This past Saturday at the bookstore, I reached or perhaps passed my New Eden threshold. I was also doing inventory crap in the children’s section, which exists in some kind of eighty-dimensional timespace vortex and whither only the most stalwart of booksellers dare venture. This may have exacerbated the twitching, bare-nerve state I enter every time I pass that threshold.

Two of my coworkers, Birmingham and Lefty Sophisticate, stood chatting (talking aesthetics of invitations, I believe) behind me when the moment came to clutch the register’s monitor with both hands and lay my forehead against the screen while emitting an expansive groan of surrender. “Oh honey,” Birmingham said “why don’t you give all this a rest and go get yourself an ice cream cone?”

I didn’t get an ice cream cone, but I did have a walk and a cigarette, and when I got back I determinedly figured out how to open the drawer of the CD player (right hook to the control panel) and extracted another noxious contributor to my proto-postal disposition: the Putumayo World Music mix, “Weekend in Ibiza.” I replaced it with Joni Mitchell, and my day got worlds better.

I sat in the vortex of death children’s section singing “A Case of You,” happy that my sad, dusty alto voice was at its best at that moment, and articulating for me the process of depressurizing. When your basic giant dickwad walked in soon after, I was calm enough to defuse his situation and merely suggest to Birmingham that we keep a loaded automatic under the register.

Still, by the time I made it into the train to New York this morning, I felt like I was wearing my skin inside out. The only way I can describe this feeling is as a kind of aphasia. I said to Lyrical the other day that I feel isolated in New Eden because virtually no one here speaks my language, both literally and figuratively. I thought of it in terms of foreignness, of an irreducible difference between myself and my surroundings, of the impossibility of translation. But I’m now realizing that mine is an aphasiac anxiety — I attempt to express something, tell some story about myself, and whatever comes out is something entirely unintended that has a sense wholly unrelated to what I had wished to communicate. Or nothing comes out at all.

I don’t mean this, really, in terms of actual spoken language — though there’s that, too. I can’t say what I mean, exactly, but it’s something to do with feeling that the edges of my self are eroding, or that the world has turned upside down and forgotten to take me with it.

What saves me, aside from frequent trips to Dishtown and New York, where kindred spirits resuscitate me, is that the ladies of New Eden Books are not what I expected them to be. To look at Boss Lady or Birmingham, I’d never have thought they were people I could get along with peaceably, let alone befriend. Getting to know these women, recognizing their complexity and allowing them to recognize mine, finding what lies behind what I thought I saw when I first met them, has been an incredible opportunity.

Some kind of leftover adolescent angst born of my high school self’s sense that everyone was evil and everyone was out to get her, some judgmental defense mechanism caused me to write off, for example, the Literary Hoover from the moment I met her. She was, to be fair, wearing something suspiciously pink and well-pressed, but according to my code of judgement I had no reason to believe that I had encountered in her the most voracious reader I’ve ever met. I had no idea I’d be finding myself relieved to have her standing next to me as the only person in a fifty mile radius who could get excited with me over histories of premodern medicine. Another coworker proved to have a delightful, easy laugh and an ability to talk about virtually anything with interest, and in still another I discovered an inexhaustible reservoir of silliness and affectionate sweetness.

Some of them even get me. Boss Lady has learned how and when it’s funny to tease me about my radicalism and sometimes-sardonic aspect, and Lefty Sophisticate laughs with me in my snarky moments and knows to squeeze my shoulder when someone buys a James Dobson book. At the end of a long day recently, Birmingham said, “I’m real glad you’re going to Brit City on the Sea — I think that’s gonna be real good for you.” This came as an incredible relief — she understands, I thought, that I don’t belong here, that it’s not inventorial misadventures making me twitch but a profound sense of isolation and a streak of wanderlust. She sees that I don’t fit in, and she likes that about me.

Just goes to show, mouse, I thought to myself: don’t you burn any bridges, because you never know when the straight blonde Republican ex-flight-attendant pink-pants-wearing tennis-playing fiftysomething Southerner is going to turn out to be your favorite new friend.