Post #5: A Fine, Bitter, Day At the Park (Thanks For Understanding)

It’s the beginning of April, three weeks since lockdown started, and City Park has become my official place of sanctuary. The wonderful, sprawling, accessible City Park. It’s only a five minute walk from my house, and it happens to be bigger than Central Park in New York City. I know this because back in the Before Time that fact seemed to be attached to any conversation about the park. 

“Oh you’re going to City Park? Isn’t it great? You know it’s bigger than Central Park, right?” 

Back then, that was just a fun fact to share whenever you wanted to feel slightly superior to those in the Big Apple.

But now, three weeks into the madness, I find myself holding on to this little tidbit to justify my actions. Apparently, people have no problem with joggers, bikers, or hikers going out into the world during the pandemic, but if you tell someone you’re going to just hang out at the park so you can get out of the house for a while, they snort in disgust and ask how could you while conjuring up some mental image of a 90’s MTV spring break crowd gathering at the park. 

That’s when I always whip out that little handy fact. 

“Relax,” I tell them over the phone or on Zoom, “I go there everyday and I’m never close to anyone. it’s bigger than Central Park, it’s not hard to find isolation.” 

Sometimes this alleviates concerns, other times it does not. Personally, I don’t really care. It’s part of my routine now. An integral part of my routine, in fact, that keeps me sane. After all, there’s only so much typing, bicep-curling, eating, and pornhubbing you can do inside an (empty) house before you start losing your mind. 

And yes, I do have my own spot I like to go to every time. It’s past the overpass and the dog park, right by the bayou, at this nice little picnic bench under the massive oak trees. I used to come to this spot to write in my notebook in the Before Time, so it’s close to my heart. Also, if you must know, it’s not far from where my ex and I would go to picnic sometimes and make each other laugh. I only bring that up because as much as I love the park, there is at least one moment each a day there when I find myself in the pit. That’s what I call it when my stupid emotions make me feel things that I don’t want to feel about my last relationship and I turn into a big baby. It’s obnoxious, but apparently unavoidable, so everyone should just be prepared for that, ok?

Anyway, there’s a ton of open space in every direction, so while yes, there are people lounging around and fluttering by, they are at a great distance away and no new laws are being broken. Everything is copacetic. 

Sometimes friends who are too afraid to go themselves, ask me what the park is like during quarantine. I tell them it’s pretty much like how it was before… if everyone had been edited out of the park except for me and all fucking happy couples. This is not a joke. And today is no exception. The numerous pairs of loving smiles and interlocked hands that putter around me are absolutely disgusting. Yes, it’s not hard to separate yourself from others by a hundred feet or more at City Park, but trying to guard yourself against the sight of satisfied lovers that lay on the grass, kiss at the water, or walk around the perimeter, orbiting you in their satellite of obnoxious glee, that is a fool’s mission. 

I’ve heard from many a friend that their relationships, and numerous others, during the quarantine have devolved from that of supportive partners to scornful roommates to hateful cellmates, but from what I’ve seen at the park, this is just not the case. All I’ve seen are happy couples maintaining a healthy social distance not just from me but from this entire nightmare of a pandemic, lost in each other’s googly eyes, breathing in each other’s air, unafraid of what they might get because they both know they are in this together, quarantining together, riding-or-dying together. 

In other words, I’m surrounded by assholes. 

And these asshole couples surround me at the park right now, like always, at a distance too far to make out their faces, unless I squint my eyes, and then I see that each and every one are clearly me and my ex back in happy times. But, if I squint my eyes even further still, I can see they are, in fact, my ex and her new man, my replacement, lost in their joy of finding each other. 

And like clockwork, that’s when that old familiar pain starts turning in my stomach, and I know I’m heading right for the pit. I can’t explain how frustrating this is. I feel that enough time has passed that these daily bouts of heartbreak should be done by now, or at least, diminished considerably in power and poignancy. Yet, that’s just not the case. Honestly, I blame the pandemic. Everyone tells me I need to move on, but how the hell do you do that in a pandemic? How do you find personal growth in a pandemic? How do you find someone new when you can’t approach anyone? The fact is, in a lockdown, life stops moving, it becomes stagnant, unchanging. So whatever you’re dealing with emotionally at the beginning of the lockdown is gonna remain the same til life starts back up again (or maybe I am just a big emotional baby, that too has been suggested). 

