Finding me

I have a friend who is busy at the moment finding herself. I could, of course, have told her that she is right here, right now, but I figure that levity would not be taken in the right (or left) spirit, not right now, when she is what she is and how she feels. You see, she is a nice girl, a friendly girl, a girl who laughs and jokes and, a lot of the time, eats her way happily through life and its various shenanigans, but at the moment, right here, right now, she is a fairly unhappy girl and it is not fair that I should be making silly puns, jokes and other giggly statements about her.

Why is she unhappy? Oh, the usual female angst at dumping a boyfriend who doesn’t really deserve the angst that she is wasting on him but, try telling her that, right here, right now. It is not the time or my place and, at some detached level, I should not get involved except to stand by her because she is my friend, colleague and space sharer at work. But one tends to absorb the angst, the unhappiness and the afraid-ness that she is feeling at being suddenly single, suddenly alone and suddenly embarrassed at being part of a world that she no longer feels comfortable within.

That, I think happens to anyone, everyone, who is unexpectedly cut adrift from a familiar routine of belonging and being. In a way, a strange and occasionally unnerving kind of way, I have escaped that. For some reason I have always been able to maintain a core of privacy, of aloneness, of self, that no one, however close to me physically, emotionally and intellectually, has been able to touch. Perhaps, like Fred, a man I once met when I was in college and not as stable as I am now, I have found myself…at last.

Fred was an odd kind of bird. Much older, greyer and more battered than all us chickens who flocked fascinatedly at his feet, but still in search of the elusive psyche that was him. He had to ‘find’ himself, he insisted, and had travelled all over the world looking. At the time I met him, he touted himself as a Vietnam vet and was going off to the Far East with the Foreign Legion. Of course, that instantly alarmed my mother when I told her about the encounter, because she knew that something like the Foreign Legion, familiar only through Beau Peep (the comic strip) and the romantic air to the name of the organisation.

But in spite of his travels, Fred never found himself. Not in the short time I came across him through my college counsellor and occasionally in the campus store or at the mall. He always stopped to say hello and ask how I was doing, and I always was nice to him, looking forward to hearing more stories about the war, about his travels and about his cooking – he was a good cook I was told, but an even better teller of tales about food. Many years later I asked about him and was told that he had gone out of the country. Maybe he did find that ‘self’ that he was looking for, who knows!