I don’t know when it first came to me, this idea that I would travel around the country to visit people I follow on Twitter. It could be that I didn’t know what else to do, or it could be that it was the thing I was meant to do, but at the time all I could see was a hashtag.

#IRL

If you call a project #InRealLife, it should not surprise you when real life happens. Here you are, embarking on an Odyssey of your own creation, friends waving, goodbye goodbye goodbye, kisses and hugs and money pressed into your pockets. Your home is gone. Your tent is packed. There is no turning back, no return to the green couch, the days of anonymity and drinking coffee.

There’s a nagging sense that you’ve forgotten something, but it’s too late to stop. The people are everything you imagined and when you write about them, it is all the joy of Christmas morning, these astonishing humans up close and in living color. But in the in-between, the places where doubts pile up and the money trickles down and the road gets so lonely that the Spotify Comedian’s Channel is not enough to generate a smile – this is where you think you may have taken a wrong turn. The car makes a funny noise, its wheels shimmying so that driving feels like a challenge that you are not up to, not today, not ever.

Thanksgiving arrives. You spend it on a couch in the living room of a friend who understands that what you need more than anything else right now, is to be left alone, the slightest breeze or kiss or kind word, a pain beyond your threshold.

December delivers you to a place of rest and family. Your very own homeless shelter which, by the way, you’ve checked into before and for God’s sake aren’t we done with that, haven’t we learned that lesson? But apparently the answer is no, no we have not. You hate every Christmas carol, but for the first time, you know you are not alone and this in itself is a gift, this communion of mothers who can’t afford Santa Claus and fathers who sit in chairs wishing they could say the thing they really mean. This tiny light is a candle or maybe a menorah but it is not the bonfire for which you would do anything–the warmth you need with the people you love. Forget presents, they don’t matter any more. Not In Real Life. But if your people could come and there were s’mores, that would be enough. Well, that and paying your bills.

You search Craigslist and what you are looking for is fast and easy and for the first time you understand, at a level of cell and ligament, why people make the choices they do. Why they sell their souls and their bodies because what will it matter anyway, this is never going to change, it will always be like this. A warehouse job shows up and you send your resume because they asked for it, but you send it ironically, like you are signing up for a slot in a comedy club because why do you need that English degree to work in a warehouse. The shame wags its finger at you, but you have moved on. Being broke is hard, but understanding that it’s nothing to be ashamed of is a gift, wrapped in the ribbon of knowing you will never hear a discussion of the minimum wage with quite the “well there are two sides” passivity you had in the past. You drive to the warehouse and park in a Rubik’s cube of a lot with a knot in your stomach, thinking surely you will be rescued you will not have to do this thing which feels like walking to a country not your own.

At 10:10 there is a ten-minute break and you sit on a pallet and laugh at your drama, at the idea that this was hard and you were tough, because there are 70 year old aunties and grandfathers whose lives are in another language, doing the same job you are doing, lifting and loading boxes and earning $10 an hour because it’s almost Christmas or the rent is due; not to pay their storage fees or their student loans or any of their precious and privileged bills. The smart ones are so easy to spot—the young mother in charge of single orders who arrives at 7 and leaves at 6 and cuts hair until midnight, the junior college student working third shift security when he leaves because he can study or sleep, whatever is at the top of the list that day. The new eyes you’ve been given enable you to see them immediately, but the fancy shoes and white collars who tiptoe across the concrete will not. They have work to do, very important work and they are sympathetic to the customers who have ordered cases of $100 wine at the last minute because Jesus This Holiday Season is Madness.

You read Twitter during the break, but it is now a foreign country you once visited. It is New York when you moved away and your spot was taken. It is the window through which you look at a life that is not your own.

The thought of writing exhausts you.

The first reason for this is The Voice in your head—the one that you would recognize in a tinny long distance call in twenty years or two thousand—the voice that says be careful what you say because it might be the wrong thing and then there will be consequences and you won’t know what the wrong thing was or when the consequences will end so it is best not to say anything at all, to lock the thoughts in your head and give the key away to an unkind friend or an absentminded stranger.

You are no longer the girl from the report card who “talks to her neighbor.” Now you are the girl who can be alone for a week, emerging only to tell the grocery store clerk that you do not have your rewards card but you will give him your phone number. You release the digits one at a time, and find they are no longer a unit, but a bit of dangling code, floating and unhooked from meaning. Do not call me, you say silently to the clerk at Safeway. Do not worry, he says silently in response.

The second reason is that the words are tangled like your headphones, or better yet, like the messy office that used to be next door with piles and piles of paper and projects and an inhabitant who insisted he knew where everything was, until the paper became tables and cupholders and computer stands. Where are those words, you wonder? No One cares, The Voice answers, and you tell yourself that No One is everyone, but you know that it is also you.

The words are in your brain, but your brain is frozen—a novelty cube floating in the punch at parties, water shaped neurons and ice blue transmitters. You wait in the sun all day, warmth on a face which is no longer your own and remember the joy of a fully formed thought. And then one tiny drop thaws and begins its descent but the sun goes down and that will be all for today, this tiny gem (or bit of trash we will see) frozen and glittering in midair and just out of reach.

The words are in the earth but they disappear like water in this state where you have pitched your tent. Everywhere you look there is beauty; hills and valleys swollen with metaphor just for you, you child of the plains. Tell of the blue skies and magnolia blooming in February. Tell of the poppies you may not touch, and the moon rising over mountains. But the words feel as old as you do. They are from a November rain and they have grown stagnant, recycled for the dishes and the laundry and a bath and this will not work, I cannot offer you this water, these words.

Waking and sleeping. Lather/Rinse/Repeat. Loss and then more loss until the moment when you realize almost everything identifying This Real Life as yours, is gone. And out of the void a word appears.

“Who do you say I am?” Jesus asked Peter in the beginning. How are you explaining the unexplainable to your wife, your friends, your children? You can define Me, but do you really understand what we’re doing here? Do you have any idea how much you could lose?

At the end though, the question changed.

“Who do you say that you are?” Jesus queried then. Take a good look and see who you’ve become, not the failure, not the dark matter, not the blips and dips that haunt you in the night. Look past those things and see the thin outline beginning to appear…Do you love?

You imagine Peter squinting into the distance and seeing to his astonishment, that the answer was yes. Yes he did. Yes I do. Yes Yes Yes.

These are the words you hear on a cloudy beach, pondering a cosmos that only expands—opposing in every way, your efforts to shrink and disappear. Those who hate you will not be pacified if you sit down, shut up, go away. But those who love you, now and not yet, will forever see a space where you should be.

I have failed, yes. Wherever I thought I would be at this point, on this day, is not where I am. But in the light of this bright Solstice, I am finally ready to fail more and better. I am ready to start again, to pick up where I left off and finish, for the joy of the task and no other reason.

I see now that #IRL was never about the completion of a project. It was about the people who lived their truth loudly enough that I could see it through space and time – compass needles pointing at True North like sentinels for the Universe. The thing I forgot when I began was my own.