Two-Way Street

Living permanently on the road came with its own set of concerns. In a way it was freeing - I was glad to be out of the north, away from the constant grinding pain of existing in the same social circle as Aiden and Shelby. Sleeping in a tent with my best friend was a big step up from the series of terrible living situations I'd put myself in over the last two years.

I had tried to make it work. I even went to a team party at Shelby's one night, thinking it wouldn't be so bad with the rest of the team there as a buffer. But it was. I fought the crushing anxiety as long as I could, but eventually told Ninja we had to leave. We went home, where I fell into a nightmare-filled sleep. People yelled at me all night long until I woke, exhausted. I decided I would never again go to a party where I knew they would be.

Traveling laid some of my immediate problems aside, but encouraged the blossoming of an existential worry - what was I doing with my life? In preparation for the trip, I had unwittingly removed all of my big goals. I was completely lost. I messaged Hawk from a campground in Florida, looking for support, but I think he was too jealous of the trip to be able to see my problems at the size they appeared to me.

Ninja and I were running out of both money and patience. Never knowing where we would sleep next or if we were going to get stranded somewhere or really anything at all was taking a toll on our minds. I couldn't admit it, but a month into what was supposed to be a year-long adventure I was already dreaming about the unimaginable luxury of having a place to live. I never intended to go back to what she still called home, but I had no other destination in mind, either. Living in the wind wasn't suiting me as well as I'd thought it would.

The money crunch came down on us in Texas, and I implemented the easiest solution I had to hand. I went back to stripping. Between the amount of debt I ran up in hotels and bike repair bills, and the fact that Ninja got a low-wage job with a biweekly paycheck, we got stuck. The hotels were costing us more than we could afford, so we signed a lease on an apartment to stop the bleeding.

The first time I stripped, most of ten years earlier, I'd made a few mistakes that left some emotional scars, and I swore I wouldn't make them again. In my first month in Texas, I'd made all of those and more, and had my eyes opened to a level of scum I'd never seen. The psychological drain started before I ever walked in the door, because I really didn't want to be doing what I was doing, and it was all downhill from there.

My first sobbing breakdown in the hotel room scared me, but I pushed through. The breakdowns became a regular thing, happening on average a couple of times a week. One night it happened in the club, and everybody treated it like a normal thing. All the dancers have meltdowns. It's expected.

I learned not to go in if I felt too awful, because I couldn't do the job. I slipped from working four days a week, to three, to two. Progress on paying off my debt came to a standstill. My depression flared and I started to feel hopeless and trapped. I wanted to die, but I couldn't do that to Ninja and my mother.

Through it all, Aiden was a relentless noise in my ear, talking to me constantly, asking me for updates on my life. He never burdened me with things I didn't want to know but seemed genuinely interested in what I was up to. He was one of only two friends from up north who regularly checked in on me. I gave him terse factual updates at first, then more detailed ones. I started telling him about club life. I talked to him more and more, filling him in on bits and pieces of myself. I desperately needed support and was coming to the disappointing realization that a lot more people are a lot more horrible than I ever wanted to believe. It was getting harder by the day for me to trust anyone with anything.

I wanted to hate him for what he had done to me, but instead I found myself dragged into the realization that he was still one of the best people in my life. He listened to my complaints and desperation, offered sympathy while I railed in anger at all the horrible things around me, and never asked for anything in return.

He said he just wanted to help me, but I knew it wasn't fair for me to use him like that, even if I hadn't asked for the help. With great apprehension one day I returned his "How are you?" with a "How are you?" of my own, something I hadn't done since before we broke up. I never asked him questions because I was afraid of breaking a dam and getting inundated with information I didn't want. That didn't happen, though. He said he was fine and thanked me for asking.

The lack of terrible results made me more courageous. Every day I tried to reach out a little more. I started with easy questions, about the yard and the chickens. I really didn't care how they were, so it felt like low stakes. I asked about his mom; she was fine. I asked about his son. I avoided general questions, and I never asked about Shelby. That was way beyond anything I could deal with, and he seemed to know it. He rarely mentioned her, and when he did it was only in passing.

Back when we were dating but lived apart, he would occasionally message me that he was tipsy on margaritas or cosmos or whatever the drink of the night was. I usually got annoyed and stopped talking to him for the evening. Distance drinking felt like some kind of slight.

When he started to send me those messages while I was stripping, though, I really couldn't be upset. I drank way too much myself and had no right to give anyone else any crap about it. We kept talking. I realized that he was sending me those messages an awful lot, and one evening when it had been several days in a row, I asked a new question.

"You seem to drink almost as much as I do these days. Are you okay?"

He didn't answer, and I saw a big red flag. I told him he didn't have to answer then, but I'd be waiting for an answer in the near future. Several days passed without further comment. He kept chatting like things were fine, but I knew something was up. I waited.

Maybe a week after I asked, he decided to explain. "I think I'm depressed. I don't know how to deal with it." He listed several typical signs of depression, and my heart reached out without permission from my better judgment.

"That sounds a lot like my experience of depression. I'm sorry you've found that place. It's shitty."

"The world is so used to me being 'on' all the time no one knows what to make of depressed Aiden.  That's part of why I wasn't super open about it. You have enough strife emotionally. I didn't want to dump more on you."

"No worries...I just don't want to be using you as my support and not have any idea what's going on with you. I don't want you to pretend to be okay for me; that's unnecessary and unpleasant."

"So we can try this a bit differently going forward."

It was so much easier to connect with him after that, possibly easier than it has ever been in all the years I've known him. There were many times in the past that I felt like I was screaming at a stone wall in my attempts to communicate with him; he always listened, but rarely seemed to hear me. But the new Aiden had a level of understanding that the old one didn't. While I felt bad that he was depressed, part of me was grateful for it, for the change of perspective it had brought him. His old bouncy, irrepressible, bordering-on-obnoxiously optimistic attitude was toned down to something closer to my own reality.

I offered my emotional support to him in the past, both in general and anytime it seemed he might need it, but he rarely did. To have him finally accept my help was almost a relief, something it took me a while to put words to. I felt needed.

When I told him I was coming up north to visit family for a couple of days, he asked if he could take me to lunch.

My first thought was, Here we go again.