Extinction by Terry Fan

Betty the Waitress

The map was spread across the table, wrinkled edges fighting for space against coffee cups and greasy dishes, as we plotted the distance from New Jersey to California. It was 2 a.m., and we were 22, four old friends squashed in a diner booth. Eileen was moving to California in two days, and the rest of us were going along for the drive. We were all one week sprung from college, and I was desperate for anything new, just needing to go, to move.

“More coffee?” asked the waitress, standing over us with a fresh pot in one hand and the other perched on her thin hip. Her name badge called her Betty, and she looked like one, with frizzled yellow hair and chipped magenta fingernails. She had the leathery glow of a lifetime sprawled on a beach blanket down the shore, a cigarette in one hand as the other flicked through a gossip magazine.

“Hey now. Where you guys going?” she asked, spotting our map.

“We’re driving to California,” said Eileen, blond curls shining. “We’re leaving on Saturday.”

“Ooh, California,” Betty said. “Push in,” she demanded and we obliged, wide-eyed, sliding further into our booth so she could sit, half her ass perched over the edge.

I pushed the map towards her and explained our routing.  We’d leave New Jersey and head first to Tennessee, where we’d walk on Beale Street in Memphis, big plastic cups of warm beer in hand as the blues spilled out of the clubs into the steamy twilight. We’d plow on through Oklahoma, where we didn’t know it yet, but we’d sleep in a bug-ridden roadside motel and wake up at sunrise to stand over the empty swimming pool out back, wondering about the rotting mattress resting in the deep end. We’d push on through endless Texas, where we’d eat enormous steaks and take goofy pictures with cowboys. And our final night would see us streaking through the desert of New Mexico, Eileen and I singing Counting Crows songs under a midnight bowl of stars as our friends slept in the back.

Betty listened with calculation, following my eager pencil scratches across the highway lines. Other booths tried to catch her eye but she pretended not to see. She was probably pretty, in a flashy way, when she was younger. I pictured her twenties full of hot pink bikinis and platform sandals, parades of boyfriends with motorcycles and tattoos. Tonight she looked washed out under the florescent lights. I noticed the start of liver spots on the back of her hands.

“You kids seem nice. I always wanted to go to Cali. Got any extra room for me?” she said. She grabbed a french fry off my plate and popped it into her mouth.  

I intuited the game. “Sure thing, Betty,” I said. “Everyone needs to drive to California once, right?”

“You know it,” she said. “I’ll find a babysitter for my kids. We’ll all be best friends by the time we get there. I bet the beaches in California are nicer than the ones here.”

We told her she could squeeze in. We’d leave noon Saturday, from the diner parking lot. Pack light.  

An angry guy at another table shouted out for his check, and the game was suddenly over. “Well, it’s been nice, kids,” she said, hauling herself up. “Enjoy your drive.”

She walked away, old and tired to my young eyes, and I felt a flash of fear. I saw in the set of her shoulders how easy it might be to become someone you had no intention of becoming, to be 47 and dreaming of driving away with a car full of strangers towards a bluer sea. I was full of the terror you feel at 22 when you have no idea who you are or what to be, and the future is catching up with you. When I closed my eyes all I could ever see was a road, a snaking asphalt of exit signs blasting by, radio up and windows down. I didn’t know where I wanted to go but I knew I couldn’t sit still.

I thought of Betty from time to time over the next nine years, as I built my life brick by brick. Of course I thought of her on that cross-country drive, the last time my friends and I would be together and free, with every door still wide open for us. I thought of her again when I flew to England a few months later on a working visa, armed with nothing but one brave friend, a hostel reservation for the first two nights and a hazy plan to get a job, find an apartment, and make a life on the opposite side of a big ocean. I remembered her when I came home six months and 12 countries later, with strong shoulders from backpacking, $44 in my bank account and a heart bursting with a level of confidence I’d never known before.  

But one blink of a year later I was miserable, commuting for three hours a day on crowded, dirty trains towards a desk job in Manhattan that sounded cool on paper, like something I should want to be doing, but I didn’t.

So on my 25^th birthday I reminded myself of Betty and left that job for a new one in the travel industry. And that beautiful little job brought me everywhere – to the Galapagos Islands, where I snorkeled with sharks and laid flat on my drunken back at midnight on the deck of a small wooden ship, dazzled to realize that even the stars were different in this opposite hemisphere, gazing at the Southern Cross instead of the North Star. To a colorful marketplace in Lima, Peru, where I held on tight through my very first earthquake. To the sun-bleached Atacama Desert in Chile, and to the Nazca Lines, where I flew in a tiny red four passenger airplane and tried not to vomit on the pilot. Just this winter I counted my blessings and set foot on the rocky shores of Antarctica for the first time, penguins flocking around my heavy boots and the briny sea smell in my nose. If it’s possible that there is a portal on this planet to another one, then that secret doorway is in the rough waters of the Drake Passage, and on the other side is a miracle of blue ice and bright light. I've stood at the bottom of the earth and felt true wonder, and have been deeply thankful. 

