Week: I really need to learn to shut up

Sometimes, we misjudge. It is true. What seems like a sure thing might have a 20 percent margin of error, and in that 1/5th, there opens an abyss for missed connection, misunderstanding, apathy or even malice. More than that: sometimes we judge a situation to be safe, even harmless, when it is anything but that. But more often than not, at least in my experience, we like to skate on the edge of danger, because it reminds us that we are alive. Until, you know, we're reminded that even that isn't a given.

I say too much, and I am careless with my words. It is true, I spend words profligately, use them as currency, throw them in the trash like excess table scraps that could have been saved, repurposed, fed to another hungry mouth, or mind, later... But my impulse control center is lacking, perhaps, or perhaps (and this seems more likely), I go through life knowing what the prudent thing would be, and mostly adhering to the rules, until I decide: fuck it... I don't have to and I don't want to and I can't be anything but who and what I am. And in those petulant moments, it seems like a good choice to overshare, to expose the contents of my secret suitcases, dumping it out onto the metaphorically unmade bed.

Usually, the consequences are minimal. Even the keen emotional pain of romantic disappointment, or of the unraveling of a shared life are surmountable challenges. In fact, with age, I've decided to take more risks, embracing (not radical) honesty and transparency, and stating my desires and needs not because I experience less disappointment on having those needs left unmet, but because I now have ample experience in survival. The pain will, eventually, subside, or shuffle off to Buffalo, and the far recesses of your mind only to be unleashed on rare occasions when inebriated by the pull of an old melody.

Sometimes, however, this abject openness, this flagrant daring of social mores, or this unrelenting performance of self that one has committed to carrying out, can have real, life-threatening implications. When the rules of engagement are unclear, and the object of the game is unspoken, that's when the abyss rips open, and we dangle from a thread, trembling like leaves on a tree in the midst of a hurricane.

For example, I carelessly tell you: "I refuse to live in fear" and mostly, that's true, except when it isn't. (Does that make me a liar? You would say yes, like you always do, holding my inaccuracies against me. What does it matter? I digress). If we operate from a place of constant defense, our bodies and minds contort into the strangest of shapes, but if we refuse to acknowledge our real vulnerability, is it better?

The other night, on my way home in an Uber, sitting with my guilt over my own conflicted participation in the neoliberal logic that exploits workers, constantly lowering their wages, extending their working hours, was precisely a moment in which I let down my guard, and exposed myself to real, concrete danger by talking too much. It was, perhaps, a gesture to mitigate my discomfort with class discrepancy, or even just a jovial, pisco-induced false sense of security, or the habit of engaging on a personal and affective and intellectual level with people that wander into my sphere, but I revealed too much. Suddenly, before I knew it, I found myself in the old familiar chest-pounding dilemma of being simultaneously at someone else's mercy, and desperately attempting to carefully extricate myself from the precipitously deep water in which I might drown without them noticing my departure. This, of course, is a metaphor, though the streets have been flooding in my neighborhood these days.

Let me explain.

I do believe that the affective ties that we build with others in our daily interactions are tremendously important, and that if I can sow more love than fear, more gentleness than sharpness, then I count myself as lucky. But, damn, sometimes I can really fuck things up by not holding my tongue, not holding my cards up closer to my chest. (Being an empath and a people-pleaser probably doesn't help my cause in this attempt to shutter my soul, but I am once again reminded that I must be more careful, that just because I am comfortable with who and how I am, doesn't mean that I am impervious to the impositions of other's imaginations on me.) Sometimes we are braver than we ought, and sometimes our fears can make us lose the things we most need, and the trick is knowing how to rectify our mistakes mid-stream, because we're going to keep making them.

So, before Uber, there were taxis, and despite the admonishing (and well-founded) advice to never take them from the street, I have been known to calculate that risk, and throw the dice, relying on my hyper-attuned ability to read people. And in the better part of my adult life, I have also relied on my ability to interact in a warm way with taxi-drivers (almost always, but not exclusively, men) so as to mitigate my own risks in the context of being in an enclosed and moving space that is their domain, and often where I am without recourse in the event of any unpleasantness. It has almost always worked in my favor, that is, I am still alive and relatively unscathed (except that sprained hand in Chicago and the driver who on the grid-locked freeway made it clear that while I was "in my right" to make a claim of the accident, wouldn't it be better if I sat pretty and didn't make a fuss?). I have learned all sorts of marvelous things, have coached people on their career paths, served as confessional, laughed with deep connection, shared parenting tips, lamented the state of politics, learned about local events and preoccupations and gotten a glimpse into worlds and cosmovisions that are utterly removed from mine.

