Enter the Ordinary Story

I sit across from my long-time friend in a hypothetically Mexican restaurant in a pit-stop off I-40. I’m swaddled in the gray cocoon of withdrawal. Not from a drug, unless you count my ability to use attention from a hypothetical beloved as a drug. (There’s a lot of “hypothetical” going around these days in my life – look for details in a future short story.)

I know this withdrawal. I’ve felt it before. It is, at this point, beyond ordinary. It renders the world around me flat and banal. “I see that you are beside yourself with excitement,” my friend says.

“Damn near paralyzed,” I say. We laugh, the dry chortle of what an old friend once called gallows humor.

A young waiter steps up to the table. He’s tall, slender and dressed all in black. He hands us our menus. I look up at him and the cocoon falls away, not because he is the next beloved, but because a greater Beloved is tattooed on his right arm. The San Francisco Peaks (Nuva’tuk-iya-ovi for the Hopi, Dook’o’oosÌÌd for the Navajo) rise over a towering Ponderosa over an elk. The same scene – with a wolf instead of an elk – covers the back of his arm. The tattoo artist has worked in shades of forest green. “Are those The Peaks?” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “I love them.”

I ask if I can photograph his arm. “Of course,” he says. He takes our order and later delivers plates of food that is not actively bad, but essentially without flavor. I feel the withdrawal closing in. It doesn’t matter.

That night, I text my friend: Not exactly an endlessly intriguing road trip in Northwest Nevada, but the companionship and the humor were just as solid.

The cocoon, this afternoon, holds me. I have stayed faithful to not using the readily available drug – not the former beloved, but reaching out to him through the internet and phone.

Instead, I reach out to my readers, and I invite you to send us one of your ordinary stories – you know, the day you drove into the back of the irate guy’s truck because he passed you without signaling, your grand-kid’s performance as a cockroach in a school play, the tired mom or dad in the laundromat (Ray Carver’s stunning essay on trying to find time to write as a working dad in Fires).

There are no ordinary stories. There are no ordinary lives.

Prompt: Show us how deeply you know that.