Bea Troxel, Song of Return

Song of Return

Bea Troxel

Holding a tiny wine cup inside of a drab, gray conference room inside of a convention center in the middle of Los Angeles, I told an old coworker about my college boyfriend. He had prompted me after sharing his own college romance story. I told him my ex and I had incredible chemistry, but it didn’t feel right, and so I left him, after much consternation.  The coworker, a forty-year-old man I worked with every summer at a writing conference, looked back at me through his reddish curls and a voice dripping Louisiana and said, “Bea, you’re gonna die alone.” 

I was twenty-five, young; he looked at me with dark intensity. I stared back at him and I must have laughed or looked away to distract from the sharpness of his comment burrowing. The shame it brought up. Here was another moment of being told my leaving would end with me totally alone. His college girlfriend broke up with him, so it’s easy to now assume, eight years later, that he was projecting, but at the time I couldn't get there in my mind. Shortly before this a friend had told me, “Bea, at some point you’re going to have to commit.” Also, after dating for one month and ending things, the woman handed me a little dinner conversation card that asked, “What does it feel like to get close?” She thought I might be afraid of commitment. 

I’ve left nearly every person I’ve dated.

I’m not just someone who leaves, but I am someone who feels compelled to leave. I feel it deep in my body. Before I am conscious that it’s time, I get itchy ears, a sore throat, distant eyes. I attend to these symptoms as if they are God. As soon as they emerge, I think, “Seriously? Again?” There is a split between body and mind. I feel that the ending must happen. I can’t stop thinking about it until I leave, wishing the ending away. Because my body feels awful until I split, I’m walking around in a half daze, disoriented and sick. And once I leave, the symptoms stop. I’m done. 

*

Six months into my grad program at the U of Arizona, at the ripe age of 32, I took a Collections Class with my professor, Ander. We examined collections of stories, essays, poems. We read essays about collectors, some towards the hoarding end of the spectrum, others whose collections did not destroy their relationships. We also maintained our own physical collections. At the beginning of the semester, Ander had promised us that our collections would reveal something about our writing process and I was like, yeah, yeah, okay, I know myself already. After first thinking I might collect a series of bits (longstanding jokes) throughout the semester (such as: wearing paper watches taped to my wrist in my first week of teaching college freshmen)—this felt too laborious—I chose to collect from my favorite spot in Tucson: The Free Table. 

I’d open my sliding door, step onto the porch, hear the scrape scrape scrape of the neighbor tanning hides: I’d been observing her for months. Some days a bison, some days a sheep. I’d wave to her as she wiped sweat from her forehead and continued to scrape scrape scrape. I was headed to the Free Table. 

While first discovering the Free Table right when I moved to Tucson, I dated someone so kind, so patient, so lovely with a toothy grin and long hair. I’d liked him for so long, but as soon as we first kissed I felt my eyes slink back in my head, the fogginess emerged. I couldn’t believe my body wanted me to leave! Thrown back to choosing grad schools the previous year and feeling achy and sick when I finally got into a program I’d been long excited about, barely able to open my eyes fully. Feeling like I had to say no. Thrown back to my previous relationship when my scratchy throat emerged in the midst of feeling wildly happy, wildly attracted to my partner. Thrown back to the first time, a decade ago, when I knew I wasn’t attracted to my girlfriend, but I didn’t want to leave. The sore throat, the ache, telling me I had to leave.

*

The Free Table, started by an older couple in my neighborhood during the pandemic, is a long wooden table of constantly shifting items. Some days I’ll stroll by and just see a few frayed shirts and a box of hair dye. It rarely rains in Tucson, so the table needs no cover. Heading there, I jog through four lanes of traffic, walk one block past a Mesquite tree, turn left so I can see it at the end of the block. As I approach, I can tell if it’s full of goodies or sparsely laid baby clothes and fraying particle board. Lucky days are when there are piles of clothes, pirate-like white pants hand stitched, or boxes full of tiny objects, like the shiny white ball that opened and held miniature cassettes and film rolls. Or the day I journaled about wanting a drying rack and walked up to find one sitting at the table’s edge.

At the free table, I’ve found tomatoes, lunch, a thermos, a suitcase, first landing of the moon newspaper articles from 1969, and Sensodyne toothpaste. I met someone who runs community bike rides, a retired astronomy professor, a man dying of cancer who only had a few weeks left and told me so and as I walked home I asked myself, “What do you do with that?” 

*

I decided that I would take home one item from the free table each week for my collection. 

The first week: a mixtape titled “American Badass.” I thought, “Everybody is gonna love this.” But instead, I ridiculously found it was a scratchy version of“Cowboy” by Kid Rock recorded over and over. Wisps of outside noises cluttered the song as I listened. How disappointing.

The second week: a Chubby Checker record. Also the second week: I left my relationship. The body signals were too strong.

Grief and loneliness marked the following visits to the Free Table. I’d walk up at dusk, the sky pink and streaked with blue clouds. The moon rising behind me. I could hear my roommates calling out to each other “Moon I win!” as I left the house. I’d walk there thinking about my ex and his long hair and his toothy grin. His calm: wondering if I’d made some huge mistake. 

