unlimited access
The baby gate finally went up. The kid had offered to build it, but he declined to read the instructions, declined his mother’s help, wanting to just figure it out like LEGO.
“RTFM? Read the frickin’ manual, the first law?” I said to him sunnily, breezily, quizzically. “I think even your dad would tell you that.”
He put the gate together. His mom pointed out where he’d gone wrong. (“So one of you has read the instructions,” I said, amused.)
“Missy, you’re getting a gate!” the youngest one said, a few times. Each time I reminded her that I was getting a gate, that the gate was for me, not for the scrappy canine scamp.
He over-torqued the tension rods, complaining it was “still flexing,” while his mother repeatedly told him to stop. He was striving to make something that would never loosen, that would be like a part of the wall.
“A little flex is okay,” I finally said, “like a bone that doesn’t break.” I’d recently explained to him that, resilient though a child may be, they are still prone to injury, that their jellybones might even be more susceptible to injury, to floating out of alignment. “Everything is always moving just a little, so you want flex. You don’t want it to be so tight that it springs out, or loose enough to just fall down. And it’s drywall, which is always a little soft, so.” I piped back down, trying to not annoy anyone around me. Later I would thank the kid for being “our trusted adult” in his father’s absence, which is to say, for doing the manual labor while suffering our good advice.
The dog had noticed what was up. She’d parked herself outside the hallway gate almost immediately.
The family was getting ready to leave. My best friend was really hoping the baby gate would help, just as much as I was.
“She is a handful,” I was saying. “And I mean, we wouldn’t have it any other way.”
My best friend raised her brows. Then she pinched her fingers and squinted, a wink, eyeballing the distance between index finger and thumb, the universal gesture for ‘just a scootch’: “If she turned it down juuust this much,” she said.
“Well,” I said, as the gaggle moved to the front door. “You know what they say. You become like the five people you spend the most time with. If she’s becoming more monstrous…”
My best friend laughed. “Do they say that? That’s a thing?” she asked me. I nodded. She pointed at her kids. “And Grandpa,” she said, mentally counting out how many people to blame the dog on.
I did two thumbs, this guy, taking full credit for the dog’s appetite for attention.
A good friend recently asked if he could offer me some advice.
I’d sighed. “Yes?” I’d grumbled.
“My two hopes for you,” he continued, “is someone who respects your boundaries.”
I nodded grimly.
“And someone who is available.”
I’d nodded, then stood up, trying to not stand abruptly or move too fast, pretending that this was a perfectly normal moment to choose to rinse out my mug. I turned away from my friend to use the kitchen sink.
I’d experienced a flare of anger, one that took my breath away, and I needed to quickly hide long enough to think about what I was feeling. My first thought was hostile, bristling: Where the hell did all these good men come from? With 30, 50 people already queued up trailing behind, all needing to be mentored or managed or sponsored, concentric rings of indispensability, good men who think, I have time for a girlfriend or spouse, plenty time for a current partner or a new friend, why not, I have tons of availability, plenty of calendar slots. Of course I was remembering being asked to pencil myself in on Calendly and fucking losing it.
I turned the thought around, facing the mental gun toward myself and peering down its barrel. I absently stared into the mug as the faucet ran, waiting for the water to run clean.
Did I think I was an emotionally available person? I imagined a bridge, a simple 2D line arc I was almost capable of actually visualizing, and I imagined myself running all the way across it, rather than walking the normal distance, standing in the middle.
Ah. I saw it now.
If I ran all the way across the bridge each time, if I always ran the entire distance across a single thread of connection, that meant I could run all the way back across, doubling the distance between myself and the threat, slamming and locking every door behind me as I went.
I’m not anxious for connections, I’m not open to them, I’m avoidant of them, picking and choosing and then fleeing.
Only very few long, ponderous seconds had passed. The cup was, by now, rinsed out. My friend said he was off to take a work call. I nodded, turning to watch him leave.
Yesterday I accepted a friend request. Then I’d DM’d her. “There’s nothing on my profile,” I joked, “but I do play a lot of Tomodachi Life.”
“Yessssss,” she replied. Then: “AuDHD?” Then, a meme gif of two galaxy brains, a lemniscate of mirror neurons passing between them.
“STOP IT,” I replied, to her glee.
After some back and forth I admitted that I’d never DM’d a relative stranger on that platform before, and that she could even come find me on other platforms—that this was just my alt, for doomscrolling. I gave her my actual handle, invited her to come friend me. She tried. She couldn’t.
Oh. “The hunkering,” I said apologetically. It’d taken me 10 minutes, maybe even 15, to log in myself, going through the multifactor process, authenticating, unlocking. It was a series of gates I had to unlock and pass through, in order to finally meet another person on common, level ground.
“Sorry about that!” I probably said. “The hunkering,” I reminded her.
Now the house was silent, and I’d already been in and out of the hallway a few times. I was latching the gate behind me again when I looked down at the dog. She was beyond piteous, collapsed on the ground outside of my physical boundary. I unlatched the gate and let it swing open, walking to my bedroom, left that door open behind me, too, and sat down to get some bullshit done. Ah, the drudgery of staying alive, staying in the game.
She walked in, collapsing on the floor behind me, eventually moving to the bed. After a while, I scooted toward her and touched her for a while, her face and chest and ears. She pinned my hand with her paw and licked it.
“Hey, I appreciate you, too,” I said to her softly. Of course I understand that there is only this, this lingering moment between us; how could I not. I went back to my bullshit.