We've Been Having Feelings For Years, Part 1
Towing a shit-rock of decision fatigue and disappointment somewhere between Pizza Hut and Tucson, Arizona.
The day before Christmas Eve, T. and I took a pit stop at a pawn shop in New Mexico called FAST CASH. The exterior of the small, one-story building was cluttered with piles of worn out things: a lawnmower, a high chair, rusty tools. A hand-scribbled sign on the door read “NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS” and as we neared closer to the entrance, my shoulders rose towards my ears, my stomach clenched.
Inside, a petite woman around my mother’s age sat in the middle of the room, surrounded on all sides by glass jewelry counters. Seemingly inconvenienced by our presence, she acknowledged us with a curt glance and continued doting on the freckled coonhound at her side.
The store was filled floor to ceiling with stuff, and I mostly disliked being inside of it because of how unwelcome I felt looking at everything. I was, after all, just passing through, and the shopkeeper knew it too. Hidden from view in the back room, T. and I sorted through enough country western mixes on cassette to fill a grocery bag, and on our way to pay for them, I spotted a John Gray book titled Mars and Venus: The Languages of Love.
Gray is widely known for his #1 New York Times Bestseller, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which has sold over 15 million copies and, not surprisingly, has almost 12,000 reviews on Amazon. With a mere six reviews and no paperback editions available on the same website, The Languages of Love, which came out seven years after Gray’s hit, seems somewhat of an oddity. What’s more peculiar is that on a whim I suggested we get it, and without hesitation, T. added it to our pile.
Later that same day, we went to a mineral hot spring and paid to soak for 50 minutes in a tub made of rocks. While we stood in line at the ticket window, I felt embarrassed spending money to access naturally occurring groundwater. I wondered if T. would judge me for not being more frugal. I thought about the cinema, how easily we spend money to sit around in dark theaters, and how unlike the guarantee of a warm soak, films are often not rewarding. We bought the tickets, rinsed off separately, and huddled together under a canvas tent, waiting to be called into a private pool.
Behind the wooden door of our New Age cabana, a digital clock beside the tub counted down the 3,000 seconds we had left to be naked while overlooking the Rio Grande. Time slowed; I imagined counting every lash on T.’s eyelids, or the pores on his cheeks. Instead we giggled as we read the sign prohibiting sexual conduct and proceeded to reach out for each other’s bodies under the blanket of a bath. The water held us, the river chit-chatted with the wind above its surface, and across the bank I noticed a “T” carved into the mountainside.
When our time was up, we dried off and sauntered back to the car, half-dressed and blissfully unbothered. A missed call on my phone told me that our plans for the next four days had been cancelled due to inclement weather. Chugging from our respective water bottles, we absorbed the news together in silence.
At first I didn’t really care. I was a tender guppy, untroubled by and fortified against disruptive information, all because of the soak. If anything, I was relieved. It was, in fact, too cold to do much else besides stay home.
But we were not in California, finishing a crossword beside the fireplace, or laying between my comforter and the heated mattress topper at the ranch. We were standing barefoot in the middle of a parking lot in Truth or Consequences, wondering what to do next.
I am self-employed, unmarried, and child-free. I lead in most areas of my life. I also spend most of my time writing, and as Melissa Febos reminds us in her book Body Work, “…the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions…every single notation — every piece of punctuation, every word, every paragraph break — in a piece of writing is a decision.”1
Lately, I make decisions for my mother too, a painful reemergence of the decisions I was forced to make for our family when I was a child. Besides this weighted shit-rock I carry, my freedom to decide things is pretty spectacular. Often, I do as I please and I don’t have to take anybody else into account.
The minor drawback of this liberty is that I am often in a state of decision fatigue, and as a result, I don’t like planning. I want someone else to plan things. I don’t like making extraneous decisions; I’ve made enough already today. Where is the place I do not have to lead or decide? Take me there, I’ll let you know if it sucks.