Anyway, each visit to the pit varies in power and length, and the elements that determine these things are not known by me, but I pray this is a quick one so I can go back to my peaceful reflection time in the park. 

You know she never loved you, right?

That’s the first pit thought that hits me, and it’s enough for me to know that this one is gonna be a doozy. Your thoughts in the pit only get nastier over time, so if the first one is that bad… yeah I’m in for it today. 

Remember the last thing she texted you? ‘Thanks for understanding’. Why would she text that unless she wanted you to die a horrible death. 

My brain begins to burn now, and I feel reason and logic disappearing within me, replaced with white anger. 

Oh yes, I remember. 

‘Thanks for understanding’. That was the last sentence in that cold, firm paragraph of a text that explained why we couldn’t talk anymore. Of all the jagged daggers in that text, that last one cut the deepest. Thanks for understanding? How can you thank someone for understanding without asking them first if they do, in fact, understand? I don’t think you can. And I think if she did ask she’d find that I do not understand. Oh god, there are just so many things I don’t understand. 

I don’t understand how two people who have said “I love you” hundreds of times over the course of many months could become perfect strangers in mere days. I don’t understand how I, a normally rational and well-behaved man, could allow jealousy and anger to utterly consume me causing me to act like a child, especially when I knew this was all gonna end eventually. But honestly, the biggest thing I don’t understand is how she could have found a replacement for me. My heart just can’t make sense of that.   

Thanks for understanding. 

You bet, bitch. 

…but she’s not a bitch. I know that. Even in the pit, I know this. She’s no more a bitch than the couples around me are assholes. No one is bad here. It’s a fine day at the park and I’m just bitter. Bitter and tired.

From my pocket I hear my phone go off. I recognize the little jingle. It’s a notification from this website that wants to update me everytime it has more depressing news about the virus to share. As I have many, many times in the past three weeks, I take out my phone hoping for a nice distraction, even if it’s a depressing one. Instead, I find something that is both distracting, yet not a distraction, and oddly apt for my current meltdown. 

New York City, the US epicenter of Covid 19, has officially reached over three thousand deaths, surpassing the death total of 9/11. 

A wave of guilt crashes into me now. The pit has turned from anger towards her to anger toward myself. What kind of man am I to shell out all this hatred for someone caught in the worst of it? 

She left for New York City six months ago, a city that in the last five weeks has become a terrifying hot bed of disease, infection and death. I can only assume she has since left to go stay with her parents upstate, but I have no way of knowing. I blocked her on all social media, and she ignored my email I sent three weeks ago where I asked if she was okay. 

Maybe she didn’t ignore it…maybe she couldn’t respond…

No, I tell myself, don’t go there. She’s fine. She just doesn’t want to talk to you. She hates you.

The bitch.

My head hurts from all the yoyo-ing. That’s a term I picked up from a friend when I told him about my current situation. When you go from pure anger, to sadness, to missing her, to acceptance, back to anger, that’s yoyo-ing. In the pit, it’s all yoyo-ing. Up and down, up and down, while the happy couples cuddle around me in the distance. 

She was the only good thing in your life, and she’s never coming back. 

If I’m being honest, I think what makes this so hard is my lack of experience. I hadn’t realized til this whole thing happened but I really haven’t known this sort of heartbreak before. In fact, when I think back on it, I realize the vast majority of my life has been spent as a single man living a single man’s life. And the relationships I did have, well, let’s just say they weren’t the healthiest. Now, I don’t regret this at all. I believe all mistakes are critical for growth. It’s just that… I never knew. As corny as it sounds, I never knew what it was like to have someone, a partner, who was there for you always, who endlessly supported and encouraged you and gave you love all the time. That just wasn’t my world. Of course, no relationship is perfect, but it’s that element of a healthy relationship that I miss so goddamn much. I almost wish I never had it at all, so I wouldn’t know what I was missing. 

Who are you kidding? It was a joke of a relationship and it would have died an embarrassing death even if she hadn’t moved away and found someone new. 

I rise up to my feet. I can’t take this anymore. I need to get away from my thoughts and from the interlocked hands that surround me. This park is bigger than Central Park, dammit, no reason I can’t find some privacy. 

I follow the bayou as it bends before the bridge, make my way through a maze of trees and bushes before coming to a clearing where I find a young family- mom, dad, and two kids- enjoying their alone time in the park. The dad gives me a suspicious look, like he’s worried I might steal his woman or maybe infect his children with some deadly disease. I quickly excuse myself and head off down a small path I find that leads to places unknown. 

