Money in Savings

I have never been good with space, keeping it, or closing it. I don’t like it when friends get too close physically or emotionally without an invitation. I don’t necessarily like to be pulled into a hug without it being my idea and I don’t like it when someone chooses to get close to my emotions or my fears. The space where my fear and love and dreams live is mine only.

I was immediately on the defensive when a woman on my networking call asked if I thought my big goals could become a reality in the next six months. I was already a little on edge when she proclaimed all undocumented people coming across the Mexican/ US border to be criminals, but I suppose her question about my goals to work with brown children in India was an innocent one, maybe. Or, maybe not.

I didn’t like it when one of my dear friends asked me how I would pad my savings account before another big move abroad. I did not invite her into the space my savings account and I share. It seemed like, with that question about the details of my plans, she threw the door open on my big goals without knocking.

I figured it would be enough to tell her I miss the work I did in India and I long for the freedom to walk along rice fields in Bali to justify my big goal. Why must she ask that we go into the spaces that got me into a life I did not want to begin with. Money was a major factor in why I took the job I did not want out of college and lived in a place where loneliness was my only company.

Or maybe I would rather invite her into the space between myself and money than tell her about the fears that dwell a little deeper. The fears that I choose to maintain space from except during those innocent moments between wake and sleep that allow them to bubble to the surface without invitation.

As unrealistic and ridiculous as it may sound I could tell her how I map out in my mind what will happen if I go to India and am never able to come back. I don’t mean that I will go to India and perish from malaria or because my bloodstream has been infiltrated by a parasite that can only be found in remote corners of the Ganges river but that I will physically not be able to close the space between the states and I. What if a global apocalypse or world war ensues and I am oceans away from my home, well my parents more specifically, they are the definition of my home.

I could tell her that my brain goes wild and thinks of all the otherworldly worst-case scenarios that could ensue. That the little satellites floating in space that allow me to call my parents when I’m in India fall from the sky, that there is a massive war over petroleum and planes can no longer make their way between the two countries. What if aliens take over the planet, or Trump-supporting Republicans in this case, and I am forever trapped in a country that is not my own.

I could tell her all of these things in an act of letting her into the space where my fear lives or I could just talk to her about my savings account.