The remedy

Have you ever been flooded by a wave of emotion when looking at two unassuming paper bags?

I’m supposed to be skiing right now¹.

We flew out to Utah on Wednesday night, landed and picked up our ski rentals, and then were on the first lift up the mountain on Thursday morning. We zipped around for four insanely fun hours, and then began making our way down the mountain to grab the smooshed PB&Js that were jammed into a backpack that was jammed into a locker.

We got separated on the way down the mountain, and at the stopping point where we were supposed to meet up, I arrived before Seth, which never happens. A few minutes later, I received a call from him, letting me know he needed ski patrol to come rescue him and bring him down the mountain. He’d fallen and suspected his leg may be fractured².

Long story short: He was taken to a clinic where they confirmed the fracture³, and with four hours on the slopes to our name(s), our long-awaited ski trip was officially over. We decided to cut our losses and head home early, trying to recoup some money on rentals, lodging, etc.

Upon landing home at 9:30PM, after a long travel day with Seth on crutches and me, a Certified Klutz, in charge of all of our bags, we went straight to grab tacos.

When I ran in to pick them up, I saw two paper bags sitting in the holding area.

One was labeled “Seth W.” This was our bag. Seth placed the order.

The bag next to it was labeled “Lexi.”⁴

Have you ever seen anything more romantic?

As soon as my eyes locked in on that pair of bags, they got a bit misty⁵.

I grabbed my bag (Seth W.), separating it from its bag lover (Lexi).

I have the tendency to catastrophize, am prone to thinking that a Big Bad Thing that will separate me from all of the Good Things in my life.

It’s impossible for me to hold something in my hands without being afraid I’ll either squish it so hard that its guts come spilling out through the spaces between my fingers or that a pelican will swoop down and snatch it away from me.

It’s ironic that in this case, I was the Big Bad taking the Good Thing away from Bag Lexi.

It’s also ironic that, as soon as my fingers touched Seth W’s papery skin, the 2002 Jason Mraz song⁶ The Remedy (I Won’t Worry) started playing over the restaurant’s speakers. When I say that this was ironic, I mean it purely in an Alanis Morissette kind of way, which is to say that it was just barely ironic and moreso just kind of funny/vaguely poetic.

Things are very bad, and…

My weird brain took this occurrence⁷ to mean that it was a good thing that I had been forced to come home early (and, by the transitive property, that Seth had fractured his tibia).

If we hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen Bag Seth & Lexi sitting next to each other. In fact, poor Bag Lexi would have been sitting alone, feeling like she’d been stood up for the prom when Bag Seth never showed.

I wouldn’t have heard the dulcet tones of Jason Mraz going “Well, I saw fireworks from the freeway, and behind closed eyes I couldn’t make ‘em go away.”

I wouldn’t have been capital-M Moved. Because, as prone as I am to catastrophizing, I am equally so to romanticizing.

Are things like this⁸ The Remedy for suffering? For pain? For dashed dreams or unrealized expectations or hope left on read⁹?

I’m not sure.

Does a good thing happening cancel out all of the bad that preceded it, or coexists with it? No. Is there always a cure or a remedy or a salve for every wound? No. Tibias get fractured. Horrible things happen. Atrocities and accidents occur. Irrevocable mistakes get made. Disaster strikes. There are some medicines so bitter than no amount of sugar can make it easier to go down. I don’t want to exist in a world in which the only way to accept these things as fact is to spin them into a tale that somehow tries to convince me that these things are okay. They’re not.

But is it delusional or naive to cling to any tiny shred of beauty or love or hope or joy even while acknowledging the existence of objective suffering?

Following Bad Bunny’s truly lovely halftime performance, I saw a lot of conversation around the concept of joy as a form of resistance. I think that’s a phrase that can easily be taken as trite until you see it in action and feel the truth in it. In these moments, you may notice the mistiness in your eyes before you can even register what brought it there. We’re all so hardened, so cynical¹⁰, that sometimes these pockets of joy — and the power they carry — have to catch us by surprise in order for us to accept them.

