The Day I Cried in a Red Trolley

We went to Asheville for Valentine’s Day and my husband’s birthday. I thought I was just taking a break, but what stayed with me wasn’t just the layered blue watercolors of the Smokies, the Art Nouveau buildings, or the vibrant and textured art scene. It was attention.

One rainy morning, I stood in a small trolley café waiting for a latte and an Asheville chai for the birthday guy when I suddenly thought, This is where my younger self would have wanted to be. This was the whole vibe. And then “The Sound of Silence” came on.

“People talking without speaking,

People hearing without listening.”

I’ve heard that song my whole life, but at that moment, it felt like a lament. In fact, I realized it was a lament.

I started crying. It wasn’t one emotion. It was all of them — grief, gratitude, joy, memory, and a sense of sacred connection. I decided to just let the tears flow, to let them baptize me from within.

When I was younger, I knew how to inhabit my life. A cup of coffee, a park bench that served as a front seat to the whole world passing by, a long conversation. That was enough. I wasn’t optimizing anything. I was inside the moment, watching, feeling.

The weird thing was that I felt pretty invincible back then, like I had all the time in the world to get my life together, but I was also wholly aware of the mortality of the moment. However many stretched ahead, each moment deserved its own life.

Somewhere along the way, life grew fuller, responsibilities multiplied, my attention fragmented, and slowly self-consciousness took up more space.

Self-consciousness is about being seen.

Attention is about seeing.

Standing in that café, I felt the tension between the two.

Do I look ridiculous?

Are people staring?

Pull yourself together.

Right there, I could feel the tension between presence and performance, between being fully in the moment and worrying about how I appeared.

But the presence was still there. It hadn’t vanished.

The drinks were finally ready. I looked at the barista through my pathetic tears and thanked her. I stepped out into the rain and let the rain merge with my tears. My grief and the Mother-of-the-World’s grief became one.

I couldn’t fight the self-consciousness, but I wanted something more, and that was presence. The moment was important, even if normalcy refused to ordain it.

I wasn’t the freak of nature — the world of man was.

Realizing I wasn’t the problem, I kept walking, one foot in front of the other, as I unapologetically glitched between the two perspectives.

It was a messy sort of presence, and that was okay, because I wasn’t optimizing.