Not all of us feel it. I didn’t feel it, and now I do: that fragile belonging to another person, or to a group of people, so unique and irreplaceable. It makes life bittersweet.
The first tastes I had of this were in college. Freshman year there is the inevitable grasping at straws; we arrive, a loosely connected group of teens eager to become the people they want to be, to discover who that is, to experience everything that was held off by parents or impossible in the tiny pool of high school. We banged hard against each other, trying to connect. Failing sometimes and succeeding in those brilliant, small moments that suggested we were coming to a new home.
Again, and more intensely, sophomore year, because I was a transfer student into a more elite school, one of only four entering midyear into a tightly-knit class just shy of four hundred. It was more of a struggle because everyone else had already found their hard-won niche in a freshman hallway or some corner of our one dining hall (which was severely segregated according to the unwritten rules of The Few Who Gained Admission Last Year). I bumbled through with a cigarette in one hand and a cheap beer in the other. Eventually a handful of others found me in my corner of the basement party, and I was again for a short time home.
And now it is the hardest, the most tenuous and precious. I forget that I am Other. I treat people as I always have. The smile is the same smile, the gesticulating hands are still mine. When I am greeted with reserve it takes me a moment to remember myself; I think the other person is plain rude until I remember that my dress is just this side of hinting at terrorism, oppression. I am a blazing flag of friendliness in garb that suggests to everyone else that I should be stern or shy or timid. I am none of those things. It might be perfectly intuitive to some and I’ll never know. But by now I know that it is not always a smooth ride between me and the stranger. They clue me in with a blank stare. And I miss being one of the inscrutable many.
There are a few people to whom I belong and will always belong. We may go our separate ways and I’ve been through enough goodbyes to know that most of us will. They will take with them a piece of me, they already have, and I will pray for good for them thereafter and hope that we are reunited in Gardens in which identity is no consideration.
I suppose that it is easy to forget, looking at a religion that seems so inescapably monolithic (we dress the same, we pray the same, we greet the same worldwide) that Muslims get lonely too. It’s not easy finding one’s social way in a community made up of every race, nationality, language and background. Some of us convince ourselves that belonging and being known are pipe dreams in this life, and we chase people for other reasons and make do and become happy. Others of us burn a hole in our hearts waiting to be understood by someone who seems too impossible to exist. Do we hold out? What more intimacy can we wrangle out of this life? When we find a place lacking, do we leave? How long a wait is it worth? These questions never leave, and that is our tragedy.
Most of us slice ourselves into pieces, and express our different longings to different people. When someone comes along who makes us feel whole again, it is shocking. We disbelieve our own hearts. With time it sinks in and then it is even more terrible than before: you cannot lose a fantasy, but you can certainly lose a person. But what you have, what you’ve been waiting for, when it is in front of you? There are only two options. You hold on for dear life, and pray to God that it never ends, or you walk away and don’t give yourself anything to grieve.
It’s either bittersweet or bitter. Take your medicine.
