Fuzz & Focus - a work of (mostly) fiction
“I’ve got a story, it’s almost finished. All I need is someone to tell it to. Maybe that’s you…"
--Jimmy Eat World
It was a motion made wholly out of vanity. Two minutes out her front door, she took her glasses off to avoid getting earpiece tanlines on the sides of her face. She debated returning to the house for her contact lenses, but decided against it. “Best to just keep walking,” she thought. “If I turn back, I’ll just get distracted at home and won’t make it back out again.” So the glasses went into her pocket, and the contacts stayed in their case on the bathroom counter.
Without glasses or contacts, detail fled. Houses and trees became a fuzzed stripe of brown and green, squished between blue stripes of lake and sky. People ceased to be persons and instead became colorful, mechanized cotton balls, passing by every minute or so. That sign didn’t say “Speed Limit 25” until she was six feet away from it. The clearest thing she could see was the sidewalk three feet in front of her.
But without visual detail to hold her attention, stuff of a less tangible nature came into focus. The peaceful sound and motion of dusk in the suburbs fell away into the background, and recent events surfaced in her thoughts. She hadn’t been able to understand why he’d stopped speaking to her, why he’d taken things so badly, or he wouldn’t forgive her. And she still didn’t. But somehow she was able to understand the insignificance of it now. It didn’t matter if that breakup destroyed a friendship. It didn’t matter if he never forgave her for all the ways in which she’d unintentionally hurt him. And it didn’t matter if he never apologized for the ways in which he’d hurt her. All that mattered was that it wasn’t the end of the world.
“Why does it feel like I learn everything the hard way?” she mumbled to a passing squirrel. “Why can’t I ever just trust my gut, and trust the advice that others give me?”
The squirrel climbed the nearest tree, without even giving her a passing glance. Not that it mattered. So she kept walking, sorting over the past week’s events in her head.
By the time she got to the lake and settled herself on a mossy rock at the edge of the water, the past two years had flown by in her head, in reverse chronological order. First the most recent breakup. Then the guys she’d dated spring semester. Then her failed attempts to be an Army girlfriend fall semester. Her thoughts glided over her last year of high school without a pause, and as she settled on that rock, her brain settled on the road trip of two summers ago.
She realized what pop singers have been trying to tell us in Top 40 hits for years-that love is like a road trip. A road trip with vague directions, too-short pit stops, and no end in sight, because though you know the name of the town or city to which you’re traveling, no one told you how far you’d have to drive to get there. Every sign on the highway looks from far away as though it might carry the name of your destination and tell you how close you are. But every time, you get closer to the sign and see that it doesn’t say the name of your destination, but instead says something like “Grand Junction,” “Tulsa,” or “Oakland.” You thought you were close, but you definitely weren’t.
But on road trips, we don’t fret about finding out that we’re nowhere near the end yet. Well, children do. But most of us embarking on this road trip of love are mature adults, capable of handling disappointment with at least some dignity. So though we might be disappointed at first to find that we’re still not there, the disappointment, along with the city that brought it, soon falls into the rearview mirror, then slides back to the horizon, and finally becomes nothing but a vague memory.
So she hadn’t reached her destination yet. So what? She’d put it behind her. Jake might take longer to move on, but he’d banished her from his life, so that wasn’t her problem anymore. She shook her head, remembering how this had started. She’d taken off her glasses to avoid tan lines, but though she was halfway to legally blind and relying on memory and blurs of landmarks to navigate her neighborhood, she wasn’t seeing any fuzz at all. Everything had come into focus.
I’ll be your distraction… I’ll be your distraction…
There’s a field nearby where it’s written in stone, my love will not die.
Please let it be known!
If there ever was ironic timing, that was it. Her phone rang from her back pocket, jarring her from her thoughts, just as a song called “Distraction” started playing on her headphones.
“Hello?” she said. With a question mark, because she didn’t recognize the number.
“Hi, this is Andy. We met at Craig’s house the other night, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember you. You’re the one from Montana, right?”
“Uh… yeah. Hey, some friends and I are going up to Lake Freeman this weekend. I know you said you liked camping, so I thought maybe you’d want to come,” Andy said, his voice barely showing his apprehension.
“That sounds great, actually.”
By the time the conversation was over, she could see a green highway sign coming up on the horizon. She couldn’t tell what it said from this far away, but she would patiently wait until she got closer to find out. And if it said something like “Lubbock,” she would pull over to fill her gas tank, and then keep driving until her sign finally did show up. There would be no tears cried at gas pumps over potato chips and Red Bull.
