Where I End, and You Begin

I’ve always loved cities since I was a child and knew what a city was, and that those strange configurations of high-rises seemingly existed somewhere out there. It was New York City, obviously. In film and TV, the city looked the opposite of everything I was experiencing growing up. The wind, a terror in Bosler, was defeated by a density of glass and steel. The stars, conniving and pernicious, ineffectual and neutered by a sea of sleepless watts. And the “individual” trumped by the packed souls, lips close, breathing the breath of another, all rocking in unison to the rhythm of subway tracks. Even with all the late 80s and 90s newscasts of crack epidemics and warnings of crime, it was, to my eye, utopia. Not for all the reasons previously stated—that was part of it, of course—but it appeared utopia for one specific reason: a body, even packed in that subway car next to a dozen more, had definition in a city.

Somehow, in the least populated state in America, a place where empty, lonely miles often separate you from your closest neighbor, one is never alone. Never defined. Never you, here, and them, over there. I can’t explain it completely, but in defiance of biology, their skin was always touching mine no matter how far away they seemed. And that fleshly friction grew in degrees of heat and pain until the substances softened and melded and converged. That neighbor was inside me. I could not tell them from me; the previous lines muddled until it could be said we never existed apart in the first place. Ten miles away, Wayne was a second pancreas. Jeff from town was in my mouth and I could taste his job, his habits. When a “stranger” entered my periphery and extended her hand, I grabbed it knowing my right grabbed my left. And when I got to school to tell the other kids about my collapsing body, they already knew; my home was their home, my body theirs. The “vast” skylines, towering mountains, the fetishized absence are all illusionary. A magician’s trick. An encompassing mirage.

In the city, there is you. I don’t know you. I’ve never felt the softness of your skin or your pulse in my right ventricle or your bile mixing with mine. I don’t see your reflection when I look for mine in the mirror. You are not in my eyes and I am not in yours. You are, miraculously, a stranger. A true absence. A true vastness of indefinable space that is at once frightening and alluring: “What would it be like to live in that wilderness, surviving against all odds? How I might find myself or something about myself that can only be discovered outside this civilization the same way our ancestor’s so often did. A wild calling in my marrow to live among that wild, just for a little while, knowing myself in that strangeness, knowing that its impossible, but dreaming of it anyways.”