I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(3)

I walked up the up ramp, then found myself at a dead end at the top of the lot. So I turned around and followed the down ramps until I ended up in the basement, standing in front of a blank concrete slab. What kind of Hotel fucking California was this? In a panic, I retraced my steps and went back to where I’d started. The backs of my heels chafed and burned under the leather of my black pumps, so appropriate for sitting in a conference room and so ill-suited for half an hour of airport laps. I’d covered the whole lot twice and not passed my car. I would never get home. I was stuck.

I called and woke up John, my husband of just two months, and begged him to come get me.

“You’re fine,” he reassured me. “By the time I could get there, you’ll find it.”

I didn’t find it. I found, instead, the airport security trailer. I knocked on the door, hoping this scene wouldn’t become the beginning of the investigative journalism piece about my grisly death. A gray-haired guard wearing a navy uniform greeted me with a set of keys in his hand. He took his time walking to a truck with orange lights on top—tired and unimpressed by my lostness, as if he did this a few times every night—and I followed him, climbing into the front seat of a truck cab that smelled like corn chips and motor oil. We rode together from level to level, lot to lot, I with my face turned to the hot parking-lot air and my arm out the window, clicking the button on my automatic key.

After about ten minutes I heard a beep-beep and saw a flash of headlights. There was my car, waiting in a spot that didn’t look familiar at all. I had to have passed it earlier. How had I missed it?

When I got home, John asked, “What happened?”

“I got trapped,” I said. “But I escaped.”



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As turned around as I got in that parking lot, I get twice as confused driving on actual roads. I hate it when people give directions like, “Drive south for two miles,” or, “Go east on the highway.” How the hell do people know which way south and east are?

I need landmarks. If I have to get from point A to point D, I need to know what points B and C look like. Turn left at the red light just before the giant pothole. Veer right at the big billboard with a chicken on it. Stop when you get to the building with the bright blue roof. That’s why now, whenever I’m in an unfamiliar parking lot, I take a photo of my spot and keep taking photos the whole way into the building so I can find my way back along the breadcrumbs I leave for myself: There’s the Coke machine; there’s the green EXIT sign; there’s the revolving door. I drive with a robotic voice narrating my turns, my destination always plugged into a map app, even at home in my own city. I really can’t overstate how much the iPhone has changed my life.



* * *



Fifteen years after that parking lot episode, I got lost again.



* * *



I didn’t want to tell anyone I was unhappy, because it didn’t make sense.

There was plenty of love and time to go around for our family, enough money for groceries and gas and the mortgage and even unexpected things like exploding water heaters and tree limbs through the roof. I had my health, my youth. I was not yet forty. I was not dying of an insidious cancer, and I had not accidentally gotten hooked on meth, like those soccer moms I saw on the news. My husband and children and parents were all alive and well.

And plenty was going right. Truly, if I picked different snapshots from this time in my life, they’d add up to a picture of perfection. I was still, sometimes, having fun. I did things with my family and friends. I worked. I posted cute pictures of my dogs online. Those are the moments people could see.



* * *



But then there were moments most people didn’t see. Ask anyone who has lived through depression, and chances are at least some of them will tell you it was the most unlikely thing—that they had everything to be happy about. But even the people who have no terrible, obvious burden to carry can find themselves staggering under the weight of a dull, constant dread. It doesn’t add up, but it’s true.

Everything around me was as I’d designed it: There was the house we bought because it had the right number of bedrooms and a backyard flat enough for a swing set. There were the booster seats I meticulously researched and purchased—for our own children to ride in, plus the neighbor kids we carpooled with every day. I drove them to the elementary school we chose for its small classes and robust arts program and active parent association, for which I could volunteer on committees where the other parents might just be so inspired by my helpfulness that they’d write me thank-you notes in honor of my commitment and reliability. The house and the car seats and the school were part of the life we decided to live in the middle of Atlanta, the part of the city with the highest traffic, highest taxes, and highest crime, but also the highest density of culture and friends and activity. John and I agreed: We’d rather stab ourselves in the eyes than live in the suburbs. We were glad to pay more for less space in the name of authenticity. Screw the strip malls.

There was the basement I turned into an office, where I did my job as a freelance writer and cartoonist. This twelve-by-fifteen-foot space had a little desk and a discarded dining-turned-writing chair and a tiny patch of rug thrown over the concrete floor to make it feel warmer and less like an underground bunker. The walls were exposed brick, and over the desk, light shone through a single window. No one else was using the room. I had laid claim to it because I felt the lack of a place that was mine, where no one could drop their socks or trash or half-empty cups, where I could leave out a stack of paper and not come back in an hour to find a crayon line drawn across every page. To make people laugh, I called it my “lady cave,” which, instead of sounding cool, like “man cave,” sounded like a coy euphemism for “vagina.” But it was an ideal space for writing and drawing, occupations I chose because they allowed me to do what I love—fit ideas into word puzzles, doodle animals, and help people communicate more clearly. I had a schedule that was under my own control. All of this was under my own control, in fact, because I decided it all.