Two minutes later, I’m still on the trail, completely away from everybody. I can’t hear any footsteps or annoying conversations, and all I can see is the green in the air and the brown on the ground. It’s some sort of mini-forest that I suspect I’ve visited before, although I’m not sure. I’m starting to feel better though. Perhaps it’s all the trees and bushes blocking my view, but I feel like I’ve crawled out of the pit. 

You think her and her new lover ever laugh about you?

…then again, maybe not. At least not completely, but these thoughts are becoming less and less frequent, so that’s something. 

After another couple minutes of walking, I come to an old wooden cabin that stands on stilts, with a small creaky-looking set of stairs leading up to it. But it’s not a normal cabin, its comically broken down, with gaping holes in its steepled roof and missing wooden boards in its walls. The whole thing looks like it might crumble at any moment, so my first instinct is to leave it alone. But then a vague memory hits me and I realize I’ve seen this cabin before, I’ve even been inside it. Last Halloween, when a huge part of the park was converted into a haunted forest. Yes, I remember that well now. I remember my ex refused to go with me because she scared easy so I went with a group of friends and we all had a blast. I remember us walking through this mini forest at night, having costumed freaks and killers jump out at us, I remember us being led into this decrepit cabin, where a man with an axe and a Freddy Krueger-like burned face demanded to know if we slept with his wife. 

Good times. 

I decide to relive those good times right now, and skip up the creaky stairs excitedly. I’m definitely feeling better now. All alone in my murder cabin, what’s not to like? 

Once inside, I take off my backpack and take a seat on the floor at one of the corners, resting my back against one of the sturdier-than-it-looks walls. I reach into my backpack and take out my small glass pipe, taking a quick hit before jamming it in my pocket, just in case. As I let the smoke out of my mouth, I reach back into my pack and take out a beer. It’s a glass bottle so I have to take out my keys so I can open it with the black and gold churchkey that’s attached to the key ring. 

I enjoy my beer in my murder cabin, appreciating all this isolation. If this was in the Before Time, it would be hard to come here and do this. But now, thanks to the global crisis, the murder cabin is an ideal place to self-medicate. 

Once I finish my beer I stuff the empty bottle into my pack, rise to my feet and head back out to the park, feeling much more blissful than before. 

The next thirty five minutes or so are spent idly walking around, enjoying the various paths of nature, occasionally resting against the trunk of a tree, and skipping some rocks across the bayou’s surface. Life isn’t all that bad, I decide, it’s just all about your frame of mind. 

I’m about ten feet away from my parked car, ready to head back home and finish some writing, when I make a horrifying discovery. My keys. They are no longer in my pocket. I try to remain calm as I search my backpack. They’re not there either. Not in a single pocket or pouch. 

Holy shit, I realize, I lost my keys. 

Now, I don’t know about y’all, but for me, there are few things more heart attack-inducing than not having my keys. Losing any of the big three- wallet, phone, keys- immediately injects soul-crushing panic into my soul, but especially my keys. Because if I don’t have them, someone else could, and that means someone else has access to my car and house. As unlikely as it would be for someone to know where either of these things are, it still terrifies me. there’s still a chance it could happen. I need to solve this mystery immediately. 

I retrace my steps. I think of everywhere I have been in the last hour, of all the places I sat or lied down. But that panic inside me is making it hard to think clearly, and suddenly I find a terrible thought waiting for me and I know the panic has brought me right back to the pit, louder and more defiant than ever.  

How could she do that to me?  

God damn it, no. I scold myself. This isn’t the time for this, I have to find my keys.

You’re never gonna find your keys because you lost them in a park bigger than Central Park in New York City, where your ex moved just to make you feel bad. The universe is against you. Give up. 

There’s nothing I can do but fight this onslaught by continuing to retrace my steps and pray I find my keys. 

But in the back of my mind, that nasty little thought still hits me. 

Give up.

Just give up.

In my retracing of steps, I find myself back in that clearing past the bushes by the bayou bend where that family was, but now the family has been replaced by a quartet of hula hoopers, all of them rotating their hips in unison while their plastic false idol spins around them. None of them acknowledge my presence. I don’t find this surprising. This may be controversial to say, but I’ve personally never met a hula hooper that wasn’t a horrible person. But in any case, I ask them desperately if they’ve seen any keys in the area and they all just shake their heads at me, so I move on to that path I found before. As I hustle through the flora I fight through the desperation, and that little dagger deep inside me that keeps stabbing me with that one line…

You won’t find anyone like her again.

