Zk | 02-meet-cute

I have noticed over the years that we tend to put benches in the strangest of places. I noticed this at Saint John’s, those years ago back in Minnesota. The placement of benches ought to be deliberate. There ought to be some sort of goal in putting them where we do. A bench placed in a park with a careful view across the grass, through the trees, down the street would be ideal. You could look at the kits playing in the grass, the trees moving in the breeze, down the bustling street. Instead, we place them facing buildings along sidewalks.

Or, here at work, we place them facing a parking lot. I know, of course, that this bench is here because it is intended to be a place to wait for someone to come pick you up in our car-ridden town. I know this, and yet this bench feels so fantastically pointless. There is one in front of short-term and handicap parking which feels far more apt a place for such a thing, but no, perhaps that was not enough: this one is along the side of the building, facing that overflow portion of the lot that on some days sees no use at all.

There is this occasional fad among certain groups on the Internet, I’ve been told, of seeking out so-called liminal spaces. I think that the term is ill-fitting. Liminality has a very specific meaning. I do not think that many of the places described as “liminal” that show up on social media and forums on the ‘net are liminal so much as abandoned and vaguely spooky. They are not a place between, they are not a place one transits, not a border. They are simply poorly lit or forgotten.

The important thing about liminality, though, is not that a place be forgotten and certainly that it not be in any way scary, but that it should slip and slide beneath your interest. Liminality requires some form of passing through, It needs to be a border that you cross or a place that you enter for the sole purpose of exiting. Abandoned shopping malls are not liminal. A barn, canted awkwardly to the side with age, standing alone in a field is not liminal.

A parking lot is liminal. An airport is liminal. A drive-thru is liminal. These are the spaces that exist only to be traversed. They are the spaces where, should you get stuck in them, you will be struck by the unnerving quality of the experience. They are not places that you visit. They are places that, should you visit — really, intentionally visit — you will feel unwelcome because they resist the very idea of doing so. They push back at you, in some intangible way, and say: “You are not meant to be here.”

I am stalling.

It’s perhaps a little strange that I seem to get the most out of journaling during my lunch breaks. To me, it feels as though I ought to be doing something so personal and introspective back at home, rather than sitting out on that awkwardly-placed bench in front of the office in that liminal parking lot, but there is something about the discomfort of that place combined with me already being in the therapeutic mindset that makes this the ideal situation.

I am stalling, though, because I know that it is easier for me to get caught up in words than to actually do the work at hand. Perhaps I am in the mind of liminality because this idea of liking someone, of wanting to pursue a relationship, is so new to me.

I have long since acknowledged that, despite my ability to listen actively and to guide patients through therapy, I am insufferable. I do not mean to denigrate myself in this. It is a fact and I am comfortable with my role in life. I am autistic and comfortable with all that comes with that (indeed, it works to my advantage in my professional life as I work primarily with other autistic individuals). I have few friends outside of a professional context. I do not enjoy drinking. I am devoutly Catholic. I suspect, for some whom I met at university, even at the private school before that, that I am out of place for being so ‘low’ a species in such lofty places as those, for such are the places for the cats and dogs of the world, not a coyote who has, in their mind, pried himself up from the blue-collar professions of his ancestors² or some imagined poverty.

Along with all of this, however, has come with a necessary distance from romance and relationships. This is another thing that I am comfortable with. The celibacy that was in my future as a priest was not a thing that I was in any way uncomfortable with, and when I moved on from that life I saw no reason to change that. I do not enjoy the word ‘single’, because that implies something ‘less than’ in today’s society. I am happy alone.

I have, at various points in life, picked up a romantic twinge, and when I do, I cherish it. I will sit with that feeling and enjoy it, and then I will put it up on some shelf within me to be a part of my life, and yet in some way apart from it.

It is not unlike praying in that sense: God is always a part of my life, and yet is apart from it. I do not subscribe to many of the modern evangelical takes on religion, wherein God is within you and Jesus in your heart, but something perhaps more conservative and old-fashioned. God is beside me, perhaps. Above me. He is with me, but not within me.

Another way to look at this is perhaps that these feelings are embers, or the smoldering of paper that has not yet caught fire into a relationship. You can see the faint tint of red crawling along the fibers of the paper, and yes, I suppose that you could blow on it and coax it into something more, but better, for me, to watch it slowly consume the paper, enjoy the beauty of the ember and the delicacy of the ash it leaves behind, and then, once it has gone out, acknowledge that it has left me a new person.

That, however, is not what Kay has done. She has flared into my life as a bright spark. It is not the slow crawl of smolder along paper but the bright flash of magnesium caught fire. Unstoppable. Undousable. Inevitable.

