Ryan Lane ryanalane

The Worlds Within Us

Phoenix, among homes, I would describe as the most normal. In my brain it has long been thoroughly normalized. The epitome of Arizona/Southwest/American living as I’ve experienced it. But it is also scrubbed of a distinctiveness that Tucson and even my drained Prescott hometown retain. The place is identifiable but also generic enough for me to resign it to a backdrop of total familiarity. Regardless of activity or era, the rhythms I find myself falling into here have felt exceptionally taken for granted. The roads I drive, the grocery stores I enter, the café havens in which I used to seek regular refuge are draped in neutrals. I have known no other form of this place. After returning from more colorful periods elsewhere it used to be a major pain point, a pothole of depression or at best a waiting-room feeling where all I could think to do was sit and pray for a change.

Tonight I wrote back to a kind soul from the past. An elementary school sweetheart who recently got in touch after

Van valami furcsa és megmagyarázhatatlan

“There’s this film you have to see! It’s called For Some Inexplicable Reason,” she blurts, recalling. We were sitting in a courtyard, part-café part-living room, a prime example of Budapest bar syncretism. It was a sleepy Sunday. The city’s always quiet on Sundays, as I was that day, less than 24 hours back and already nursing a Hungarian hangover. I had arrived the previous evening, breaking a long two-year absence, and in short order Julcsi and I went for beers. I was grateful to see her so soon—not only because I missed her greatly, I did, but also because she is still my only friend with whom I solely speak in this peculiar tongue. After an absence, the practice was welcome.

Before I moved away from Hungary in 2013 I felt on top of the world. I was nearly 22, working an exciting job in a city with which I had essentially eloped. Far away was the Arizona desert that had wrung me dry from university strictures and

Dear You, Me, and All Those In The Way

What gives you the idea that you know everything?

No, I don’t literally mean everything. I don’t think you’re that opaque, although I think you’d surprise yourself. Obviously there are facts you haven’t come across, books you haven’t read, TED talks you haven’t seen. I’m not talking about any of that.

Here’s what I am talking about: from the 7+ billion people currently alive, to the 100+ billion who’ve ever lived, to the masses of animals that your neighbors eat, to the trees you’ve never touched, to the towns you’ve never heard of, to the names…

What makes you think that your 20/30/40/50/60 years on Earth, living as one person—one very specific slice of humanity, in one very specific slice of history—gives you a handle on everything that’s ever going on? And by handle I mean something like this:

Become An Ocean

You must become an ocean. There is no other choice, really, should you wish to avoid your own quite optional shipwrecks, freeing you to engage with what exists outside your modest slice of consciousness. Do not get me wrong: there is no sin in toiling in constructed pain—we creatures do it for reasons sound as they are unknown. But there are a few junctures where the smooth road is just as valuable as the rough one. Existing beyond this pain is one such choice.

We get swept by shit things. Like when my partner and I had sex in the evening and by midnight she was sucking another man’s face in his own bed. Or after high school when I slept with a married woman twice my age, sloughing off my culpability only for guilt to return and capsize me. This is real pain, caused and felt. But then comes the constructed pain. I’ve lost nights to rage and weeks to sadness and shame. I’ve forced others worse fates. Any shit thing can become a shipwreck. It can swell to be the only reference point. Your cr

Healing With Our Fathers

I walked away in tears from a recent dinner with my father. He was lit, or so it felt, brandishing his restaurant bravado with loud voices, large gestures, and bottles of wine preemptively ordered without as much as an ear to the staff or the relatives with whom he was dining. I couldn’t handle it that night. We all have rough evenings, yes. His have evoked anger, sadness, pain from me.

I connect such nights to scenes from years ago. Across our tiny kitchen table, my dad and I would sit and pontificate about markets and world politics and other things on which I knew too little to really be commenting. Lips primed, we held forth on whatever verbal morsel came to mind, actual knowledge notwithstanding. To me it felt like getting closer to truth—or something—back when I thought truth was a sense of enforced security, of demanding validation. I talked and talked and felt so smart. Talking with my dad.

My mom and sister ate with us in silence.

That was how it was. The boys talked an

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