When I saw those two paper bags sitting next to each other, I didn’t feel like they had been placed there for my eyes to see them. I didn’t feel like I was in a simulation.

I felt reminded of the fact that, for how much absolute horror and terror and madness and badness and sadness there is in the world, there are also very small but meaningful examples of wonder and beauty and romance and love all around us.

Catastrophe and romance, somehow coexisting in the grand scale just like they do in my tiny little pea brain. Imagine that.

Everything is romantic

Here’s something I never thought I’d write — and that you probably never thought you’d read:

This is a meet-cute about two paper bags:

There was a time when I was empty.

There was a time before that, too, when I was something else entirely. I can’t remember that time perfectly, but sometimes it comes to me in flashes. Ambient noise. A memory with blurred edges. A picture just out of focus.

Then I arrived here. In this place with its smells of onion and spice.

For a long while, I laid in wait. During this time, I listened.

I listened to the loud noises in the form of sizzling stovetops and shouts of “Corner!” I listened to the chatter. I listened to relationships beginning. I listened to friends giggling and families arguing and then laughing over how ridiculous their argument was. I listened to pep talks and proclamations. I listened to the occasional complaint, the requests for more silverware or less tomato.

I heard everything, but I was part of nothing. I was one of many in a stack.

I’d overheard someone say, once, through a mouthful of guacamole, that you shouldn’t be a passenger in your own life. That if you wanted to amount to something, you had to take accountability — acknowledge your agency and do something, for the love of God.

I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do. I was a bag, after all. A bag in a stack, creased and folded and waiting my turn. I didn’t choose to be a bag. I didn’t choose to be this far down in this particular stack.

I wondered if any of my fellow stack members felt this same sense of existential confusion — the tension between wanting to make something of themselves but not knowing where to start.

I measured the passing of time by the lightening of the load above me. With each bag that was removed, the world became a little brighter. It became a bit easier to imagine that my turn was coming.

When the day finally came — when I was pulled free and opened up, air filling my up and the wind in my creases — I felt joy and fear in equal measure.

After all of that waiting, my moment was finally here. But what if I wasn’t good enough? What if I didn’t know what to do?

As item after item was added to my center, I felt my confidence ebb and flow. Imposter syndrome threatened to overtake me. But I was a bag, I reminded myself. I was made for times like these. I was finally getting to live my purpose. I was finally doing the thing I was made for.

When I was full, my top was curled over — I wished there was a mirror for me to see how I looked — and a name was scribbled on my chest. Lexi, it read. I’d spent so much of my life without a name — just one of many in a stack, nameless and nondescript. Now I had an identity, a purpose.

I was placed on a shelf, where I would wait yet again. For what, this time I had no clue. There had been rumors of where bags went once they were filled — some that bordered on fantasy and others that sounded more like nightmares — but no one really knew for sure.

Next to me, on the shelf, there was another bag. This one was named Seth W. I glanced over at him, taking in his sharply-creased edges, the tight curl at his top, the modest receipt that billowed from his neck. He was familiar to me, although we'd never met.

Hello, I said.

Oh, hi.

You come here often?

He snorted. First time. Does it show?

I made a show of looking him up and down, sussing him out. You reek of it.

Well, you reek of chicken tinga and barbacoa.

I laughed. Another bag was added to the shelf, pushing me a bit closer to Seth W. I didn’t mind.

Where do you think we’re going from here? I asked.

Somewhere where they’ll be excited for us to arrive, he said.

I liked that answer. My receipt billowed a bit in the breeze as the door opened. In the background, the noises coming from the sound-making-machine changed. I liked these particular noises. They made me happy. I looked over to Seth W, and he seemed happy, too.

I like this song, he said.

Song? I asked.

