Walmart People

“Steady now. Steady now. Don’t fear what you can’t see.” Grace Potter & the Nocturnals

Let it out, don’t push it down, don’t be afraid, just trust yourself and be brave. Be brave. It’s gonna be okay. You’ve gone through hell before, right? And you’re still alive, aren’t you? So just let it out.

What’s happening here? I’m not sure I understand, but for some reason my heart is heavy. Turtle wants me to be happy, he says please be happy, he feels the urge to look after me. He says I’m awesome, I’m beautiful, he’s a fan. He likes me, in this way that has snuck up on him quietly over the years, and I’m stunned, stunned, because it’s just the same for me. Every time we’ve lost touch I’ve felt a little sad and every time we reconnect, I need to make sure he’s okay. It’s just... I know that he’s this incredibly kind person, and he makes me laugh like no one else. And I’m almost entirely sure that he’s real.

* * *

I guess my biggest fear in life is love. I mean, if you give your heart to somebody, you expect them to love you too, right? But it doesn’t always work that way.

Love. What is the point? I really would like to know this. It drives you crazy, makes you mad, makes ya nervous, makes ya sad. What is it all about? To have something to do? To destroy humankind? Or to make us all closer?

Love makes you feel a lot of things, and you often get hurt. But once you have found true love, it will last forever.

(from the diary of a thirteen year old Erin, December 1995)

* * *

Pick it up, pick it up, don’t

Don’t do it, don’t

Succumb to it

I don’t want to be sad. I want to be happy, very happy, very merry merry happy. Why do I have to be one of the people who actually feels every emotion to the fullest? Even the smallest loss can be devastating.

So much lost, so much that I don’t say

But I carry it with me every day

I hide inside myself and close my eyes

Don’t notice me, no please, don’t look at me

Cuz if you look maybe then you’ll see

What weighs me down so heavily

Do you think he knows just what it’s done to me?

He’d probably say to me- oh you know he’d say to me

Move on

Just move on

But I don’t know

If I can do that again

(Lyrics from “Move On” written 09/12/09)

* * *

July  2013

He pulls up beside my car, in the giant parking lot outside of the Walmart in Medina, and parks his bright, shiny red Blazer. His windows are down and I hear Kelly Clarkson pouring out of them, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!!” and I glance over to see a man with mirrors for eyes in the driver’s seat. I pass my judgment quickly: that’s a strange song for a man to be listening to by himself. And then I think, I bet he’s a cool guy. The real kind of cool, the not-afraid-to-look-stupid cool, not the kind of ‘cool’ that keeps people living in fear of being true to themselves.

Meanwhile, I open the trunk of my car and try to determine if the giant black garbage can on wheels is going to fit.

“I don’t think it’s going to fit,” I say to my son. He looks at me, then at the can, then back at me.

“I think it will fit!” says the man with sunglasses on. He’s out of his car now, and standing right behind me, almost towering over me, and I think how long it’s been since I’ve stood so close to a tall man. That’s when I notice the little girl. She’s standing a little ways behind her dad, with dark hair that could use brushing and bangs dripping into her eyes. She looks about the same age as my son. It hits me that she must be the reason for the music.

I laugh at my mistake and I laugh that this stranger is talking to me and I don’t know what to say.

“Do you need some help?” he asks me.

“I don’t know. I’m sure I can handle it.” I’m not sure I can handle it. I’m not sure I can handle anything, including life. I try to shove the can into the trunk. It’s not going to fit.

“Do your back seats go down? I used to have a car just like this, I bet you can make it fit.” This man is still talking to me. What is he doing? Why is he talking to me? I’m flustered and I’m trying to shove the can into the trunk although I’ve already discovered very concretely that it’s not going to happen and I can feel this man standing there watching me and I don’t know what to say.

Instead of responding to him, I tell my son that I might have to put the can in the backseat. The man must have thought I was talking to him because he says, “Yeah, just slide it in there, that’s what I did,” and all I can think is, “That’s what she said,” and I laugh hysterically to myself and wonder how insane I must sound.

I tell my son once more that I might have to put the can in the backseat, and he says to me, “I’ll ride in the trunk!” and I laugh and he laughs, and then I tell him that he’s going to get to ride in the front seat with Mom for the first time. I know he’s done this with his Dad already, all the time, but this isn’t something that I allow. He still rides in a booster seat because although he’s eight, he’s still only in the twenty-fifth percentile for height and I’m a very protective mama bear.

The man with the mirrors for eyes is still standing there when I pull the can from the trunk and open the back door. I still don’t know what to say to this man, but he’s standing there, and so I say, “Thanks,” even though he didn’t do anything at all, and he says, “Well, if you’re still here in fifteen minutes, I’ll be back if you need some help,” and then he takes his daughter’s hand and walks toward the entrance to the store.

I move JT’s booster seat and slide the can in and it goes in without a hitch. We both get into the front seats, and for a minute I just sit there. Did he want me to wait? Was he just being polite, or was he flirting? I honestly have no clue, and I have no real reason to wait since I got the can into the car, so I buckle my seatbelt and pull out of my parking space and onto the road.

I’m not sure why, but I smile the whole half hour drive back home.

