You Are Here - Holding Space

“My problem,” I was telling Leah as we headed into the bar that Thursday night, “is that I am an excellent drunk driver.”

“With great power comes great responsibility,” she said sagely, but she seemed a bit distracted. I could tell this whole thing with Will really had her mixed up. Then again, Leah’s always been easily distracted. I chalk it up to her extra sensitivity: it’s her only weakness, in my opinion.

She held the bar’s front door open for me and we entered the cool, cavern-like darkness of the long pub. We used to visit a great deal of different bars, but lately Leah had only felt like seeing Sean—another product of her sensitivity was her tendency toward gargantuan, impossible crushes—and what can I say. She’s my best friend. I humored her preferences, knowing that someday she’d get over him, or the ache would be too much for her sleeve-prone heart. Either way, sometime soon we’d return to the rest of the alcoholic circuit we’d established. In the mean time, Sean was a good bartender, as bartenders go, and Leah’s little crush on him didn’t seem to be hurting anybody.

“Whiskey neat and a gin and tonic?” Sean greeted us when we straddled our barstools.

“Double gin and tonic,” I clarified, grinning. Sean nodded, then glanced at Leah.

“I… I think I’ll have water,” she said. “Or maybe a club soda.” Both Sean and I stared at her for a moment.

“Rough night last night?” Sean finally guessed, serving up my drink and leaning on the bar toward Leah, a look of sincere puzzlement crossing his face. Auburn eyebrows scrunched together over his brown eyes, and I saw her self-consciously avoid his gaze. She shook her head.

“Just ready for a change,” she mumbled. I studied her over the rim of my highball glass, ice cubes numbing my upper lip as they pushed, wet and cold, against my skin. “What?” she asked, noticing my lingering stare.

“Mnnph,” I mumbled into the gin. My voice echoed back at me like I was in a shallow, dark cave.

Whenever I was in a grumpy mood but didn’t want to acknowledge that I was in a grumpy mood, I made a mental list of things I liked so that I had a reserve of positive things to bring up in case Leah was feeling a little slow on conversation herself. Here are the things I liked that night: the smooth feeling of the wood-but-not-lacquered bar beneath my fingers, the way I could make the symbol for the Olympics on the bar top with the condensation rings from my gin and tonic, the fact that Sean had recently had hooks installed under the bar for ladies—namely, Leah and I, the loudest and most frequent complainers—to hang their purses on, and the way I could feel the carbonation up in my sinuses.

Leah’s eyes glowed bright after a very long silence, during which she’d been contemplatively sipping water. “Is there anything in your life you want to change?” she asked. I didn’t answer, swirled the ice cubes and a slice of lime around in my drink. “I mean, do you ever have those moments when you see yourself clearly and you just think, I see now what I have to cut—cut or die?”

“You’re fine the way you are,” I assured her. I was glad: I knew all the things a best friend was supposed to say, and I always said them on cue. She was quiet. Took another sip of water. “Okay,” I said, taking her a little more seriously. “Yes. Sometimes.” I swallowed what remained of my first drink, and nodded at Sean when he raised his eyebrows in the question he didn’t need to ask: want another? “I want to lose twenty pounds,” I offered. She didn’t even dignify this offering with a glance.

“Sometimes I want to live in a tree fort,” she mused.

“Might get cold in the winter,” Sean interjected, sliding the glass across the bar at me. This time, he’d remembered that I liked three lime wedges in my gin-and-tonic, not just one.

“And sometimes I want to go to the desert and lay on a rock and look at the stars all night,” she added. I looked at Sean, and he looked at me, and I could tell he was waiting for one of us to crack, for one of us to lighten up, so he could laugh with us, and everything would be okay again. I felt a little disgusted by his need for everything to be cheerful and easy and buoyant and light. I downed my drink quickly and shoved the glass at him. Here is something I liked: the sound my glass made when I pushed it too hard over the bar, and it nearly toppled, that sound—glass tripping on wood, whoosh.

