circles and belonging

 They had announced the grief circle would form down by the stage at 11, but as I wandered out from the coffee station it still hit me like a wall.

I recognize clearly that this is probably all in my head, a tactile projection, but I still swear I can feel the weight of that circle as I approach it. It’s almost like a haze in the bright light, a rippling of color and texture, like a mirage. There is a portal surrounding them, a gravity to their presence, and I realize that one thing I will not do is cross that barrier.

I have come to a weekend retreat for jewish women. A sisterhood gathering of sorts that a friend has been trying to sell me on for year. Come! She tells me, there are activities, but you don’t need to do the activities! There are massages and yoga and tie dying stations, but you can just drink! Many people just drink, there is a 24 hour bar and a majhong table and a tight bright community that is fine if you just want to chill!

She is a lovely woman, who sees clearly my need for community,but doesn’t mention that fact that is apparent to me the moment I arrive and that was probably worth guessing far before I decided to join ...that a large 48 hour slumber party is, most likely , powerfully, deeply not my scene. I feel as if I am cosplaying teenage youth group. 

So staring now at that wall of grief now, that hugging, sobbing, singing sisterhood I am deeply aware of many things, but chiefly this is as alienating as anything I have experienced in a long while. More alienating than a frat party, more alienating than Taylor swift concern, more alienating that that first time I went to karaoke and someone told me I just needed to stop holding back. A group of my peers, mourning an event worthy of all that grief, is like a sinkhole I can’t even dip my toe. I can’t even stare directly at it

I go the long way around back to the clubhouse so I don't have to touch the forcefield of trauma and bonding that is occurring and sign up for something that is tantamount to a religious tarot reading and sit there and swirl in the sense of being both too too old to go to summer camp and yet far too young, cynical, and ironic to hug and cry and sing. And yes, they are still singing. I ponder my limitations. Am I just too emotionally stunted, too out of touch with my own grief? my own dark sadness. Truthfully, I feel like a fraud. Like someone who trolls funerals or calls someone who just lost a friend and goes on and one about that one time they met him and how deeply they were touched. I feel unreal, a ghostly haunting on the deep and bonding womanhood that seems so clearly presently all important to every participant other than me

Later I go to my reading and contemplate my own inability to find community within my community. It’s a stunning reading. It calls out my hunger, my need is my famine. It tells me to look in, to look at my memory, which is represented as darkness. to find peace in what I am rather than acting like a kid at buffet licking all the treats to find the one they want. I say something and she cries. More tears and I am vaguely touched and mostly very happy she does not touch me.

One dark truth I need little delving into into is how little, ultimately, I want to touch and be touched by these women. How untrue my desire for community must be when the very thought of a hug, a hand, a friendship circle of hand holding, makes my skin crawl. I don’t know what to make of this but I elect to not share this with my weeping oracle.

But something rings true and I relax. This stranger with a homemade deck of cards comments that I might just be different, and thats okay. It's obvious and dumb and one funky thing to say to a total stranger when your own hobby is kabbala cards. But it's true. I might authentically still need to find a community, but perhaps its okay that this is hard to find. Perhaps it is true that my desire to just hang out, have difficult one on one conversations in dark halls does not a party make, does not a sisterhood form.

I sit with that in the hot tub and am joined by another woman. She is a writer they have flown in to do a reading. She is cynical and funny and is very excited to be here for the free booze and the 10K miles gap from daily life and like a true writer tells even tremendously mundane stories with incredible humor and tenderness. I follow her to her workshop and listen to her speak because she doesn't sing once and there is nothing I like more than a story about anything that is told well.

Perhaps another darkness I can plunder is that my memory is now so hazy. So slippery and fickle, and things that feel familiar can feel as alienating and off-putting as they do comforting. Many things I once clearly related to are more ghostly than I wish to admit. A dark truth is that I once had stories to tell, so many memories to share, but now I just want live others memories. I am vampire for the meaning in others, a parasite of cabals long forgotten.

Is there a community for this? A place where you can find not so much a new sisterhood as a safe space to absorb the reminiscence of others and be born anew?