Charlotte Kupsh

My first day as a professor, I wake up with shooting pain in my left shoulder blade. I have a tough, stubborn knot hiding just behind the bone, positioned in such a way that I can’t reach it with my Naipo Shiatsu Back and Neck Massager (with Heat Deep Kneading Massage for Neck, Back, Shoulder, Foot and Legs, Use at Home, Car, Office!).

I bought the massager during the first year of the pandemic, when I had a knot in my back for two months because I lived alone, couldn’t reach it, and couldn’t ask anyone to touch me. Now, in 2023, in Muncie, Indiana, I can be with people any time I want, but I still don’t have anyone to help me with this fucking knot.  

I don’t go to campus. I don’t teach today, so I go to Indianapolis (sorry—to Fishers, a suburb of Indy). I work at a coffee shop for a few hours and have lunch at Books & Brews (which is in Indy, at least technically), a used bookstore with a bar and a heavy emphasis on tabletop gaming. Funko POPs are not really my scene, but everyone leaves me alone and I get to have a beer and a sandwich on a Monday afternoon, which I think is a win in favor of the “work life balance” I am so determined to achieve. I am more than my job, even if I spent seven years and made two cross-country moves away from everyone I knew and loved to attain that job.

My real reason for going to Indy is to visit Costco. But the Indy (not Fishers—I checked) Costco is laid out differently than the one in Lincoln. I cross the store and back, unable to internalize the route, trying to move clockwise against the—maddening—counterclockwise flow of traffic. I can’t find mixed nuts or fig bars. The cashier doesn’t ask if I want a box.

I don’t have a full conversation with anyone all day. I haven’t had an in-person conversation in three days. Phone calls, texts, and FaceTimes are my saving grace, but it’s not the same. Ironically, I’m more in touch than ever with all my long-distance friends. I’ve never had so many video chats and voice messages. But it’s wearing on me, not having friends here yet. Last week, one of my fellow newbies in the English department and his wife invited me over to dinner at their house. “We’re lonely,” he told me, shaking his head.

On the way home from Costco, I see a flock of birds flit across the sky above my car. Last fall, I lived under the flight path of a massive flock of starlings. In the evenings, when I was walking home, I’d see scores of them overhead on their way from wherever they hung out during the day to their night roosts around the state capitol building. Starlings are incontestably menaces (they roost in enormous groups of thousands and they shit everywhere, and it stinks). So why am I crying in my fucking car over a bunch of birds?

I am trying to love Muncie. I study place and I’ve written full book chapters on how academics adapt to their migratory homes. I know that these things take time. How many times have I told people that some places take more time to love? How many times have I dismissed others’ criticisms of places because I didn’t think they were trying hard enough? How many words have I written about deep, emotional connections to our environments and how those emotions sneak up on us, how they burst from our hearts suddenly, without warning?

God damn it, I am trying.

Yesterday, I walked over to the Craddock Wetlands, a small nature preserve with a boardwalk over a wetland. It’s right in the middle of Muncie. On the way there, I walked through a park. I saw a red pickup truck parked on the side of the road. I thought maybe the guy was fishing—lots of people fish on the White River, sometimes with high tech looking backpacks and walkie talkies, sometimes with plastic rods that look like they’re toys—but then I saw him up close. “It sucks to run out of gas,” he called to me. I smiled instinctively before I processed what he said.

I brought pepper spray to the wetlands because I am afraid of everything. Unfamiliarity can give you a sense of hostility. When you don’t know where you are, sometimes the mundane becomes menacing. I am trying to make Muncie familiar, like a place where I belong. I bike on the trails. I go on long walks. I ride my bike to campus instead of buying a parking pass, and as I bike along the White River, I count the turtles. There is a cement embankment along the trail off Wheeling Avenue, and I have learned that the turtles—there are all different kinds and sizes—like to come out of the water and sun themselves on it. There are a few marooned logs in the river, and that’s where I see the most turtles, lined up in rows and sometimes even on top of one another. When I get to school or when I get home after work, I text Ben and tell him how many turtles I saw. So far, the highest count has been 75.

Ben tells me there are fourteen species of turtles in Indiana, or maybe it’s just in the White River. (That’s the kind of thing I could keep straight if he were here with me.) I don’t really need my glasses to get to campus safely, but I wear them every day now so I can notice the wildlife. On other parts of the river, I see herons (my highest count is 8) and woodchucks (I know where they all live now). Once, on my bike, I passed a big, black snake on an underpass. Before I met Ben, I noticed wildlife with a passing interest, but I didn’t really notice it. Now I notice everything. I take stock. I wonder about what I see.

I don’t have a lot of people to tell about the turtles. I work it into conversations with my colleagues who—bless them—act interested for a minute, but I’m not sure that they actually are. I can’t believe I’m the only one who’s noticing all these damn turtles. You have to be very quiet and look in the distance to get an accurate count, because they see you coming and dart into the water. If you’re in your car, you won’t even notice them.

Starlings are never alone. That’d be a poetic reason to cry over them—they’re always together, and I feel so isolated right now—but actually I was crying because I realized I wouldn’t see them migrate over my apartment in Nebraska ever again.

So, I’m by myself in Muncie. And I’m trying. I’m making a lot of little steps, learning things, going places with the GPS turned off. I’m telling myself it will get better and these things take time. I’m leaving the house and trying new things, even when they scare me, and even when this knot in my shoulder is still shooting daggers into my upper back. I’m trying. I’m counting the damn turtles, and I’m trying.