Blue

One friend writes of her travels in Barbados, another about his time in Buenos Aires. She’s staying in a hotel in the capital. And even though she has friends and family around her, work to do in the day, still she’s lonely, out of sorts in the midday heat. He, despite knowing the language and being a seasoned traveler, often finds himself disoriented and confused—in the wrong line, unsure of the social situation he has stumbled into. He tells me of working hard on trying to function calmly inside these states of dislocation and faulty translation. This is true for my other friend, for whom everything feels different, new, exotic. She is heartened when she sees herself in some of the people (“They have the gap in their teeth!”) and appreciates how they look at her. She enjoys the fish, the spices. The clean sheets she enters for the afternoon nap. She’s having a good time. Reading both friends’ emails, I get a sense that they feel lonely, some sort of restless state I can only name “being blue” but that also could be called “feeling alive.” Sitting here on my back porch, living vicariously through them, this seems counter-intuitive. But I get it. I remember. There’s a brand of sadness that can help you inhabit your body; it usually comes when you’re out in the day, when life overwhelms, and really it is an act of will in response to this pervasive aloneness. A kind of I'll-take-this-blue-feeing-and-use-it-to-my-advantage move. Look how good I look in blue. Putting on the blues to push through the blues.