The third week: animal figurines. I positioned them around my room, the brown horse on my speaker, the blue dinosaur next to my reading chair, feeling them reflect back my sadness. 

The fourth week: Dvorak tape in D minor. The offerings did not feel too exciting. I would grab an item haphazardly to bring back. When choosing my collection I wanted something exciting and unique, worried a dull collection reflected on my ordinariness, but the collection felt dull even while the table felt exciting.

The fifth week: I needed a rain jacket for a trip and walked up and bam! A raincoat. The sixth week: I needed a suitcase. Bam! A suitcase. The seventh week: I hoped that goggles might appear. And all of a sudden a tinted pair was waiting there. (I didn’t even dare ask for tinted goggles.) Finally, some magic was returning to me. I was not just heaviness wandering to and from the table.

I told my class of the serendipity of the table, how it continually gave over what I hoped for. Ander jokingly said, “Now, Bea, are you also leaving stuff at the table, or do you just take, take, take.” The words “take, take, take,” echoed through my head like the words a villain hears from his childhood in an action movie. The words that form the wound that motivates the villain to live a life of crime. I just took, took, took. I just left, left, left. Before the words could cement themselves to my brain, I said, “No! I leave stuff all the time! I even rescued one-hundred books from an alleyway and left them at the table.”  When I shared this in class, my voice was so hurried, the hundreds of books numerous, that everyone looked at me like I was nuts. But I needed to make sure I wasn’t just take, take, taking. Or I needed everyone to know it. I needed to make sure I wasn’t leave, leave, leaving. 

*

At the end of the semester I had a pile of items that I did not care for as a collection: linen shirt, fanny pack, soda stream, stereo holder. The official collection did not interest me, which felt disappointing. I wanted a collection like The Last Supper Museum in Douglas, AZ that has a room full of odd versions of the Last Supper painting or the aesthetic of hundreds of aluminum can tabs. I wanted something beautiful, but as I reflected, I realized the walk to the table, the surprise of what I’d find, who I’d find was what compelled me. But as I sat down to write the manifesto of my collection, I slowly realized a theme throughout all of my writing and my life: my writing is about staying. My writing is about place. My writing is about return. 

On my wall hangs the “Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules,” by Sister Corita Kent and the first rule is: “Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.” This is my writing process. I find a place and then return time and time again. I visited a family of beavers every week for two years and wrote; I handed friends a fake phone over and over for years and wrote; I watched Magic Mike XXL with friend after friend and wrote; I’ve written about the same field over and over and over. It’s not about the collection, the writing, the piece, the idea: it’s the process. It’s returning time and again to the place, and staying, hoping to see something new. When you keep the ritual, you learn about the changes within yourself and the place. When you see the same spot over and over again, you see the strange collection of watches, the coffee maker, the same shirt never getting snatched. You gain a knowledge of the rhythms of that place, or yourself. 

The evening after writing my manifesto, I went to a going away dinner. It was the perfect air temperature: stars overhead. We sat at a long, wooden table made by one of the dinner guests. We ate chicken with lemon, rare steak, fat asparagus. And Trace, my classmate, leaned across the table unprompted and told me that it’s my sticking with a place that seems to be important. They said I sit with things. They said my obsessions are not brief but long lasting, and that I’m willing to bear situations long past the comfort level. The discomfort I had framed as leaving, and yes, I’ve left a lot, is also a feeling I’ve sat with. Even when the Free Table felt boring, I showed up. Even though staying with my ex felt uncomfortable, I sat through it to see what was really going on. Even when a topic feels exhausted, that’s usually when I find something totally new. I want to be consistent in showing up. It’s how you build trust—or at least that’s how I do it.

And then, as I write this, I think about how with the many jobs, many loves, many places, I have stayed longer than I wanted to. This is not just about staying or leaving, but it’s more about the story I tell about staying or leaving. 

I stayed with the toothy grin month after month because he was kind, loyal, loving. I stayed because I wanted to know if my urge to leave came from fear—the body, the sore throat, the tight chest. Or was my wanting to leave the true thing, and did the fear arise when I didn’t follow it? Unfortunately, it’s both. 

When I tell myself I always leave, I stay longer than I should just to prove my story wrong. When I tell myself I’m always someone who stays, I’ll try to leave so that I don’t become a stuck lady. But if I just attend, knowing that new things might arise. Or that new feelings emerge every day, then there might be some freedom. Maybe I won’t have to rely on my body to urge me to go. Maybe my body isn’t always telling me one thing. Maybe my body isn’t God. Maybe I’ll hear for myself what is going on. Maybe I can listen.

I imagine this: a field. A meadow. A bog. All in the same physical location but during different parts of the year. Imagine this, walking up to a pond’s edge and waiting, not knowing if anything will show up. But imagine. Waiting, and something does. Or something doesn’t. All of it, the collection for someone who can stay, who returns.

*

Bea Troxel is an essayist and musician from Nashville, TN and a second year MFA candidate at The University of Arizona. She writes about beavers and wave pools, but really she's just writing about longing and intimacy and connection. Her most recent record, Gettin' Where, came out in 2021, and you can catch her playing an occasional show around Tucson or spending hours on end at the Free Table.