Condensation on the inside of the stopped bus, I never feel claustrophobic but we’re stalled on the tarmac late at night waiting to get on the plane, and it’s hotter inside than out. Humid. Almost like we’re in the same water. Too much intimacy with strangers. Smells of sweat and a chicken sandwich and this old man’s breath each time he bumps into my backpack. We’re too corporeal, fleshy, and I wish I could just abstract my mind away. 

8,760 miles away my friend writes me a long email. I read it on my phone greedily, trying to escape the bus.   

‘It’s 11 PM—Do you know where your children are? I’ve been awake for roughly 21 hours and am becoming less lucid by the minute. Prime time to drop some sweet sweet verbiage’ 

It took us two hours to get to the airport. Buses like logs in a dysfunctional river and motorcycles like idling fish. Unplanned growth, noncooperative behavior: the local maxima of cooperative efficiency are pitifully low. I was looking out the window hating the people in our way. We were going to miss the flight because of them.

On the delayed, unmissed plane, we’re 3 rows of 3, twisting back in our seats to talk to each other too loudly–interrupting, laughing at, and shushing each other. 222 other people in here. I counted. Later, at 2 am, we’ll deeply frustrate one another as we check into the hotel–the staff is overwhelmed by our arrival, too much noise, and exhausted stumbling. But in the morning at breakfast, we’ll all eat and laugh together. That ancient activity. 

Eight billion choose ten is a number with ninety-two zeros. I’ve wondered what ten-person combination has the least in common as I speculate where we fall in the distribution. In life experiences, we’re all young and go to school together and study similar things, but in personality, we’re a thousand-piece puzzle in five dimensions. 

We intern together and share hotel rooms and even beds on the program trips. We’ve argued about everything even conceivably debatable. We know way too many weird things about each other–about our strange habits and recent digestion, about our opinions on one another. The people far away I don’t argue with. They seem so amicable. But soon positions will flip and I’ll be with them and so far from the ones I’m with now. All the time. Everywhere. Fighting. We nearly evaporated when the feels-like was 116. We met professional skeet shooters at a club after dancing sweat-soaked and thirsty, then walked back to the hotel together at three am when the city seemed silent.

‘But yeah, I guess that’s why I think you’d love Rome. You just happen upon beautiful monuments like that and for a brief couple of minutes, everything is still.‬ Peaceful. Wonderful.‬’ – excerpt from my ex’s response to a long, angsty email

I’m so painfully in love with all of you. And don’t you kind of hate the people you love? You resent things about them because you want them to be this idea you made up. Do we love ideas of identity or the physical people they’re supposed to represent? 

“Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive–because we are so stupid about each other.”

-Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?

Pair those pretty words with sweaty crowds, traffic, arguments, and the fears of rejection, leaving, and death, then you have both this simultaneous attraction and repulsion to other people. The real human magnetism.

I’m so hungry for attention and affection. For connection and understanding. For respect and validation. I’ve met a couple of people in my life who don’t seem that way, and I don’t understand them. What does that independence feel like? I have this like horrified respect for them, just impressed they can exist and a bit jealous of their invulnerability.

But I love to be loved. I do care what people think of me. And I don’t want that earnestness to die. 

I know I’m clingy, immature and both overly sensitive and insensitive. Distant and rude. I’m quite self-centered, and I barely know what that center is, or is supposed to be, or what I want it to be. I orbit these vague, grandiose concepts of self and get sucked into a singularity of my own experiences. Slap me! I’m serious. 

But I really do try, man. I always respond. Always. I reach out. I invite. I initiate. And I get temporarily forgotten or completely ignored. Or maybe you’re all just completely disinterested? Is it apathy? We all have busy lives. Just take five seconds and respond. I know you’re on your phone—It drives me insane. Am I immature for thinking this? Isn’t anyone else lonely? You say it’s self-focused and resentful, and it is, I am. 

