Never lose your marbles (for suzana)

Freshmen year, UC Berkeley, I lived in a triple dorm room in Unit 3 (before the remodel). Our floor was like most floors in the building - an eclectic mix of people from all walks of life, different colours, different socio-economic backgrounds. But this weird sort of thing happened on our floor that didn't seem to happen as much in the rest of the building - we didn't just pass each other in the hall and nod politely, we became close, we made ourselves into a family.

I was the extrovert - I wanted to relate with everyone all the time. Somewhere in the middle of the hall lived Ben. He was autistic, severely, but with a serious gift, maths. I never talked to Ben about maths, as this seemed to be the only thing anyone else talked to him about. Instead, we talked about feelings, emotions, of which Ben had trouble understanding all together, and I seemed to have an overabundance of.

Ben didn't like to be touched, at all, but he agreed that it made sense for us to hug, as I hugged everyone, and he needed to be able to hug me like everyone else. The hugs started slow - we just sort of scraped knuckles behind each other's heads, with our arms out as far as possible. Over time, we got closer, and the hugs looked real, but Ben still insisted he didn't feel anything other than the physical touch.

In one of our many conversations, usually late night after I had a few beers and he was up doing everyone's maths assignments, he told me how he came up with a whole series of experiments to try and feel emotion and he was wondering if I would mind helping him understand it all. In the first experiment, he decided to roll down the concrete fire escape steps of our building to purposefully feel pain.

In feeling pain, that one feeling he could recreate, he hoped to understand more about feelings in general. And he said this hadn't worked so far, that all he felt in throwing himself down those stairs was pain - physical. So then I asked him if this frustrated him - that if he did this over and over again, with no results, did he feel frustration.

A week later, he came back to me, battered and torn, and smiled a big smile, gave me a big hug. He said yes, he had felt frustration - he understood that emotion and could now recreate it.

In another of our many conversations, Ben told me that I was standing on top of a lot of rugs and that pretty soon someone was going to start pulling them from underneath me. I remember vividly not questioning Ben about why he saw this to be true - I knew it to be true. I asked him instead whether he felt I should concentrate on trying to stand back up again on the next rug below, or if I should start investigating all the different rugs beneath me, anticipating what was coming next. He smiled - he always smiled when I made him think about possibility that wasn't related to hard-codable facts. He hadn't an answer just yet.

Awhile after this conversation, one of those rugs was pulled, the first of many over the years, and I was sad, truly sad, and when I saw Ben, he could see it all over my face. He hugged me right then, the first real hug - and it in, one of his first powerful emotions - true empathy. The next day there was a knock on my dorm room. I knew it was Ben (he looked and walked like a sumo wrestler approaching an opponent). Ben had quickly run down the hall after he knocked, such that when I opened the door, I was left with a glass chalice full of marbles and a note saying, 'Never lose your marbles'.

I have been thinking about this again, what this means in my life so many years later. Here I was at the precipice of life, that along the way, I would get rocked and shook, but as long as I stayed true to the person I was in that moment, the crazy young girl who believed she could teach Ben how to feel, I would be OK, I would survive any and all changes that were about to come my way.

The glass chalice broke in one of the many moves in my life, and I did my best to keep the marbles. When I moved to Ireland, I gave the bag of marbles to a young friend - he was 10 at the time and I wanted to pass on Ben's message to a younger generation. I did, however, keep one lucky marble. Tonight I am going to give the last marble to a friend in need.