The lonely ones will find each other by the heat of their bodies

You're in a strange city. It's dark and cold, and you're so ravenously hungry that you think you're going to faint at any moment. Your pockets are stuffed full of money, but you can't find a restaurant or market. Everything in this city seems to have closed for the night.

You walk and you walk, feet aching, head swimming with hunger, when finally you spot a soft neon glow in the distance. A restaurant! Salvation!

You reach the front door and try to go inside ... but the maitre 'd blocks your way and pushes you back onto the steps. Is there a dress code? Is your face dirty? He won't tell you anything other than that you aren't allowed inside. He's indifferent to the cash you show him, indifferent to your pleading.

So you sit by the door outside, getting hungrier and hungrier and colder and colder, smelling all the wonderful food, hearing the warm laughter and clink of silverware on plates.

And then your friends come waddling out, stuffed to the gills, and when they see you they say, "Oh, you don't want to come in here, the food is just awful!"

All your life, you've yearned for a best friend, a lover, a life companion. You know it's a tall order. But it's what you need. You need it like you need air and water ... and try as you might, you just can't seem to find your love.

You were an only child. Typical of many larval writers, you were very shy and were too weird to make friends easily. If the other kids noticed you, it was to make fun of you. So at school, you always sat at the back of the room. Once you got big enough, your parents would just leave you at home when they went to the theater or to the dance club or to whatever Adult Stuff they did that they didn't want to drag a kid along to. And you remember sitting in your room screaming at the walls because you were so fucking lonely.

Now you're an adult, and you're still sitting in your room screaming at the walls. And, as always, nothing answers but silence.

Maybe your relationships have been brief and far between, one night stands scattered across a frigid, barren landscape.

But maybe you've been in long-term relationships. You've been in love, your heart broken so many times you're surprised it still works. And one day you wake up to realize that all the people you've ever loved are now married. After all your sweat and tears trying to get them to love you, too, after all their claims of not wanting commitment ... they're committed. To someone else. And no one can say why you lacked that certain je ne sais quoi d'amour, not even them.

You're a good person, and you have a lot to offer a lover. You're considerate, generous, and you have the Kama Sutra practically memorized. But you see the men going out with vacuous, whining bimbos and the women going out with jerks and slimeballs ... and no one's giving you the time of day.

It's gotten so the moment you see someone you're attracted to, desire is immediately crushed by an overwhelming sense of despair from the weight of all your past rejections. And sometimes, all you feel is rage at the sight of couples holding hands, kissing, smiling at each other. Paint it Black becomes the soundtrack playing on an endless loop inside your mind.

Your friends -- who at this point are mostly all in committed relationships -- are full of helpful advice.

You particularly like the Ann Landers Special, which is: "Feeling Lonely? Get a dog!" Wow, great idea. You need someone you can have meaningful conversations with and make love with and go to the movies with and buy a house with and have kids with ... yeah, a dog is the perfect replacement for a human being!

You also love the advice you get from older friends who are going through divorce or who are about to get a divorce. These are the friends who've got nice houses, and they've got fine, healthy children and cats and dogs. You have a crappy apartment that doesn't allow pets.

And when you tell them of your loneliness, these friends cry, "Ah, to be young and single! Be glad you're not married! It's terrible!"

And in your mind you're sitting right outside that restaurant again. Your friends have had their turn at the banquet, and gorged themselves until they were sick. And now they tell you that you should be happy you're starving?

Fuck them.

Fuck them.

Get up off the steps and walk back into darkness. You will not starve, and you will not fail, not if you keep searching. Don't waste your gold on those who dismiss you, ignore you, take you for granted and belittle your dreams.

The lonely ones will find each other by the heat of their bodies in the cold blackness.

And they will find their love.

Ocean

I remember the last time I felt the ocean. It was at Port Isabel, near Padre Island, the week after spring break. The beach had a hangover: crumpled beer cans and cigarette butts, candy wrappers and used condoms. Herring gulls squabbled over choice bits of trash and cried as they wheeled in the sky. The sun was sulking under a blanket of clouds. An unseasonably chilly wind, greasy with salt, blew fitfully across the waves.

The sea spread out to the horizon, rippling like a vast sheet of gray-green satin. The easy roll of the distant swells turned to a surge of foam at the shoreline. The whispering roar of the waves was calling me, pulling my blood as the moon pulls the tide.

I found a clear spot of sand and stripped down to my swimsuit. The wind knotted my skin with goosebumps. I left my sneakers on; the sand was full of hidden fish hooks.

I crossed the beach and waded in, shivering and wincing at the first cold bite of salt on my legs. The current tugged at my ankles. I'd been warned about the undertow; it had dragged under dozens of unwary swimmers. I imagined the victims being pulled down, down into the dark water to become a feast for deep-sea crabs. But today, the undertow was no watery mugger; it was insistent but gentle, almost playful, like a man pulling his lover behind a tree for a kiss. I splashed out into the waves until my toes could barely find the sandy bottom.

