the layers of me, Adeline – these things are not marketable and they do not solve equations or memorize biological processes and they do not increase French vocabulary or read great American novels for I am not these things, I am not that kind of thinker. And when the digger visits your body he may find these things in you and I hope if he does he finds other things too, but if he doesn’t you have compromised the you who was buckled into a car seat not many years ago just to travel the maze in which the things you do distinguish you rather than the things you are and the things you think. I suffered great loss upon my return when I realized I do not belong here where shiny screens blink countless colors onto my pale complexion to entertain me and the places my mind goes when my brain chemistry is altered are the only places my mind is at peace.
Every morning before school I sit on the cracking black squares and white octagons every morning the hot water drips like a stream of hot wax through every strand of hair and all I can hear is the plop plop plopping of liquid on tile all I can hear are my thoughts. Down the drain they go. Lavender lotions in purple bottles coco creams raspberries washes vanilla sprays the viciously delicious scents of sexuality and civilization they make me appealing they make me clean they strip me of my own product and douse me in extracts dyes particles hand picked and replicated. Listen, you live for thirty days in the same moisture-absorbent shirts and your body’s moisture sinks into the fabrics and into the pores and into the fugitive bed each daybreak for thirty days. You become comfortable with your own smell. Not a reek nor an odor nor a stench. The smell of your chest when your nostrils are buried into your shirt to mask your face from the wind’s slapping belly and the sweet smell of your sleeping bag as you fall asleep idealizing reality and the moment five months later when the fleece you wore every day for thirty days catches the breeze just right, sends the gentle smell to your nostrils and in that very moment if you’re too busy you miss it forever oh but if you happen to feel a tug on your nose hairs a tug on your memory and suddenly your skin feels buried under six layers of sweat you’ve caught it and it reminds you of your smell. Let lavender reek of lavender; I don’t want to smell of lavender.
Around around the porcelain bowl I floundered like I some days still do, around like a flushed golden fish trapped by momentum, when I realized I could not fill my lungs to their capacity, here, where I wander to and fro like the lost souls stuffed between the wooden cracks of my floors and I bend in the wind like a dandelion weed with no strength shedding my fluffed white flower, sustenance and beauty, without question or will or resistance. But only here am I those things, feeble and docile; with great hope the lantern was lit within me when I realized that what is here is bereft of the air needed to fill my lungs and not vice versa, so the digger will find me in the rubble of Earth and ignore my body for it will rest in no grand pyramid, nor under any pile of textbooks and flashcards, nor on the battlefield, but in some far place out there where the wind snaps its whip with the chill of air that is pure.