The music, he explained. That’s what they call the noises that come from the sound-making-machine. The ones that feel like they are just floating on the air and coming from nowhere? Music is like a language, and songs are like words. Or maybe more like sentences. I don’t know, I don’t fully understand the nuances of human language.

And why would you? I asked. We’re bags.

He laughed.

“Can I help you?” a familiar voice asked from above us. An unfamiliar voice said, “Yeah, just picking up for Seth.”

That’s you, I said to Seth W, admittedly a bit sad to see him go so soon. It was nice knowing you.

Same, he called, as he was pulled up and off of the shelf, placed in the hands of the holder of the unfamiliar voice, and carried away from me. I hope I see you again out there.

I hoped the same.

Moments later, my own time came. I was carried out and into the night. I was placed on a soft shelf in a room that moved. I heard more music, more songs. I heard the unfamiliar voice singing along very badly to these songs. I liked it. I sang along, too, even though I didn’t know the words.

I was carried into a new room. When the unfamiliar voice called out, “Food’s here!” a flurry of others came to join. I was passed from hand to hand, my insides being emptied. I listened to giggling and arguing and chewing and chatter.

After some time, I was crumpled up. It didn’t hurt. It felt kind of nice, actually, to not be flat or to be open. To be a new shape entirely.

I was placed in a holding bin of sorts, surrounded by unfamiliar shapes. This wasn’t like my stack. There were colors here that I had never seen before.

Hello, I said to these new friends.

Oh, hello, they said in response. Welcome.

Some time later, I was taken into another room that moved, which transported me to a much larger room that was very loud.

I was crushed again, this time much more aggressively than before, and I was flattened, but in a way that was different from my Stack days. I heard someone saying that I was going to be stripped down into fibers, and at first that sounded scary, but once it actually started to happen it wasn’t that bad. Parts of me were scattered all over the place, which was actually kind of cool, because now I got to see and hear so much more. Where my scope had been limited before, it had now widened.

I wondered what I’d become next. I could sense that I was no longer a bag, at least not in the traditional sense.

Hi, a familiar voice came from somewhere nearby, so close that it felt like it was part of me, or that we were somehow connected. Maybe we were?

Seth W, I exclaimed. It’s you!

It’s me, he said, a smile in his voice. First time getting flattened into fibers?

I laughed. If either of us had arms, I’d punch him playfully in the shoulder.

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Okay, that’s the end of that nonsense. Now go out and listen to The Remedy and have a very good & dichotomous day!!!!!!!!!!!

1. That’s a very posh thing to say. I’m going to start using it more often. When I walk into establishments or hop onto Zoom calls. “I’m supposed to be skiing right now.” It’s both chic and mysterious, which makes it DOUBLE chic. She’s SUPPOSED to be skiing, they’ll think, but she’s not. Their minds will spin with all of the possibilities, all of the possible explanations for my presence Here rather than on powder-covered slopes. They’ll wonder if it’s appropriate to ask. It will linger with them for the rest of the day, maybe even the week.

2. It was! It is!

3. and where we scarfed down the aforementioned smooshed PB&Js

4. Some people call me Lexi. One day I’ll get into the fact that, for the first 11 years of my life, I was exclusively Alex, and then my mom wanted to start calling me Lexi, and now neither of those names feel quite right to me, so Lex is a nice halfway point that fits a bit more comfortably than either of the two extremes. Actually, maybe I don’t have to get into this fact one day. Maybe I just got into it the most that is ever really required to get into it. There probably isn’t much more to say on this matter, other than that, in order to get my sister to break the habit of calling me Alex, my mom had her pay me a nickel every time she used the name. Which is funny because I didn’t care what she called me. Sorry, Liv.)

5. My eyes, not the bags.

6. and certified BANGER, mind you

7. seeing two paper bags and hearing Jason Mraz

8. two paper bags and a song from 2002

9. “hope left on read” is an absolutely ridiculous phrase that just came to me, and now I’m laughing out loud at it so I have to keep it here. I’m sorry.

10. and with good reason!