* * *

Chicken had big dreams. He said he wanted to be an artist. He said he wanted to tattoo. He said he wanted to be a writer. He had this huge fantastical story in his head that he’d been working on since he was a teenager. Working on it was really more or less planning it. He had some of the story planned out, but he never actually wrote it. He had big plans. He said the story was based on a dream that he had when he was younger. He used to have a million crazy dreams, and he’d twitch and jump in his sleep, sometimes calling out names and muffled phrases. Once, I woke  sleep. I didn’t know why, but I knew I needed to. I shook him.

“Chicken!” I whispered. “Hey, are you having a bad dream?” Chicken rolled over and ran his hand over his face and blinked several times. “Huh?”

I told him how I felt like something was wrong and that something told me to wake him up. He gave me a funny look and then told me he was having a dream and that it wasn’t bad, but he was starting to have an ominous feeling and knew that something awful had been about to happen.

I tried explaining to Chicken once about my sixth sense. I guess people call it intuition. I told him how I get these feelings, these unexplainable hunches, and I just know something without a shadow of a doubt, and there’s no real reason for it. Like the time I was at home with JT while everyone else was at The Grant partying. Nick and I had only been dating for a few months; four at the most. Over the course of the evening, I began having a strange, foreboding feeling. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to it, but as the night wore on, it became stronger and more definite, and I knew that something was wrong. More than that, I knew it involved Nick. Something was happening at The Grant, and it wasn’t good, it wasn’t good for me. I tried calling him at that point, but he wouldn’t answer his phone. Later, when Catrina came home, I asked her if anything weird had happened at The Grant that night. I think she was surprised that I knew, and she told me that she saw Nick kiss another girl.

All I could see in my mind was the first time Nick had kissed me, replaying over and over, only it was no longer me he was kissing. Catrina told me that she let the girl know that Nick was my boyfriend, and that the girl acted apologetic, yet later spent hours locked up in Nick’s bedroom with him. My heart plummeted to my feet upon hearing this. I still don’t know why I spent five more years with him. I always knew something happened that night, something more than a drunken kiss, but he denied it. I couldn’t trust him after that, and over the years I caught him in lie after lie. Why, why did I stay? Why did I keep going back? Only recently did he admit that yes, he had fooled around with her in his bedroom. No, they didn’t just lay on his bed together and talk.

Chicken told me that just because my intuition was proven right every once in awhile didn’t mean that it was always right. He would say the odds of it being true had to fall in my favor sometimes. He’d say that no matter how many times I was wrong, I would cling to the times I was right and believe that my gut feeling was always right because of those few times. He told me I shouldn’t trust that, I shouldn’t trust my gut, I shouldn’t trust myself.

“Trust me,” he would say. “Just trust me.”

* * *

Turtle has one piece of advice for me, and one only: “Trust yourself.” Instantly, I feel comfortable with him. Turtle is a writer. He doesn’t dream about it, he doesn’t plan to do it once everything in his life is perfect. He just does it, right now, through the pain, through the chaos, he pushes himself to put into words everything that matters, the deep down gut wrenching heartbreaking truth of life and what’s important. He’s a sea of hope and inspiration and goodness, and I want to swim in his waters and bathe on his shores.

* * *

August 2013

I’m feeling so inspired that I find myself walking into Walmart with the intention of buying myself a new notebook. Something fresh, unused, without the little notes and scribbles from a previous life, the lists of all the things I need to do that end with “love me forever.” Back to school supplies are stacked and displayed at every turn, and so many students and parents of students mill about, looking at their supply lists, at the shelves of supplies. I barely notice them, and stop short of running into a young boy who darts out into the aisle ahead of me to grab a specific item in a specific color, then hesitates, unsure of his choice, his hand darting quickly back and forth, holding the item, as he is clearly unable to decide if he is making the right choice. I wait patiently, looking off down another aisle to see if there are notebooks there. The aisle is full of overflowing carts and overflowing people and overflowing impatience. I turn back and the boy is gone. I continue on my way.

I’m walking through a maze of hurried bodies, and I can’t seem to find what I’m looking for. There are bins of small boxes of crayons, glue sticks, post-it notes. Scissors, pencils, lunchboxes. I’m all but completely unaware of the people around me as I continue searching for my treasure. I turn down a main aisle and suddenly the frenzy of school supply shoppers disappears and I’m alone. I walk.

Up ahead, something is moving toward me too smoothly, gliding, and I open my awareness to see that it’s a wheelchair with a young man pushing himself along the aisle, staring straight ahead at no one. He looks as though he wants nothing more than to get out of this place, away from the crowd of uncaring people who are in too much of a hurry to notice his presence as he tries to maneuver around them. We move ever closer to each other, and I’m looking at his face now, his dark hair, he’s really very handsome, and then his eyes turn upward and meet mine. I see in them the expectation that has built up inside for years, to be ignored, passed over, unnoticed. I see the disdain and the anger and the pain. But he meets my eyes, fiercely, daring me to look away, and yet I don’t. Instead, my face breaks into a huge, warm smile because he’s the only person who has looked me in the eyes since I entered the store, and will probably be the last, and I also know what it feels like to be passed over. His challenging eyes soften and then he smiles back, his whole face lighting up, and then he’s past me and the moment is gone. Something warm is trickling down inside my belly; something is melting.