“We had an infant death today,” I said to Leah, changing the subject. I knew she hated hearing about the kids, knew how each detail made her shudder, but I also knew how hearing about it could pull her out of herself, and I’d have done anything at that point to bring her away from the lost, wandering place she’d gone mentally, away from sacrificing herself to Sean’s ridicule.

Not that Sean had ever ridiculed her, but I couldn’t imagine what he actually thought of us, considering all the excuses we’d given him to think of us as absolutely absurd (at best) or absolutely disgusting (at worst). We didn’t need to add batshit-insane to the already growing list that included drunk, slutty, bitchy, sloppy, underemployed (in Leah’s case) or bizarrely employed (in mine).

Leah looked at me, a frown creasing her brow under blond bangs. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said. “I really, really don’t want to hear about dead babies.” She slugged back her ice water and stood from her stool. “I’ll be right back,” she said, heading for the ladies’ room.

I didn’t want to talk about dead babies either, not really. But this version of Leah, divorced from our normal rowdy, good time, was so difficult to be around. She looked past the things around her, now, including me. Her brow was always furrowed. Her lips were always down-turned. Her shoulders were always hunched forward. And she was always, always sober.

Leah was not a fun sober girl. I shook my head, shook it free of Leah’s problems, shook it free of stillborn infants, shook it free of all the other things I carried inside me, in a dark space. Things I liked about evenings after work included gin, wine, vodka, and, when she was being herself, Leah.

There wasn’t much else.



I dreamed I was in the prep room. On the table before me, a woman’s body, naked, dead. I cut an incision into the woman’s neck, looking for the jugular, the carotid—I could not find them. The universe, instead, gaped at me in all its starry blackness from within the incisions.

Still, I knew I had to bleed her.

I cut wrists, the insides of elbows, between the thighs, looking for an artery, any artery, any lifeline between me and what remained of this woman’s lifeblood. But nothing—only the inky night sky beneath her skin.

Finally, I took my scalpel and cut into the woman’s chest cavity. There, nestled beneath supernovae, I found it: the woman’s still-beating heart. It was radiant in its beauty, in its veined musculature. It throbbed there—it throbbed.

I felt myself being pulled back from the woman as men—men I knew! Men I had loved, had fucked, had lusted after in bars—men who had let me down time and again—crowded this woman’s body at the table. One by one, they prodded dirty fingers into the universe inside this woman, poked roughly between her stars, jabbing at her vibrant, fragile, impossibly-alive heart.

“Stop! I cried, unheeded. “She’s still alive! You’ll infect her! Stop!” I began weeping. “It hurts!”

Because, yes, the more men pushed their calloused, hangnailed, rough hands into the woman’s chest, the more my own heart ached. I pushed through the men, one hand clutching a fold of my scrubs over my own heart. When I pushed through them, I threw my own body on top of the woman’s. “It hurts!” I repeated, exhausted. The men began to fade away, and I lifted my head from the cold torso to look at this woman, the assailed.

My eyes met my own, my very own features.




I passed Will in the hallway of the house we shared, but these days he was a ghost, merely a shade of the roommate I’d once palled around with, causing ruckus and weeding gardens. He spent most of his time at work, I thought, or maybe hiding in the basement with his computers, all the lights off. Certainly, the rare times I came home sober enough to check instead of stumbling upstairs to my bedroom, he was down there at all hours of the night, pale face lit by four glowing screens, fingers flying, flying across the keyboard. The space all around him was always dark, and the light from his screens reflected off his glasses, making him look distant, blind, frightening.

I stopped checking on him.



Sean was tending a table; his cocktailer was late, and the place was getting busy. I studied Leah for a moment before I took the plunge. “Why,” I asked cautiously, pausing for a long pull on the merlot I’d selected tonight, “are you wasting your time hanging around here I could name half a dozen guys at any other bar who’d want to fuck you tonight.”