I felt a sudden thrill of fear as the swell lifted me as though I were a sliver of driftwood. This was no polite suburban swimming pool. This water was powerful. It wasn't just the force of sheer mass that I felt. Perhaps what I sensed was the kinetic energy of the rolling molecules, the innate force of the wet, heavy children of gases joined in explosive union. Perhaps what I felt came from chemical instinct, the miniature sea in my own veins faltering in the vastness of its ancient birthplace.

After a few minutes, the surges no longer frightened me. The rising, falling swell was the steady breathing of a sleeping creature. The rhythm lulled me, and I lay back in the water and let myself float.

I closed my eyes and let my mind drift. My thoughts left my body and spiraled up, up into the sky, through the misty sheets of clouds into outer space. I imagined I could see the earth spreading below me, nothing of human civilization visible. The sea wrapped the planet like a blue amoeba that had flattened itself around a grain of sand. The sea was moving, pulsing in slow, millennial currents around the globe.

I realized that the sea itself is alive, not just a soup of fish and salt and seaweed, but truly alive. All living things within it, from delicate crystalline plankton to hardy killer whales, are part of a vast, liquid body. The ocean's organisms eat and breed and die to be reabsorbed into the system, life and death locked in a perpetual embrace, just like the cells in my own body.

I had never seen myself as anything but an individual before, but now I realized that I, too, was a cell in the salty blood. And someday I would be gone, broken down into nitrogen and carbon and water, nothing of my essence left but a few genes in future generations of cells.

I felt myself drift away farther into outer space until the Earth looked like a fist-sized white and azure jewel hanging against the blackness. I turned my face toward the heat of the sun. It was swollen, shining the wrong color, pregnant with disaster.

Then it burst, a shell of flame and shock ripping out across space. The fire tore across the Earth, tearing off its living skin, shattering its rocky bones.

I thought I could hear the beautiful blue creature scream as it exploded into cosmic steam.

I woke with a start, shaking. I was so cold I couldn't feel my feet. My skin was white against the dark water. I swam back to shore, my arms and legs weak against the waves. I staggered onto the beach and found my towel and clothes. After I dried off and dressed, I jogged along the beach to coax the blood back into my chilled limbs.

I knew I couldn't go back into the water without courting hypothermia, but I didn't want to leave. So I spent the rest of the day searching for shells in the wet gray sand. The clouds broke in the late afternoon, and I hiked to the jetty to watch the sundown show of brilliant purples and delicate pinks and oranges.

After the horizon had faded to the blackest blue, the real show began. The night tide was thick with phosphorescent plankton that flashed in green alarm at any disturbance. Every crashing wave sent up a spray of ghostly fireworks. Glowing sea foam oozed like lava in the crevices of the jagged black rocks.

Finally, my eyes would hardly stay open, and I started to shiver in the night breeze. I turned away from the jetty, trudged back down the road, through the dingy trailer park to a rickety beach shack in which even the plastic had rusted. I drew a tub of hot, clear, uninteresting water, poured in perfumed bubble bath as faint compensation, and washed the sea from my skin and hair.

But it could not be washed from my mind. As I lay in my bed that night, I could still feel my body rise and fall with the waves, the sensation like phantom pain from an amputated limb.

This essay was originally published in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.

On gender differences

It's true: boys are not like girls.

But girls are also not like girls, and boys are also not like boys.

We are all born different, but school and parents and friends and advertisers want us all to conform to certain expectations ... and in the main, we do, whether we realize it or not. Even nonconformists have models for their rebellion. And so, almost immediately, we become less and less different and more and more alike because that's what we're taught.

We are born, and one of the first things we learn is that we are a "girl" or a "boy" (and if you're not clearly one or the other, the nice doctor will very likely encourage your family to pick a defined gender forthwith, and start the first in a possibly long line of surgeries to make your body look "normal").

We quickly learn that our sex is the most important thing about us -- it dictates what kinds of clothes we can wear and which restroom we're supposed to use. After all, what is the first or second question people ask about a newborn child? Is it a boy or a girl?

But this boy and girl stuff is complicated. What does it mean to be a boy? Or a girl? The newborn doesn't know.

Sure, he or she has a lot of built-in preferences: one hand seems more useful than the other, vanilla tastes good, bitter stuff like broccoli is bad, major-key music sounds nicer than minor key, and mama is better than anyone else in the whole wide world. But past that -- I hazard to say most of us are flexible once we get past satisfying basic needs. There's a whole lot to this world of ours, and a multitude of reasons to like, or dislike, any given thing, and our liking or disliking the color purple or Mozart or DOOM or When Harry Met Sally is all inextricably grounded in our own emotional landscape, which develops as we age and learn and grow.

