So naturally I wanted somebody to just tell me. That’s me all over. Show me the back of the book.
I figured, fine, there are people who do this, who sit down and ask the voices things on your behalf. I even drafted the email. Dear so-and-so, this is going to sound nuts, but: am I a Wanderer? And if I am, where am I from? Just tell me which world. I won’t make trouble. I’d just like to know whose I am. I had my thumb over the send button at midnight like an idiot.
And I couldn’t do it. Not because I lost my nerve, though I’ve got plenty to lose. It was stranger than that. Every time I tried to actually form the question — am I one — it went soft on me, like a word you say too many times until it stops being a word. The wanting was real. The question kept dissolving.
Later I found out somebody already asked it, almost exactly. Some fellow in one of these circles asked the voices, point blank, am I a Wanderer, and what density am I from. You’d think that’s the whole reason you’d call long distance. And the voices wouldn’t answer him. Gently, but flat: not for you to know, not right now. They turned it around on him instead. Asked him to sit with why he needed to know so badly. What he thought the label would do for him that he couldn’t do for himself.
Which, when I read it, made me want to throw the phone across the room, because it’s exactly the kind of answer that’s no help at all and also completely correct.
So nobody’s going to hand it to me. There’s no card that comes in the mail. Whatever I am, it’s not a fact I get to look up. It’s a thing I have to go down into the dark and remember, the hard way, by myself, and then live like it’s true. I hate that. I hate that it’s the only honest version.
I’m going to try anyway. I’m actually going to sit still and try.