“You know why,” she answered, almost too quiet for me to hear her over the flirting, clinking glasses, laughter, rock music. “And maybe I don’t want to get fucked anymore.”

“Jesus,” I said. “When was the last time?”

She didn’t hesitate. “A month and two days ago.” She almost smiled, but hid it behind her Diet Coke.

“That’s like some kind of record for you,” I said. I hadn’t intended it, but I knew I sounded bitter, even judgmental. She carefully avoided my eyes.

“When was your last?” she asked levelly.

I paused. I took another drink.

“December,” I said.

:Blow jobs don’t count,” she said. Meanly. We were both silent, watching boys flirt with women at the bar, watching women cross and uncross their legs. We were at an impasse—our first.

I chased a shot of gin with the rest of my glass of merlot, and grimaced when I swallowed the last of it down.

“I don’t think you should drive home tonight,” Leah said. I glanced at her and rolled my eyes.

“I’m fine, and you know it,” I said. We were both quiet. Things I liked about Leah before she became a holier-than-thou bitch included her sense of humor, her willingness to feel other people’s pain, and the way she was always game for a good time. Sean came, finally, back behind the bar. “Can I have another glass?” I asked.

“Sure, Chloe,” he said, filling it promptly with the deep red liquid. I looked at Leah defiantly before I raised my glass to her.

“To my best friend,” I toasted. “The nun.”

She pursed her lips, then raised her glass solemnly. “To my best friend,” she echoed. “Queen of the Twelve Steps.” We both swallowed our drinks in full, eyes locked until we had to tilt our heads back far enough to swallow the dregs. Then we turned, simultaneously, on our barstools back toward the bar, and dropped our glasses hard on the bar. The bar seemed, for how busy it was, suddenly too quiet, the glasses on the bar too loud. The space between our stools was only about four inches, but I knew what stretched between us was a galaxy.



I admit it: I left the bar angry, and I kept a flask under my seat to help me focus on my lists when I was too angry to do it on my own. I took a long pull on the flask before I started the engine, and started listing as I drove toward home. Things I liked about being drunk included having a warm chest so I could forget the burden of a universe I apparently carried inside there, a blurry memory: the better to forget your rejection with, my dear, and the way lights glowed brighter—television sports scores, text messages on my cell phone, taxicab service lights, brake lights.

Brake lights.

Brake lights.



In that moment when I saw in myself, behind my eyes, that great endless nothing of stars and void, there were so many people I wished that I had had the opportunity to love fully. I thought of the endless parade of human bodies I saw at work, day in and day out; someone out there sent in the clothing we dressed them in, someone out there provided pictures so I could do their hair and makeup just so. Someone out there paid for our services, paid for embalming or refrigeration, paid for burial or cremation, paid for the Our Fathers or Open Microphones, Ave Marias or Winds Beneath My Wings.

I wondered: who would put their fingers inside the cavity of my life and pry it open? I thought of Leah, of how she was the only one left. I wondered, sternum crushed against a broken steering wheel post, universe laid bare at last, would Leah believe the fib that I had loved her enough? Things had started to come apart at the seams that night; we had begun to see the big, black spaces gloaming in one another. I had loved Leah, as much as I could love anyone. As much as I could love anyone.

But who can love enough with the space of the universe around her heart? I thought of that great vastness, that huge wheeling of sporadic solar systems, dying stars, moons orbiting, orbiting, even the great rock masses of planets having partners, companions, and me, alone, the lights so bright, a dramatic contrast to all I carried within me. I held it all within me, I held that space, and then, as light closed in on me—so many lights, so many colors, flashing, wheeling, a carnival through blood and broken glass—I released this holding space into what lay beyond. I surrendered to the eternal loneliness, whatever it may prove to be.

Yes, I wished I could have loved more fully. But we always only do our best to those we love best. To my best friend, I thought. The brave and holy and alone.