But the very young child hasn't got that complicated, mucked-up emotional landscape yet, and he or she is trying to figure it all out; ambiguity is more than most little heads can handle. Hell, ambiguity is more than many adults want to handle; life is a lot easier without gray areas. And almost every kid I've met goes through a period -- hopefully a brief one, though some will carry it to their graves -- where they try to sort the "boy" from the "girl" with crudely drawn gender roles copied from the behavior of their parents, their extended family, characters in TV shows, commercials, etc. And then they start mirroring the behaviors they've observed in their models.

Girls become mommies, and wear dresses, a young child might tell you, while boys become daddies and smoke pipes and watch NASCAR. And during this phase a given little boy might get quite upset if you suggest boys might wear dresses, too, because he's trying very, very hard to put things in the right category and your information doesn't match. That same little boy might likewise be taken aback if you called his wrestling action figures "dolls", even if in a general sense that's what they really are.

And thus begins the long process of self-definition and self-discovery in which we struggle with trying to express ourselves and our individuality and meet our needs while trying to conform to our expected social roles so that we don't get ostracized as a weirdo.

Kids learn by copying what other people are doing. If they copy well, and get praise or attention for it, they keep it up. If the copying gets them ridicule from their peers, they usually try something else, unless the thing they're getting negative feedback on is so internally satisfying or compelling to them that they decide they don't give a damn what anyone else thinks and keep doing it.

We humans are social animals. We all of us to some degree want to be liked and accepted, and the moment we get to school, our focus is on being liked and accepted by other kids, because there's no hell quite so complete as being branded a "freak" and being cast out of the social circles entirely. Children can be brutal in their teasing and bullying, so there can be incredible pressure on kids to conform to what the other kids like and do.

It doesn't just take a hell of a lot of gumption to do things that are radically different from what everyone else is doing -- it takes more imagination and energy than most people have.

I know a male scientist who tried to get his daughters to play with traditionally-male toys; when they refused, he confidently declared it was because they were girls. I do wonder if his daughters really refused to play with his toy trucks and go launch rockets with him because they inherently didn't want to do such things out of some inner girlishness.

Might they have refused instead because they'd gotten old enough to know from their older sisters, friends, cartoons, TV ads, etc. that, as girls, they were not supposed to play with trucks and rockets? I suspect his gals are just as savvy as the old scientist himself, and they knew (instinctively or consciously) that it wouldn't serve them well socially to play with uncool toys.

I learned to love toy rockets and trucks at an early age. But I also spent my formative years in something of a vacuum. We didn't have TV until I was 5, and I didn't have much exposure to other children until I entered kindergarten. "Play dates" were a foreign concept to my parents, and so most of what I was exposed to in my early years was courtesy of my science-minded stay-at-home father.

When I got to school -- boy, was I ever a freak. I knew how to talk to adults, because I'd spent my entire life thus far around them -- but other kids baffled me. I wanted to be liked and accepted, but my socialization (or lack thereof) was so far out of line that I was immediately rejected by the girls as being "weird" and so I mostly tried to play with the boys, since I knew the language of toy cars and space movies. But since I was never brought into the girly fold, I never developed a love of makeup and My Little Ponies. In fact, I developed a dislike of overtly girly toys because I associated them with their owners.

And so, as an adult, I still love computers and science fiction and movies with lots of explosions. I'm the only female in a group of 12 guys in my workplace at a computer help desk. I seldom wear makeup or dresses. I'm heterosexual, and as far as I can tell biologically normal when it comes to the girly parts.

But I wonder, if I'd been around other girls before I was five, if I'd had older sisters or a girly mom to model off of, if my likes and dislikes might have turned out rather differently.

Likewise, I identify myself as a writer. What if I'd been born into a culture that saw no value in teaching girls to read and write? What kind of a person would I be now?

We are born the people we are, but every one of us is inevitably shaped in deep and fundamental ways by the culture we're exposed to from Day One. And it's culture that dictates that driving a truck is "masculine" and wearing lipstick is "feminine". It's culture that tells us that being able to accurately throw a football 100 yards is more praiseworthy than being able to accurately type 100 words per minute. It's culture that tells us that fixing 100 leaky toilets should earn you more money than teaching 100 six-year-olds how to read.

It's culture at work when a parent sends a rambunctious son outside to play football, but tells a rambunctious daughter to sit down and play quietly. It's culture at work when a girl with a skinned knee is comforted, while a boy is told "Aw, it's just a scrape -- suck it up and get back out there!"

I don't think gender issues are easily separated out from all that, and I think the people who insist that "all boys do Y, and all girls do X, and they are hardwired by genes and hormones to behave as they do (and therefore any boy who doesn't do Y and any girl who doesn't do X is a freak and doesn't count)" aren't taking early acculturation into account.

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If you are a parent, and disagree with what I've written, ask yourself how often you've used the phrases "Be a good girl", "Be a good boy", "That's not ladylike," "Boys don't cry" etc. Ask yourself what expectations you have of your child, and how those expectations are tied to their gender. Ask yourself what the TV -- especially toy and cereal commercials -- might be teaching your child about sex and gender roles.