For unknown reasons, I was born with a restless heart. At 22, in that diner booth, I didn’t know how far I could go on this earth, in this life. All I knew was that the world was big, and that I was small, and that I was afraid. I was scared to wake up and be 30, 42, 55, and wonder where it all went, all that limitless space and air.

I watched Betty closely that night, the way she small-talked with the truck drivers and drunk teenagers like a pro, how she sighed as she leaned along the bakery display counter to rest. She kept checking her watch. She felt restless, too.  

It’s my opinion that there are a lot of Betty's out there, actually. People who are dimly aware of the enormous scope of this planet and that have a real itch to feel the miles collect under tired feet, but who get caught up in their lives and somehow just never get there. This is human and normal, and I get it. Life feels long when you’re at the starting gate, and it’s easy to think to yourself, later, later. Someday. I’ll go on that trip/write that book/go back to school eventually, when the time is right. When the money is there. When I meet someone new, when the kids are grown. All of these future days feel like a guarantee when you are young and hopeful and full of plans.

Although I have tried, I don’t believe in later. When I thought of the future, even back then, all I could ever see was loss, the way our moments all slip towards an eventual decline. No one is promised a glowing tomorrow and plenty of good people don’t get one at all, and there is no discernible reason to the way it’s doled out.  Maybe this belief system makes me morbid, or melancholy, I’m not sure. I choose to think of it as a blessing and let it anchor me deep into the earth. My bible is imprinted with one simple thought: you can spend your time dreaming about the future, or you can put your feet on the ground and walk.

Last summer, I went to Africa. One morning, I sat with friends under the equatorial light in a safari vehicle that smelled like sweat and sunshine, and watched as one lone giraffe galloped across the Serengeti’s dusty horizon line. A few days later we stood together on a rooftop in Zanzibar, and I held my hand over my heart as the first notes of a muezzin’s call to prayer rang out across a city made of stone. I looked out over rusted tin roofs to a flawless blue sea and felt a happiness so deep it almost twisted into pain. Every decision I’d ever made that walked me towards that moment had been the right one. And for the rest of my life, I have the gift of remembering that moment of full-bodied joy, that sureness of heart and step.

A few months ago, I mentioned Betty to a friend. In telling the story, I realized I hadn’t thought about her, or what she represents to me, in years. I suppose I don’t need to hold that memory close anymore, like a talisman against time and loss. I’m too busy living a life that fits.

That night in the diner it felt good to be with friends, planning an adventure. It was time to start walking. I watched Betty, ducked my head, and said a fleeting prayer for all of my future selves. Then I fell back into the lines of the map. 

Lisa Barbero

If standing up to applaud an article was a thing people did, I'd do it for this guy. Read it, all you busy busy soldiers of life. Find the time.

The "Busy' Trap - NYTimes.com

Make your choice, adventurous stranger.
Strike the bell and bide the danger.
Or wonder 'til it drives you mad,
What would have followed, if you had.

-C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

And An Awkward Hello To You, Too!

I like to write.

If you know me well, you probably already know this. I guess it’s sort of obvious. As a little girl, I was a near-obsessive reader and journaler. There are drawers stuffed to the brim of barely-legible diaries at my mother’s house, collecting dust, that I will never be able to throw away. The early ones have dreamy adolescent flower or constellation designs on their shiny covers, and satisfying little locks on the side for the illusion of privacy, of having secrets worth keeping.

Over the years, these tiny books started to stack up as I chronicled my mostly-normal life. The first one I can locate is from 2^nd grade, age eight. In it, I wrote in unsteady pencil about my beagle Frisky, about Jesus and his father, God (thanks, Catholic school), and a lot, and I mean a lot, about my friends. The ramblings about my very, very best friends have that devotional little girl tone you can only conjure up when you are smaller than five feet and younger than ten, and are convinced that everyone else is way cooler than you will ever be.

As I crawled forward into teenagerhood, the focus in my journals (not “diaries” anymore, god, that’s so juvenile) changed, as it should, onto teenage things: boys. Boys who liked me, but I didn’t like back. Boys I liked who I despaired would never, ever notice me. There are frighteningly specific catalogues of first dates and first kisses and first fights. There is a legitimate five page spread, age 13, about the time I called the cute lifeguard from the neighborhood pool to ask him on a date. (He declined, as he was “kinda busy that summer,” thus handing me my very first romantic rejection to weep over.)

Of course other topics came up, too. That my parents just didn’t get me. More about how much I loved my friends. Generic complaints about my grades, my skin, my body, my hair. What to be when I grew up, and how I’d die, just crawl away and actually expire, if I didn’t get a part in the school play. That someday I was going to live far, far away and be exotic and sophisticated and mysterious and wear beautiful dresses and drink coffee in foreign cafes (probably wearing a scarf and big sunglasses) and read poetry and have adventures and see the world, the whole world! I doodled the word California in bubble letters a lot. Exclamations points and dramatically underlined phrases pound their way into every paragraph.

