David McElroy

About 20 years ago, I met and dated a beautiful and charming woman. She was the stereotypical California blonde. Tall and beautiful.

I could tell she was impressed by money and material things, but I ignored that. And I quickly noticed signs that she wasn’t entirely trustworthy. I ignored that, too. Why?

Because she was beautiful and charming and intelligent. She had so much potential. If she could just change in a few specific ways, she would be the perfect woman for me.

The relationship ended quickly. She acted badly in ways that were entirely predictable. I had allowed myself to be blinded by the things that attracted me to her. If you listed all of her pluses and minuses, she might’ve scored a 90 or 95 percent. But the parts of her that were completely wrong for me were the non-negotiables.

I let myself be swayed by what I wanted to be true. She showed me — very early — who she really was. I just didn’t believe her.

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I’ve heard her name dozens of times, but I can’t remember what it is. She’s the one who nobody at her job likes. She’s the one who gets talked about when she’s not around.

But when I saw her Thursday, her face caught my attention. She was on a break from work. She was sitting quietly. Her face was blank, but she looked stressed — and she looked as though she might’ve been crying.

I sat down next to her. I can’t claim I was being kind or generous. It was out of instinct, not because I really wanted to. I couldn’t ignore someone who appeared to be in distress, even if her co-workers’ stories had prepared me to dislike her.

I wasn’t sure how to start, so I just told her I hadn’t seen her in the store recently. She told me she had been in a hospital — in an intensive care unit — for a week.

There was pain in her face. It wasn’t physical pain, but emotional distress.

As her story tumbled out, a lot of things suddenly made sense. She was no longer just a 21-year-old who snapped at co-workers and seemed to pick fights for little reason.

She was suddenly a young woman who had been battling a serious medical issue for the last year. She was someone who just had a hysterectomy because of the medical problem. She was a woman who desperately wanted to have children — and who just had to face the fact that she will never have children.

I was ashamed of myself for having judged her.

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I have been a stranger in this place all my life.

An alien. Just a visitor.

I was born among a people who I didn’t understand. A society that felt alien. A culture that felt cruel and perverted.

All my life, I have struggled between two competing compulsions. Part of me felt as though I had to fit in here. I felt that I had to conform. I had to become acceptable to the people around me — the ones who were so quick to judge me and ridicule me when I didn’t imitate them.

The other part of me has always been searching for a home that I knew was somewhere else. That part of me knew that I was an alien among these people. That part knew that I was looking for something. A person? A place? A force? I didn’t know.

The more I understood that I was a stranger in this land, the more I vaguely conceived that I was looking for another place. Not a physical place that’s on a map. I was looking for the place where I would find this “something” that I was compelled to find.

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