But YOU, I’m so glad I met you, even though the whole thing is kind of tragic really. We leave, we forget each other, we die. What’s awful about death is leaving people I think. And I’m sorry I’ve left you but I’m glad we’re not dead. I’m excited to see you again. Don’t die. 

The people who do correspond just to tell me what they’re doing nourish me. Swimming away from the whirlpools of work and entertainment to float me their message in a bottle. I treasure them. At the speed of light, through undersea cable, bits of themselves fly to me. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we are our bodies, and we are the ideas of ourselves. Neither is independent. 

What I’ve been thinking is we’re everything. We’re our gut microbiome and the air in our lungs. The most distant mote of dust light years away pulling at the cells in our bodies, affecting who we are (in a negligible sense, presumably, but in a very physically real sense). We’re our parents and our ancestors and even, in some sense, the continuation of the very first life to arise on the planet. We’re all a part of a system, and there are no Platonic boundaries between components. Individuality is an idea. It’s intuitive. It’s useful. But where do individuals really start and stop: what’s your border? If I take away too much of you, are you still you? How much of your body is enough? What makes you you? 

I’m thinking we’re a part of everything and everything is a part of us, and we’re especially a part of each other. I know if I die, my values, ideas, and memories will live on in you. You know who I am as well as I do. Your voice is deeply familiar in my mind, and you give me advice sometimes through that little voice. You were the impetus for my entire worldview shift, and you’re helping me figure out what I actually believe now. My beliefs, values, and memories are in a significant sense because of yours. -from a happy birthday letter to my best friend 

Can something of our essence be transmitted in words? I’d like to believe so. We exist in each other’s minds as ideas, whatever those are. Love also seems a physical thing, a tangible chemical reaction. Does this potential fact cheapen our experience? I don’t think we have to let it. Physical explanations don’t preclude value. 

We don’t just have bodies. We are bodies. On an Uber moto, your core is engaged, thighs tense, and the skin over your knuckles tight. You can close your eyes in fear, but you’ll still smell, hear, and vibrate. The experience confronts you with your own physical vulnerability. This summer I’m remembering how real my flesh is. When I was a kid everything was tactile and I just wanted sugar and didn’t think abstractly. Now, in school, in winter, I can get to thinking I’m just a thinking machine, and it’s my thinking that matters. I wrote that last article in January, at night inside after weeks of the same. But the sun, physical exhaustion, swimming, dancing, bass that resonates your chest, alcohol, spicy food, and laughing have jerked my head out of some nonexistent metaphysical space and smacked me with atoms. Our bodies bring us together as much as our minds. Maybe it was you. But I’m re-embodied. 

My grandmother with dementia doesn’t need to remember anything to be able to laugh, and making her laugh doesn’t seem any less valuable because she won’t remember it. Something certainly seems spiritual in her iris. I’ve been staring at people’s eyes a lot. Imagining what they see. She makes me wonder about the grandparents of the people on the bus. Don’t you think we would appreciate each other more if we knew each other’s parents’ parents? It’s so weird to spend so much time with the other interns and never know anything about their families. We don’t even really talk about each other’s friends that much. We talk about work and make jokes. Get to know one another as individuals. That’s what we present ourselves to be. But where did we come from? Did we just fall out of coconut trees? They tell me I turned twenty last week, and that I’m reliant on others. I have no idea when I happened. I’m trying to remember that this summer. How much I need people. How I am a body and not an untethered abstract mind. This snippet sums up something about peace in the chaotic dance of people and bodies. That’s what I need I think. Peace in the chaotic dance of people and bodies. Peace in that bus. 

“I’ll be glad to see you. I miss you. When do you get back?  Nice cool morning here. We are weeding the pollinator gardens by the greenhouses. If the weather is dry this evening I’m going to cut my bread wheat patch with an aluminum scythe I’ve borrowed from the farm. I had my biannual cardio checkup at UVA yesterday. Things look good.” 

-My mother’s father  

Photo provided by Freepik.