It Was Only a Boat
Yesterday, a man tried to jump off a highway overpass and it put the entire city into gridlock for two hours. I was at home, watching grainy footage on a weathercam like a big macabre creep. His body crawled back and forth on the side of the overpass, clinging to a fence. A team of people carried a big yellow mattress beneath him, following his movements to catch him if he fell. The 101 was empty and hundreds of cars sat in limbo. At that height, the chance of survival would be high. Is that why he chose it? I watched the footage numbly, feeling as if I should be feeling more.
I cry a lot. A lot. Usually alone, sometimes in public, often in movie theatres. I cry at sitcoms. I cry when I laugh too hard. I cry every time Malala is on a talk show. Crying alone at the theatre is the most satisfying. It feels taboo, first, to see a play by yourself. The theatre is for people in pairs. And to cry at live theatre, at a moment that’s unrepeatable, is a special kind of thrill. Speaking of unrepeatable, I’m not sure I’m willing to admit that I’ve cried at an improv show but, well, it might have happened once or twice.
In college, a friend brought his parents’ boat to town for the weekend, and we took it out on the big lake near campus. Seven of us, on a boat that seats seven. My boyfriend sounded reluctant about it, but I convinced him to go — it’s a boat! It was windy that day, we quickly noticed. There weren’t a lot of other boats out. The waves were big. Being on the water seemed like a bad idea, but I had a habit of being too fearful. I said nothing. We went tubing (they went tubing — too scary for me), and every time we turned a corner, a giant wave would wash into the boat. The bottom was filling up and we were all still laughing about it.
I grew up a huge worrier, always wearing my heart on my sleeve about something or other, obsessing over remote doomsday scenarios, or caring too much about what my friends were doing. I thought, if I could just stop doing that, I’d have power. When I learned about body language, I figured out how to eliminate most of my tells. Loud, startling noise? Just don’t react: don’t jump, keep your breathing regulated. Feeling insecure about a friendship or relationship? No problem: say nothing, wait it out. I was pretty good at it, but I was going insane.
We were far across the lake and drifting, when the weather seemed to take a turn for the worse. The boat owner said, “we should hurry up and get back to campus,” and as he went to turn on the engine, it made a sputtering sound: it was submerged. The water level rose quickly and we realized we were going to sink. No one was wearing life vests. My boyfriend announced for the first time, “I can’t swim,” and still insisted that I get on one of the tubing rafts instead of him. I was too afraid to take charge of the situation, and I accepted. I often feel guilty when I think about this, how I allowed it. He couldn’t swim and I took the life raft. The other raft was filled with all our wallets and phones, though, so maybe I should chill about that.
“I should chill about that” has become one of my mottos. For all my private crying, and all my offhand public references to my crying, I am terrible at showing other people my emotions. They feel like they’re made of acid and could erode a moment away to nothing. My hero, Jill Soloway, made a speech recently about how crying on film sets should be encouraged (“If you can’t cry, you’re a liability”), and to that I say, fuck yes. Because what’s the point of keeping composure until you explode like a peep in the microwave?
There was a moment, before I realized someone had seen us and called 911, when I thought: “Is this how I die?” It seemed odd that something as benign, as comfortable, as lake water could kill me. But without any shoreline in sight, it also seemed possible. The yellow raft carried me ashore in fifteen minutes, and a rescue boat picked up the others. The boat had to be retrieved from the bottom of the lake. It got written up in the newspaper. We never talked about it much again. The whole thing seemed trivial in hindsight: of course we weren’t going to die, look how dramatic I had been in my own mind. That fall, I had a severe mental breakdown that seemed to come out of nowhere. I blamed it on my upcoming graduation, on my impending breakup, anything but the boat. It was only a boat.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning crying, and I cry all day. These aren’t fun, cathartic tears — they come from a large empty place in my soul and they feel like poison leaving my body. I’m looking for the climax/third act/curtain call but it hasn’t arrived yet. This might be the year where I finally discover that every way I have looked at the world and especially at myself — maybe it’s all been wrong. That my entire view of the world’s emotional landscape is skewed, and that the world HAS an emotional landscape, and that I’ve been fundamentally missing something all along. It should feel nice to discover this, that I am not such a weird thing, but mostly it feels like I’m slicing myself open repeatedly without any bandages.
I wonder what happened to the guy on the overpass. What was his first thought when he woke up yesterday morning? What about this morning? He was probably the most hated dude in the city yesterday. But maybe he needed a team of people to follow him around with a mattress. Maybe we all do. I’m sitting on the couch writing this and there is a warm, uncomfortable feeling washing over me. Like trying a drug for the first time, like having the flu, like being human.
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