But let’s get real, during those years I mostly wrote about boys.

In college life changed and became, in equal measure, more interesting and more difficult. I wrote then, too, even more than before. I had a lot more to say. I’d sit up in the middle of the night in my creaky dorm room bed, leaning against a sweaty cinderblock wall as I typed furiously on my very first laptop over thumping music from other people's parties and lives. During those years I wrote about family, about sickness, about falling in and out of real love, about the astonishing brevity of a human life and what on earth I was supposed to do with mine. I wrote like it would save me, like it was breathing. I think it actually was breathing, for awhile.  

After college, I got swept up in the business of creating a real life, and I wrote far less. Whole years are now blank and mostly unremembered – if I didn’t write it down, if I can’t flip to the exact page where it happened and I noted it, it doesn’t feel like it happened. The only exception to the non-writing years are when I’ve traveled. If I’m on the road – any road, anywhere – you cannot tear the notebook of the moment out of my hands. Looking back now, my travel journals dazzle me with their intensity. In those pages, I can quantify my excitement by just counting the adjectives in each sentence. I can see myself at 23, stomach-down on the top bunk of an overnight train through Norway, in the bumpy scrawl of my handwriting. Those dirty little books are detailed and passionate and certainly ridiculous, and I love them more than is reasonable.

But aside from those fleeting times, almost all of my 20’s went by in an unexamined haze.

About two years ago this began to bother me. A lot of things began to bother me, actually, most of them involving the fact that I was now a real human adult instead of just a work in progress, and that I wasn’t positive I liked her. I kept thinking of the self I thought I’d be when I was 16, felt a little shadow girl watching me from a dark corner, wondering. I was feeling restless and vaguely incorrect, and wasn't sure how to fix it. So, I decided to do the only thing that made sense: write about it.

At first it felt unnatural, but it got easier with time. The urge to write became a little bit aggressive, a little bit chronic. In an attempt to try something new, I took an online writing class in creative nonfiction/memoir. And this, dear friends, was the moment.

For some reason, I attacked this class. I realized right away that I had no idea what I was doing, and this embarrassed me, so I used that shame as fuel to work harder. I learned things that are obvious in retrospect, but that I had never been given the tools to understand. I learned the importance of writing artfully and deliberately, instead of just blathering. I learned to write for a reader, which is new and scary for a private journaler-girl. I learned how to write dialogue, which for some reason scared the crap out of me.  I learned to knock it off with the adverbs, and to show and not tell (which I am not doing here).

I know now that I’d rather hurl my body out a window than write a first draft of anything, but I also know that I have the patience to sit and polish one page for hours before I’m satisfied with the rhythm of it. And speaking of that, I understand now that writing has a rhythm, that it’s just another kind of music, and that if I arrange my words just right a song can be hidden underneath.  

I learned to give criticism with both kindness and clarity, and to accept it with an open mind. Even if it makes you cry. (Please, especially if it makes you cry.) And it is important to note that the best teachers are the ones who aren’t afraid to tell you that you suck, and that the only reasonable answer to that is to work harder.

I finished that class and took another. Finished that one, and took the next. I’ve been in class nonstop for eight months, producing new work every week. I now understand that the craft of writing is much, much harder than I ever gave it credit for, and that I want to be good at it.

The problem is that now I’m broke. I can’t afford another class right now, and I also feel like it’s time to stop hiding in a virtual classroom and just start working. My fear is that my dear friend laziness is going to creep in without the prompt of a paid-for class keeping me in check, so I’ve decided on a new plan: this little blog.

My goal is simple: to keep writing one essay, or story, per week, all summer. I have no objective clearer than that, no planned theme whatsoever. I’d like to try all different things. Maybe some travel essays, that’d be fun. I’d definitely like to try my hand at horror, give you all a look at the nightmares always plaguing me. Maybe I’ll try fiction, but I just don’t think I have that in me. My aim is to never say an untrue thing, which is harder than it sounds. 

And my request of you, my friends, is also simple: just be aware that I’m doing this. Peer pressure is a mighty powerful thing. Knowing that you will be (maybe?) compelled to click this little link from time to time to see what’s new in my head, keeping your virtual eye on me, will probably give me the motivation to find more to say. Even if it’s not polished, or original, or even remotely interesting, at least I’ll be writing. And with time, we’ll see where it goes.

On off days, I’ll probably post other things. Poetry, quotes, little artsy pictures. And I don’t know, videos of puppies probably. If none of that floats your internet boat, may I suggest you just find somewhere else to waste your desk time? You will be bored here.

Here’s the thing: if I put some of the energy I put into my ramblings, nonsensical emails into the actual creation of an actual essay, perhaps this chronic over-emailer will bother your inboxes less, too. One can hope.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. I promise you will find no genius here, no real art, just simple practice. We shall see.