And yet. There is a nagging danger about housing one's soul in a feminized body.

Sometimes we get an extra-heavy dose of punishment because we ooze out past the edges of respectability. Because we travel alone. Because we don't have a boyfriend, or husband, on hand, as our passport to the wider world, because we are mothers without children, or are not mothers at all, And sometimes we walk right into the trap, confident (foolishly) in our ability to decipher the motives of others.

I make small talk. I am happy, not even tipsy, but relaxed, he is pleasant, speaks respectfully. His speech pattern and accent prompt me to ask if he is originally from Spain (it seems he has an accent that could have been softened by years in Mexico). He's clearly not from here, but he claims to be from Sonora. His accent is not from the North. I ask him where in Sonora, and he makes a vague reference to being from "right" in the middle. I see a red flag fly up into the air and I ignore it. Sometimes my adherence to honesty is just my innate lack of imagination. It is not expedient to make up stories, and I don't derive glee from tricking others. I waltz trough life like an open book whose pages are only obscure because of the verborrea, always only hidden by my over-exposure and others' inherent (and confirmed) lack of interest. I don't realize until it is too late that I have somehow let on that I live alone here. Another red flag, "you should try having a Mexican boyfriend, while you're here" he says casually and I snort (making a mental count in my head, reminding myself of promises I made to no one about not being bamboozled again, etc.). The second red-flag snaps me into sharp alert, though, because what I thought was just casual chit-chat is suddenly making me aware of how deep in the ocean I actually am, and how far away the shore, and how hungry the sharks really are. I remain calm, I realize I have to continue the friendly tone for my own safety. He makes a wrong turn near my house, apologizes with an air of someone that isn't really in a service-profession, continues the superficially pleasant conversation. He tells me he's the owner of several cars, in business with his cousin (I'm reminded of a book I am reading, and my literary brain lights up, fanning the fear-flame). I am careful, now, not to reveal more information, though he continues to press... I do not say which floor I live on, though he tries to elicit the information. I think, "this dude is good. He's subtle. He's fucking dangerous." Maybe I am dealing with a sociopath. I keep it light, and friendly. I get out of the car, thank him, wave goodbye once I am inside the locked gate of my building. I get the sense that he is watching me, but I shake it off. I am home. I feel safe. For a minute.

The house feels suddenly empty with Cheyla's departure. I don't mind aloneness, I like it, but the warm sisterhood of our little ninth-floor nest is suddenly, painfully absent. I feel cold. I carry out a few of my alone self-care rituals and am about to settle into some evening pleasure-reading, or to continue writing, letting my adrenaline dissipate when my interphone buzzes. I freeze. I know it is him before I answer. But I still answer. I hear his voice, there is a galloping in my chest. I keep my voice steady. He claims to have found a phone in his car, and is it mine? I know it is an excuse. There was nothing in the back seat of the car. It is a very sly move, a sleight of hand that creates an alibi before the crime is committed. "No," I state calmly and forcefully, "I am not missing a phone." He explains a second time why he's there, and I say, "Nope, definitely not mine." He apologizes again what sounds like a non-apology, and I am submerged in immediate terror.

I run through the statistics of femicide that are clearly tattooed in my brain. I know the city isn't safe, isn't free from human-trafficking cartels, that individuals can still operate in violent ways if they are rebuffed. I know my over-confident hubris-laden tromping through life can come back to bite me in the ass and I try desperately to wrest myself from the clutches of a full-fledged panic attack. It doesn't work.

I am shaking so hard I have to hold onto the bed to not fall down. I stagger around the room. I reach out, wanting so badly to have you hold me in your arms until it passes. But, even Mick Jagger knows you can't always get what you want... I know that rationally, this man, as you might point out, probably was just hopeful. A ver si chicle pega. That the taxi-driver fantasy that Arjona disseminated a quarter century ago across the airwaves was not his own, but a story shared, the romantic notion that you stumble upon a client who will suddenly become your lover. But I feel like there was something deeper and darker, I try not to cry. I am reminded how no one likes to see such unmitigated vulnerability because it likely makes them feel responsible for caring and carrying you through it when they might not even have the emotional reserves to do it, now or ever. These are all rational understandings of the way things are, but in the adrenaline rush of fight or flight, all I can do is tremble and shiver and try to address the problem. I report the incident, though, of course, the purported return of the possibly purloined phone will be cover enough. I gird my loins, and try to follow through with the rational process of speaking to the doorman, to a) ascertain whether he gave my apartment number out, and b) tell him that under no circumstances should he let the man through the gate, but as I approach the door, as I reach for the handle, keys in hand, I am paralyzed by fear. I know, I know, me and my careless metaphors, but no... I was literally paralyzed. I froze and could NOT make myself open the door. I ran through scenarios in which he had followed someone in and was waiting in the shadowy dark of my two apartment hallway, ready with duct tape and a gun, ready to force me back inside the room, or to coerce me into the elevator. Always my fear of doorways, sometimes, a survival instinct.