--Jimmy Eat World
It was a motion made wholly out of vanity. Two minutes out her front door, she took her glasses off to avoid getting earpiece tanlines on the sides of her face. She debated returning to the house for her contact lenses, but decided against it. “Best to just keep walking,” she thought. “If I turn back, I’ll just get distracted at home and won’t make it back out again.” So the glasses went into her pocket, and the contacts stayed in their case on the bathroom counter.
Without glasses or contacts, detail fled. Houses and trees became a fuzzed stripe of brown and green, squished between blue stripes of lake and sky. People ceased to be persons and instead became colorful, mechanized cotton balls, passing by every minute or so. That sign didn’t say “Speed Limit 25” until she was six feet away from it. The clearest thing she could see was the sidewalk three feet in front of her.
But without visual detail to hold her attention, stuff of a less tangible nature came into focus. The peaceful sound and motion of dusk in the suburbs fell away into the background, and recent events surfaced in her thoughts. She hadn’t been able to understand why he’d stopped speaking to her, why he’d taken things so badly, or he wouldn’t forgive her. And she still didn’t. But somehow she was able to understand the insignificance of it now. It didn’t matter if that breakup destroyed a friendship. It didn’t matter if he never forgave her for all the ways in which she’d unintentionally hurt him. And it didn’t matter if he never apologized for the ways in which he’d hurt her. All that mattered was that it wasn’t the end of the world.
“Why does it feel like I learn everything the hard way?” she mumbled to a passing squirrel. “Why can’t I ever just trust my gut, and trust the advice that others give me?”
The squirrel climbed the nearest tree, without even giving her a passing glance. Not that it mattered. So she kept walking, sorting over the past week’s events in her head.
By the time she got to the lake and settled herself on a mossy rock at the edge of the water, the past two years had flown by in her head, in reverse chronological order. First the most recent breakup. Then the guys she’d dated spring semester. Then her failed attempts to be an Army girlfriend fall semester. Her thoughts glided over her last year of high school without a pause, and as she settled on that rock, her brain settled on the road trip of two summers ago.
She realized what pop singers have been trying to tell us in Top 40 hits for years-that love is like a road trip. A road trip with vague directions, too-short pit stops, and no end in sight, because though you know the name of the town or city to which you’re traveling, no one told you how far you’d have to drive to get there. Every sign on the highway looks from far away as though it might carry the name of your destination and tell you how close you are. But every time, you get closer to the sign and see that it doesn’t say the name of your destination, but instead says something like “Grand Junction,” “Tulsa,” or “Oakland.” You thought you were close, but you definitely weren’t.
But on road trips, we don’t fret about finding out that we’re nowhere near the end yet. Well, children do. But most of us embarking on this road trip of love are mature adults, capable of handling disappointment with at least some dignity. So though we might be disappointed at first to find that we’re still not there, the disappointment, along with the city that brought it, soon falls into the rearview mirror, then slides back to the horizon, and finally becomes nothing but a vague memory.
So she hadn’t reached her destination yet. So what? She’d put it behind her. Jake might take longer to move on, but he’d banished her from his life, so that wasn’t her problem anymore. She shook her head, remembering how this had started. She’d taken off her glasses to avoid tan lines, but though she was halfway to legally blind and relying on memory and blurs of landmarks to navigate her neighborhood, she wasn’t seeing any fuzz at all. Everything had come into focus.
I’ll be your distraction… I’ll be your distraction…
There’s a field nearby where it’s written in stone, my love will not die.
Please let it be known!
If there ever was ironic timing, that was it. Her phone rang from her back pocket, jarring her from her thoughts, just as a song called “Distraction” started playing on her headphones.
“Hello?” she said. With a question mark, because she didn’t recognize the number.
“Hi, this is Andy. We met at Craig’s house the other night, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember you. You’re the one from Montana, right?”
“Uh… yeah. Hey, some friends and I are going up to Lake Freeman this weekend. I know you said you liked camping, so I thought maybe you’d want to come,” Andy said, his voice barely showing his apprehension.
“That sounds great, actually.”
By the time the conversation was over, she could see a green highway sign coming up on the horizon. She couldn’t tell what it said from this far away, but she would patiently wait until she got closer to find out. And if it said something like “Lubbock,” she would pull over to fill her gas tank, and then keep driving until her sign finally did show up. There would be no tears cried at gas pumps over potato chips and Red Bull.