I Packed A Bag And Left For Uncertainty

By Eric Malcolm

            She told me she never thought she would fall in love with me.  She didn’t expect to feel what she felt.  We only knew each other for three days, and already I felt things for her that I never knew were possible.  Think back to your first love, the first time you were in complete awe of someone, and they suffered the same emotional response that you did, you find yourself high on adoration, sexually fueled exhilaration, and complete wonderment that this person existed all this time, and not even knowing them you somehow still survived.  This girl that I was crazy for told me she was engaged to a man, a thirty-year-old acid dealer in New Orleans, her step-father’s brother, a guy eleven year’s older then me with two kids, a mortgage, good looks, charm, and natural charisma.  I was a nineteen-year-old metro sexual drug aficionado stocking milk four days a week at Marc’s.

            I went home.  I packed my bag with a few change of clothes, cigarettes, a Zippo (that was a gift from my beloved Amanda), and twenty bucks.  My plan was to head to southern Ohio, to visit my father that I never knew, which would possibly shine light on who I was and to hopefully give myself some insight on who I was as an individual.  From there, I would head to New Orleans, to drop in unexpectedly and trusting fate I would crash the wedding, and just looking at her in the chapel she would know how I felt and understand.  Damn that movie “The Graduate.”

            My first stop was my friends in the country.  I was leaving, and I had to say my goodbyes.  I explained my plan, my motive, and we all toasted with a bottle of Vodka.  I remember thinking that maybe if I drank enough, I could just pass out and in the morning, everything would just resolve itself.

            I did befall drunkenness, but instead of passing out, I sat on my friend’s roof (where I originally fell in love), writing my goodbye letters.  Who knew how long I would be gone?

            My first letter was to Tim.  I wrote to him that I envied his relationship with Cassidy, and that whatever dilemma came up in life, if they remembered that each other’s happiness was the only thing important, everything would be okay.

            I wrote letters to a few other friends of mine, all conveying the same general message, of not giving up on life, and more importantly love.  The last letter I wrote was to Amanda.

            It almost seemed as if all the other letters were just an excuse to just keep on drinking, building up my courage to just tell her what I really needed to say.  When I finished, I took the labeled letters and gave them to my friend Joe, who promised to give them to everybody the following day.  I drove a kid named Mike home, and planned on crashing at his house.  If I went home, I’d lose my nerve.

            Even being drunk, I never went to sleep.  For the first time in my life, I had a quest filled with uncertainty, but I embraced my unwritten destiny with open arms.

            That morning, I showered, and then called my boss at Marc’s.  I fabricated an excuse get off work for the next week.  Next, I called my father’s mother, and obtained Greg’s phone number in southern Ohio.  With his number, I called and talked to his newly wed wife, getting their address.  I didn’t want to tell her I was coming.  The possibility of her informing me to wait for a scheduled visit was a risk I wasn’t willing to take.  I told her I wanted to send them a card.

            Mike was sleeping in his bed.  I had rung up several long-distance calls on his phone, but it didn’t seem to matter.  This was my quest.  I left, and departed on my epic journey.

            A pack of cigarettes later, I found myself further from my home then I had ever ventured.  The preset radio stations all faded to static, and the only audible stations my stereo received were pure country.  I stopped at a rest area, where an elderly man gave me directions to my father’s small town of Warsaw, Ohio.  All the while a handicapped man enjoyed the subtle pleasure of splashing himself in the face with the rest stop’s drinking fountain directly behind me.  I pretended I didn’t see him, just the idea of being alone far from home stirred me to want to immediately get back in my car and keep on moving.

            I found Warsaw.  I was now in the town my father lived in, but I still had no idea of where he actually lived.  In the only gas station the town bestowed, I thumbed through the phone book and found his address.  The friendly woman manning the gas station wrote me detailed directions to his house, telling me to “turn right at the pole” and such.  Miraculously, I found it.

            The house sat in the middle of an open field, and I had a surprising admiration for my father.  He was living in a trailer park close to my home, and now he had a modest house out in the country, where life was simple, and a man could settle, under the wide-open sky, left with nothing but his own thoughts and the occasional cry of a rooster or chirp of a cricket.  It had a genuine Thoreau respectability to it.

            His wife answered my knock, and almost immediately (to my surprise) she knew who I was.  I was nervous that she would be angry about my completely unexpected visit, and I could even understand her resenting my unanticipated advent.  But she wasn't, she invited me in with a surprising friendliness that I didn’t understand.  I was (and am still) his son, and I guess that’s a sacred thing.  She even called him where he worked and told him of my unexpected appearance, with jubilation.

            She gave me the “dime tour” of their home, showing me the place, her beloved goats, and the chicken coups.  Back inside, while classic country music derived from their old-fashioned television set, I suddenly felt completely out-of-place.  I had hoped that seeing my father’s home would have consequentially forced an understanding of everything, and somehow I would have had an astoundingly significant epiphany of self-relevance.  It didn’t.

            My whole quest started to seem completely impromptu and meaningless.  What did I think would actually happen?  The spontaneity of the previous day began to fizzle, and I realized that I was stupefied.  Then I began to talk to Pam about what was really on my mind.  I told her about Amanda.  I told her that I loved her; I told her that I desperately needed her, that she was an angel that gave my life meaning, and that I would do anything to win her love and acceptance.  The mood completely changed.  Pam talked to me as if we were old dear friends, opening up to me and relating with a shared experience.  I haven’t seen Pam since, but I fell in love with her, and realized my father had finally met the right woman.

            I told her my half-baked plan of crashing Amanda’s wedding in New Orleans, and she never doubted my sincerity once.

            That was when she asked me something that completely turned my whole train of thought completely upside-down.  She asked me if I had told Amanda everything that I had told her.  How had this concept completely eluded my mind?  I asked her if it was stupid of me to leave without even meeting my father, my original plan, and she told me that she would take care of it.  She would make him understand.  I said goodbye, and left for home.

            Now it took a three-hour drive to realize something that was completely obvious by hindsight, but it didn’t matter.  I was going to see her, and that was all that mattered.  On my trip to southern Ohio, I was nervous, and confused that I would get lost, but the trip back was completely different, every road sign I observed made perfect sense, and it was honestly the easiest trip I ever took in my life.

            When I reached the street Amanda lived on, I saw Joe.  He looked at me smiling and completely surprised, and threw his hands in the air, gesturing, “What the hell are you doing back?”  I stopped, and told him that I really went to southern Ohio and visited my father’s home.  I told him that upon arriving there, I realized my destiny didn’t involve me staying, and that I had a problem that I couldn’t run from.  The best thing I could do was to just talk to Amanda, and confront the problem, no matter what the consequence meant.  Joe was on his way to her house.  He had kept his promise of delivering my message, but it was no longer required.  I was going to meet this dilemma head-on.

            When I pulled into her driveway, she sat on her family’s swing, looking as beautiful as she ever had, and I realized that I was glad that I came back.  Being gone only a day, I had missed her incredibly.  That idea alone startled me, and I knew that with the way I felt, and how deep it all ran, I had to be honest with her and tell Amanda that I knew for certain that I was passionately in love with her.  I relayed to her my trip of crazily impulsive self-discovery that eventually lead me back to her, where I felt I truly belonged.

Our problems weren’t instantly resolved, because life isn’t a movie with immediate resolution, but in a short time, I did win her love and acceptance.  The whole engagement was off, and our relationship began to grow to limits I never thought possible over time, as well as my belief in destiny and fate.

TOP