Instead, I double lock my door, locking myself in. I am a shaking much harder, I need comfort, and I talk to my daughter who tells me to get a knife and keep it next to my bed. I don't. But when I was a child, alone in the house, after sundown, I would keep a butcher knife close when I would get spooked. I wonder why that fear has always been there, lurking, like I imagine this man, ready to step out of the shadows, to torture me, to punish my transgressions. My lack of imagination in some realms, you might claim, is cross-canceled by my excessive imagination in other arenas. You might not be wrong, but I am suddenly shaking too with rage. Rage that he has the power to terrify me, just by showing up where he doesn't belong, and being a little too interested. Rage that this fear I feel isn't unique to me, but rather is shared by pretty much every woman I have ever met, rage that no matter how many times we explain, we mollify, we modify our tone, we are not ever safe. Rage that I caused this situation simply by being too careless, friendly, or verbose, a charming yet potentially deadly cocktail of personality traits.

I wobble around the apartment, turn on the hot water to run a bubble bath, I am metabolically cold, I make tea, I make bubbles, I imagine my body, wet, naked, soap-covered and bloodied. Who would find me? I think about the way in which my story would be written, when the contents of my personal phone, camera, chats and emails were pored over, interpreted. Would my lifeless body take on some other meaning, or is that the very same projection that this man saw, in a culture of toxic masculinity, one that finds it more logical that a woman might spitefully commit suicide in front of her demonstrably abusive boyfriend (for example) just to, you know, show him! rather than conclude that he had been violent with her, on camera, and that her murder was a logical escalation of his already documented interpersonal violence enacted on her, purportedly, beloved body. I shudder to think about the story that would be told about me, though I have heard deformed versions of it from the mouth of someone who claims to have once loved me, so, you know... whose story is real at the end of the day in the morass of emotional claims? Oh wait, the beaten and broken female body, scientifically scrutinized, still never provides enough incontrovertible evidence that she didn't, that I didn't, in fact deserve what we got. The punishment always presupposes the crime, no?

And as I let the jacuzzi jets froth shampoo into a rising mountain of bubbles to cradle my body in air and cleansing, I sink into the memory of the policeman in Virginia that when introduced to me by his friend stated with a grin: "I ran your plates, I know where you live" as if that weren't a freakishly terrifying invasive way to introduce yourself to a woman alone. Who then weeks later pulled me over, as a joke, with my kid in the car, just so he could say hi, and who weeks after that, when I stopped at the midnight gas station, standing guard at the door with his cop buddies, inquired about whether I was going to my house alone. And, the thing is, nothing ever happened. I wasn't murdered with impunity, the way so many other women whose names we forget, or whose names we never know, or whose stories are written by someone who never knew them or loved them, but I was left with the soul-shattering what-if until I left the town, and I will still feel vaguely unsafe in my house, here in Mexico City, until I change apartments or leave altogether. The bubbles, though, are calming. And the cold eases its grip on my bones, and the fear dissipates a little, and my anger, too, goes back into its cave. I feel a little bit better, but I don't sleep well, and I stay holed-up like an agoraphobe all day, though I work with a colleague, and in sharing stories we laugh together though we could just as easily cry, we show solidarity and sisterhood, one intuited and which will come to fruition, we are safe today. We escaped, once, twice, three times.

I return to my fearless self. I get back on the horse. I brave the city, into Santa Úrsula, to meet a dear old friend and make music. I do. We do. I spend hours with three, wonderful, gentle, talented men, and I know that life doesn't have to be a constant antagonism. That structures can be thoughtfully unlearned. That I am going to be ok. That I can just let it flow, without judgment on myself. Neutral.
I release some of that pent up rage in the rub of voices on voices. Paco drives me home at midnight. And I finally, finally get some rest.