This — this and joking about the fact that that we both have what sound like single letters for names, Kay and Dee — is why I brought her up to Jeremy, this brightly burning light in my life that has suddenly claimed me. This feeling is new. It’s novel. I have had what I had assumed ‘crushes’ were before, but to be smitten is a very new feeling for me, one that I do not quite know how to approach.

Kay and I met during the last year of her undergrad and the first year of my graduate studies at UI Sawtooth. She had taken a job in the campus library to help pay her way through school, working in the interlibrary loan office, a service that I was starting to use more in earnest.

That’s four years gone now, though, and that these feelings were not in place soon after we met clouded my judgement when I started to pick up so intense a set of emotions. When one feels a yearning that saps one’s strength, one expects that this is to be fairytale-level pining. Love at first sight. Smitten by looks. Utterly taken with the ways in which one speaks.

But no, when I first met Kay, I had made a mental note that she was a conventionally attractive coyote, no-nonsense and to the point, an absent-minded dresser, and almost frighteningly competent. I read in her some of the same facets of autism that I see within myself, and I suspect much of her quiet efficiency stemmed from the fact that she, like me, often found herself feeling insufferable. It has taken me training and practice to soften my voice, to understand expressions, postures, and the vocal tics that make up people. I feel myself to be an empathetic person, a fact which drove me first to ministry and then to psychology, but to actually connect with those around me on an individual basis took effort.³

I freely admit that the ILL office was not necessarily the type of place where one focuses on exemplary customer service, but still, this did not seem to be something that Kay was interested in in the slightest. She was there to do her job, do it quickly, and do it well. After a few visits picking up and returning books¹, I decided that I would try to befriend her and find out how much we had in common.

Was this some early expression of my feelings toward her? I do not know. I do not remember feeling in any way romantic toward her at the time, yet for me to deliberately seek friendship from someone was not a thing that I might otherwise have done. I do remember thinking at the time that had I asked her to talk over a coffee, that would have carried such connotations, so instead, the next time I had an order of books to pick up, I simply asked her major.

For some reason, I remember that she had been in the middle of typing something when I had asked, claws clicking on the keys, and that she had stopped and blinked rapidly at the screen, and I imagined thoughts crunching out of gear within her head.

“Music,” she had said. “Music composition, actually. Why do you ask?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just always seem to wind up talking with you here, so I was wondering. You don’t seem like one of the salaried employees.”

Her smile was wry as she replied, “I’m not, no.”

I don’t remember if we talked about anything else that day, and there were not any stand-out conversations over the next however many times I saw her in the office, though we soon started talking every time I came by and the few times I saw her in passing both in the library and on campus. At some point, we simply…became friends. I do not know whether we would have done so without me having acted with the intent to do so. Perhaps we would have. I do not remember thinking about intent-of-friendship much after that first conversation, so perhaps all it took was that opening question.

We slid effortlessly into a routine of sharing lunches several times a week. I went to a few concerts with her, though she knew far more about the music being played than I and I often felt in over my head as we listened to the instrumentalists and vocalists on stage. I was surprised to find on the first concert that she wore earplugs throughout. I did not find the music to be too loud, some string quartet, perhaps, but she explained to me that it kept her from getting overwhelmed.

At the end of her time at UI Sawtooth, I had the chance to attend her senior recital, where several other students from the various departments performed a few short compositions of hers. The music was cerebral and, to my ears, dissonant, even dark, but it was as fastidious as her in a way that I cannot explain. I applauded heartily and after the show we hugged and she invited me out to drinks with her family, who all proved quite friendly and much like her. Thinking back, I suspect that must have made quite the sight: four coyotes sitting around a table at a fairly nice restaurant, speaking in essays to expound on whatever thesis has come into their heads.

Spending time with other autistic folks was not a strange occurrence to me, as I had known a few in university and had as a matter of course of course met several in my training, but for some reason, that night was the first time I could say that I felt comfortable in that portion of my identity. I felt at home with others, and, strange as it seems to say, rather like a member of their family.

My lunch break is nearing its end, out here in the liminal lot, so I should probably hold off from writing any more, but I should note before I do that it is interesting that much of what I describe here in retrospect bespeaks an early attraction that I had not at the time attributed to budding romance or anything so grand.

Perhaps it was, in the end.

It is a Saturday today and I have no clients, so I am attempting to write at home rather than on a bench somewhere or slouched in my office chair, and am actually using my computer for it this time rather than scribbling on a steno pad. I have to admit that I feel very strange writing like this. It feels almost like a violation of a habit, despite having only been at this for a few days.

I have put some further thought into what I wrote about over the last two days, about the fact that there may have been some hints at romance or a crush or what-have-you prior to the time when Kay moved away.

I do not think that, at the time, I was thinking in terms of romance, and I also don’t think that it was on Kay’s mind either. Her parents may have been of the mind that we might have been going out with each other, but I do not know.

