The Ease I Feel
“And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end.” These are the words that Claire Keegan gives to the narrator — a young Irish girl sent to live with distant relatives — in Foster. The girl is in the middle of a gaggle of siblings, and the reader guesses that it is the imminent arrival of yet another baby that prompts the girl’s migration from a chaotic home with hints of trouble to the tidy, childfree Kinsella home where she is told to “make [herself] at home.”
“The ease I feel.” This turn of phrase struck me so much that I ended up drafting an essay for my manuscript simply titled “At Ease.”
For a long time, I missed that ability to meet up with a friend, slide effortlessly into a restaurant booth, and immediately shed any mask and pretense that comes with people you don’t know well. In other words, I longed to reclaim the experience of being fully at ease around someone. I don’t know why I conjured this image of a restaurant booth, but I suspect it’s because there is something casual about flopping on a cushion, taking off a jacket, getting a simple cup of coffee, and exhaling in a manner that communicates this: “I’m so comfortable here.”
On Saturday, we were the lucky recipients of tickets to see Lyle Lovett, thanks to a neighbor. He’s a funny storyteller; he talks (a lot), but he says what he wants to say slowly and meticulously. “Relationships with rooms [meaning venues] are like relationships with people,” he said. “Some make you feel at ease and some don’t.” (Reading between the lines I’d say Charlotte and the Knight Theater made him feel at ease.)
I think that “lack of ease” is an outgrowth of homesickness. And that’s because homesickness isn’t always rooted in place. The essay I’ve been working on digs much deeper, of course. (Although surprise, surprise I like the idea of 2200-character micro-essays.) It pings from Jia Tolentino’s book Trick Mirror, to the writing of Saidiya Hartman, to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s “loneliness campaign.” But it all started with that Claire Keegan book, with a beautiful depiction of a girl who savors — with every fiber of her being — “the ease I feel.”
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