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me: ugh. i never enjoy parties.

anne: that will all change, at my first annual mustachio bash-io.

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I can't remember what age I was when I realized that I didn't love other people. I think it just occurred to me one day, while I was staring at my desk during the SATs, or driving with my hand out the window, caressing the airstream.--
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To be honest, I felt vaguely weary towards them, strangely jealous, like the planet was populated entirely with younger, obnoxious, over-privileged half-siblings of mine. For the woman checking her lipstick in her rearview mirror, the boy staring at his feet on the train, I had nothing. I have a tendency to be practical, I think, which is one of the very worst things a human being can be.
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More than anything, I felt a desire for them to be responsible for themselves. I was fine with sitting next to them in second period, or maybe eventually partnering with them and starting a bank or something, but past that I wanted them to sort out their own blood. I would see homeless people and it made me angry, how they had the audacity to be needy, how middle-class discomfort was their livelihood.
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This changed in the weirdest way. I went to junior high with this guy named Justin, who carried dog-eared comic books around a lot and had kind of a soothing voice, for someone who slouched so much. He was my stand partner in orchestra. He left a birthday card on our music stand on the day I turned fifteen. By the time I noticed it, he was walking out the door, pulling on his backpack over his jacket.
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This was not when I began to warm towards people. Actually, I was not kind to Justin like he deserved. I cringed a little when he talked to me, because he played with Magic cards a lot and hung out by this tree at lunch, where all the unpopular kids ate. My friends made fun of me for a week when they found the birthday card in my binder.
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I never saw him again, but years later, I woke up one morning thinking about him. Not in the random old-classmate kind of way, but involved, intense. Almost like I was worried about him, or maybe in love with him.
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I did some serious soul-searching and determined that I was not, in fact, in love with him. But for a long time, I thought about him. Every day. All the time.
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I felt an urgency for him that drove me to radical action, for me anyway, which was prayer. Honest prayer, something like fervent prayer, I think for the first time in my life, prayers that were less like conversations with God, and more like the noise you make in your throat when you think someone is about to step in front of a bus.
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I would be checking my email, or rubbing the polish off my nails, and have to squeeze my eyes shut, lost for a moment in this bizarre, unidentifiable despair, my hands gripping the sink, like a mother or a wife. God, I would say in my head. God. Don't let it happen.
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I wondered about him, where he was, how he was doing, who he was hanging out with. I imagined him lonely, afraid, aimless, and feeling rose in my throat. I worried that he was sad, in trouble. I wanted to take my fifteen-year-old self outside and take her down to the ground for her hair-flipping, her eye-rolling. You didn't deserve him, I wanted to tell her, once I had her in a half nelson, her cheek against the concrete, spitting hair. You coward.
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And then, like a fever or a flood, it receded. I don't mean that I stopped caring for this boy- a man now, I guess- but rather the strange sense of urgency about his well-being did. It was replaced by a sense of peace that felt almost anticlimactic, like when the thunder exhausts itself and the rain finally starts to fall.
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To this day I don't know what it was. Maybe he needed prayer, and I was the only person connected to him with enough of a guilt complex to deliver. I do think God wanted me to pray for him. Maybe for his sake. Maybe for mine.
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I'm not sure why it happened, but it left me different. It really did. Not completely, not all the time, but in my life afterwards I began to change. Not like I was in love with people, but like my heart had warmed towards them, like it had gone through the low heat cycle in a microwave.
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It turned me into less of a bystander, I think. It's like someone told my heart that we're all in this together, and my heart said, Hmmm. I hear ya.
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It convinced me that there are some people out there who need a sister, need someone to look out for them, even if they've never met her, even if she's the snob who used to sit next to them in seventh period. It made my throat constrict, wondering who has maybe been praying for me, who saw that I was hurt or distant during a season of my life, who woke up at night to whisper my name to a silent room. This, more than almost anything else, seems unbearably holy.