But then I have a revelation, an obvious revelation, but a revelation nonetheless, and everything else disappears. The murder cabin! That’s where I took out my keys to open the beer. I must have set them on the floor after and just walked away like the dope I am. 

OK, perfect, I think, I’m on my way there now anyway, so as long as no one came by and took them I should be good.

Five minutes later, I find that I am not good. My keys are not there. Somebody must have come by and taken them. That’s when everything turns black. That’s when, shaking with anger, I realize the entire world is out to get me, including my own brain, which by all rights should be protecting me more than anyone. Someone has my keys, and they are undoubtedly trying every car door in the area til they come to my shitty green one with the millions of micro-scratches thanks to an ill-fated washing, and the nasty indent from that hit-and-run all those years ago. 

I think about my ex, how she never wanted to take my car when we went out, and how I always suspected that she was embarrassed by it. Just as she was secretly embarrassed by me and my poor tour guide ways.  

She always knew she was destined for the bright lights and big paychecks of the big city, did you really think you were anything more than just a temporary stopover for her? 

God damn it can we please just focus on the present crisis instead of attaching my current panic with my past pain, I beg my brain. Can’t we stop and think about the proper next step to take. Surely there’s a number to call, park security, or whatnot, that will know if someone turned in my keys. Can we do that instead of focusing on this stale old crap like we do day after day after day?  

Thanks for understanding. 

God dammit. 

With a weak finger I find the city park website on my phone and call the number for security. It rings for a bit before going to an answering machine. Of course, you idiot, it’s the pandemic, security ain’t working anytime soon. 

I collapse against the porous wall and slide down to the floor, feeling utterly defeated. My heart and stomach twist together into one giant knot of agony. If anyone has wallowed in more self-pity than me in this moment, I would be surprised. Love fucking sucks, life is bullshit and some stranger has my keys in a park that’s bigger than Central fucking Park. 

 I just want to curl up and disappear into my rock bottom. 

But of course, that’s not how life works, and eventually you have to come out of your murder cabin and face the music. And I do, eventually. I take my phone back out of my pocket and started calling the same number from before. I decide I’m going to do this until someone finally answers or I die. That’s as much strategy as I can muster at the moment. 

Ten tries. 

It takes me ten tries before someone actually answers the line.

“Hello?”

“Yes! Hello! Park Security?” I ramble excitedly, “did you find any keys?! I’m missing my keys!..Please tell me someone turned in some keys!”

There’s a long pause here and I begin to panic so I decide to repeat myself even more excitedly.

“Did anyone turn in any keys!? They are car keys… and house keys too, actually, on the same ring. What is that thing called again? A key ring! Yes, A key ring!”

There is another drawn out pause and now I’m wondering if the person online has hung up on me, assuming some crazy tweaker called rambling about keys.

“…yes,” the other voice finally responds, “somebody did turn in some keys. You think they’re yours?”

“Oh god I hope so!” I tell him, hearing the angels above me sing in the sky. Please god, let this be them. Let me have a win today.  

I run as fast as I can to the intersection that the park ranger tells me to go to. A long, and breathless ten minutes later, I find him waiting for me in his jeep. 

“You have my keys?!” I ask urgently. 

“Maybe,” he tells me, as he looks from me down to his left hand that disappears down the other side of the Jeep’s middle console. “I need you to describe them to me so I know they’re yours though.”

Oh Jesus Christ, I have to describe my own keys now. My brain is barely functioning. Besides, aren’t all keys pretty much the same?

“Oh, I don’t know, uh it has a car key with like a black top part, and some house keys too, that are smaller and um, thinner, and ummm metalllic?”

He slowly looks away from me and down to his hidden hand.

“What else?”

What else? What does he mean what else?! They’re keys! They open up doors and they’re made of metal. What else does he want from me!

Then I remember…

“A churchkey! A black and gold churchkey!” 

“…OK,” he slowly says, “I think these are yours.”

The gates of Heaven open up now, as he pulls up his hand revealing a very familiar looking set of keys. 

“Thank you so much, you have no idea how much you saved me.”

“No problem, sir. What happened anyway, you just take out your keys in the forest, put them on the ground and forget about em?”

“Something like that,” I laugh.

“Well, I guess in these crazy times that sort of stuff is understandable.”  

I smile at him. 

“Thanks for understanding.”

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