However, I am also not sure that my conscious self was entirely in line with my subconscious at the time. I speak now in retrospect, of course, and at the moment I know very well that they often float closer and further away from each other in terms of agreement, so I do wonder whether or not my subconscious was heading deeper into a desire for more than friendship.

This means that there are two possible scenarios to consider:

• My subconscious mind was starting to, as a client put it the other day, catch feelings, and thus the situation I find myself in now has a longer history than expected
• The history behind this current set of emotions has some later starting point and the way in which Kay and I became friends has no bearing on the present other than as an interesting story.

If the former is the case, then I think it is worth some introspection as to what about our in-person interactions might have drawn me to her romantically. As I mentioned, she was frightfully smart. She was kind. She was not unattractive, either, and as a coyote, certainly someone who ought to have been in the market for me.⁴

If the latter is the case, however, then I have to wonder why it is that such feelings did not form until distance became an issue, for less than a month after that dinner with Kay and her parents, she moved away from UI Sawtooth to prepare for her masters at UI Boise and our communication moved almost entirely to email and PostFast messages. I know that we tried to call once or twice, but neither of us is particularly keen on phones.

When I speak with my patients struggling with anxiety disorders, one of the exercises that I have them perform after a panic attack is to walk back to when the panic attack started and write down what they were doing and how they were feeling. Once they have done that a few times, they can look for similarities in the reports, and then they can start walking back further from the starting point of the attack in order to discover potential triggers. Knowing those, they can begin working on coping and avoidance mechanisms.

I know that I am trying to justify to myself my work on this journal so far, but I think that this retrospection is part of what I am doing with the project. I am not sure that I want to cope or avoid these feelings that I’m having, necessarily, but I do want to at least better understand when they began, and by understanding the past, better understand the present.

So, in that spirit, I think the first time I noticed this crush on Kay was perhaps six months ago. I remember having spent an evening talking with her about music, about which she has been slowly teaching me, both of us sending each other videos to watch and counting down from three so that we could hit play at the same time and talk about what we were both hearing as it happened.

After the conversation, I had gone to bed thinking that there was something about that particular interaction that felt oddly intimate to me, and when I lay in bed, instead of falling asleep quickly as usual, I spent a while thinking back to her senior recital and that hug that we shared after. In particular, I was thinking about the combination of the feeling of her cheekfur, soft and dry against my own, and her scent.

The room had had more than enough scent mitigation in place, and I know that the sort of non-scent of scent-block had a tendency to cling to fur a while after having been in a room where it had been layered on thick.

However, while the audience had been sitting still and watching the concert, Kay had been up on the stage for much of the performance, conducting, playing the piano, and speaking about the music she had written and I suspect that that combined with any nerves she may have felt prior to and during the performance must have had her a bit worked up, for she smelled more strongly than I’m sure I did.

I remember laying in bed, breathing shallowly as I tried to recall that scent in its most intricate details. My thoughts became fractal in my weariness and I found myself refining and refining my memories. Did she smell of exertion? Did she smell of cleanliness? Did she smell fresh? She smelled of all three, so what were the percentages of each within her scent as a whole.

I remember feeling a pang in my chest as I realized that I wanted to experience that again. That scent, the feeling of her cheek against mine. I wanted it desperately. I craved that moment, drawn out and extended.

I am no stranger to sexual fantasies. I have had them plenty in my life, and am not ashamed to admit that. Celibacy does not preclude one from having desires, and as long as they do not become covetous, God does not proscribe them. But the thing that sticks with me about this night of fantasizing is that there was nothing sexual about it. I did not fantasize about Kay and I some day having sex, of all the things we might do along those lines. Instead, I fantasized about hugging her, breathing deep, then leaning back and, for some reason, brushing my thumb over her cheek.

I don’t know why, but that night, that act picked up a talismanic significance, as though were I to perform the ritual — the hug, the breath, the brush through fur — in precisely the correct way, I might somehow feel a light more intense than the sun wash through me, feel a rush of fulfillment, feel a sense of rightness and completion.

Finally, I remember praying. I remember speaking to God and holding in tension my words to Him and these feelings that I was having. I remember asking Him what this meant. What, O Lord, does it mean to desire fulfillment from another person? I do not want to possess them. I do not want to lay with them. I am not even sure that I love them. I just want to be happy with them, want them to be happy, and yet in such a specific way. What does it mean?

The little voice through which God speaks was silent. I was not surprised — the domain of God’s works are not the petty interpersonal relationships between individuals but rather whether or not their lives are lived in grace, and whether or not they strive to bring grace to the world around them.

I was not surprised, but I was, admittedly, disappointed. I try not to be disappointed in the ways of the Lord, of course. It’s not His job to solve my problems, and to expect him to do so is silly.

Perhaps I just wanted some guidance.