My Posse

As a kid, I had this idea going that if I did everything right, I would earn passage back to my home planet. I've always wanted to find my people. Not in some delusional, truly thought out way, but more as a feeling. Articulating it into regular words was never really attempted, but a feeling that I was very different from the people whose lives I'd been plopped into persisted, and I held out some hope deep down that there were others like me, and that one day I would find them, or they me.

In the midst of my people, I would feel normal in a way that didn't require thinking about---it would just be. Existing would be as effortless and comfortable as the perfect temperature of luke-warm pool water at the end of the day; skin temperature; flying. No problem. Our fitting-in-together-ness wouldn't be this gigantic, evident thing to notice; that's the whole point. It would be organic, unspoken, home.

I have identified some of my people over the years. Many of us communicate with each other in writing, throwing out books to the winds with the blind faith that our one-way conversation will be picked up and heard. So, many are writers.

My favorite two, the two at whose recognition I wept with anti-loneliness, the two who make me feel the most at home, like a hug, the two of my people who I feel the most normal knowing they exist, are Lynda Barry and Kurt Vonnegut. I'm so glad they're out there, and that they've made the attempt to communicate to the isolated rest of us. What they've done for me, that's what keeps me writing, so I can, maybe, toss a rope to another of my people.