Another reason I don’t like planning is because I can anticipate the precarity of my being in charge. When things are up to me, I get invested. I cling to the beautiful, albeit unrealistic, puzzle that my imagination pieces together. I get attached to bucolic hot springs, safe boondocking sites, and ticketed telescopes on top of mountains I’ve set out to explore.
I also can’t let go of the literal time it takes to look at maps, make calls, take notes, and clear everything with T. — time I know I’ll never get back, time I assume I’d use to craft a colored pencil masterpiece or write my next best newsletter were I not busy scheming.
I realize that the free time I have to do many things is, unfortunately, a privilege. Travel is a privilege too, and to experience it requires one to set aside time to think. I wish the thinking part was fun for me, but because I apply debilitating pressure on myself for whatever I plan to be perfect for somebody else, it is not. When it comes to traveling, I know that nothing will unfold perfectly, and so spending my time on something I can’t guarantee perfection with often leaves me fussy. It’s just too scary for me to take you somewhere and have it suck.
Despite my usual hesitations, I planned most of our holiday with gusto. But when the bad weather hit and the post-soak glow wore off, the reality of being on the road without an itinerary sank in. I hate making plans, but I like having plans, especially if I’m the one who’s made them. Feeling attached to the mostly non-refundable itinerary I had lovingly put together for us, I felt my good attitude start to quiver.
The hours I’d spent sitting with my computer now seemed utterly unproductive; they haunted me. What’s more, the thought of coming up with new ideas from the road felt wildly unromantic and did not compare well with the ludicrous fantasy of minimal thinking and zero-efforting I had when we first left California.
As the only keeper of an internet-phone in my relationship, I imagined that the expectation to do it all over again was about to fall on me, and all I really wanted to do was be. Things had changed, and I anticipated an invasion of reading, scrolling, and zooming in and out during a time I had set aside to do none of those things.
It’s not that I think phones are entirely necessary for road travel — of course they can be stowed away. I’d argue, however, that unless one wants to waste gas, time, and whatever sanity remains, this approach only works with foresight and planning, i.e. printing out maps and making phone calls from home before leaving, and crossing fingers that nothing changes or that locals know their way around.
At some point between eating Pizza Hut in an empty brewery on Christmas Eve and the hotel we ended up at in Tucson, I realized that I cared, and that I was disappointed. My well-intentioned plans were biting me in the ass, and the suggestion T. had originally made before we left — that we plan as little as possible — was proving to be the wiser. Side by side and heading west in the car, I expressed feeling defeated, stressed, and a bit blue. It was nobody’s fault, but I was sad not to go to Texas and eat a big burrito and behold an even bigger sky.
This verbal processing of my vacation grief did not go over well with T. Though I knew that I was on the fast-track to relief by simply being able to name what I was feeling out loud, T. did not see the point. Every sentiment I expressed was countered with an alternative. “Yes, but there’s nothing to be done about it,” he said. “Yes, but why are you dwelling on this?” he asked. “Yes, but you’re bringing me down!” he pleaded.
Of all the pivotal points, it was this exact moment of our trip that I went from being disappointed to disheartened, and I started to plan my escape from everything I was trying to be and everything T. was implying I should be. I announced that, effective immediately, I was driving the entire fifteen hours it would take us to get home.
“Go right the fuck ahead,” T. replied.
Read next week’s letter for Part 2: Everything we learned from an old white man about empathetic listening and coping out-loud. Thanks for being here.
Love,
Anna
Febos, Melissa. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Catapult, 2022.
Parts of this are so familiar; I think Simone de Beauvoir came up with the idea that freedom and choice are what we are condemned with (condemned to freedom). It also makes me think of that one moment in fleabag where she says she just wants someone to tell her what to do. Yes.
I love your writing. Christmas sucks. Sorry, people. Even unconventional, escapist Christmases. And ditto on planning and self consciousness - feeling responsible for others’ enjoyment of my plans. It’s a self fulfilling formula for a bad time. I just can’t seem to learn my lesson. Hitting hime big time.