My very first, super-serious (at least to me) boyfriend was a handsome young architecture major. Our love was complicated by a long-distance situation; he matriculated in Indiana, and I was majoring in Partying in Flagstaff, Arizona.

This distance necessitated long, impassioned phone calls every Friday night (in those pre-cell phone days, kids, I would get a roll of quarters and stand at something called a pay phone in my dorm where you actually had to feed coins in and I’d talk to him for an hour and then get off the phone and go study Partying some more) and of course, write long, impassioned letters. With a pen. By hand. On little pieces of paper. Because there was no email back in the Stone Age.

Handsome, Young Architecture Major liked to tell me about his studies in his letters, and I remember him explaining the concept of ‘personal space,’ or the little invisible envelope we each occupy. You can tell the size of your envelope by figuring out how close people can get to you before you start feeling nervous. HYAM explained that studies show that violent criminals have huge personal envelopes…they’re getting itchy when they realize there are other life forms within a mile radius. Normal people’s personal envelopes are much smaller.

I’ll never forget HYAM’s impromptu sketch of the principle, which showed a grinning convict flipping off innocent bystanders standing just over the horizon. I would have included this lovely graphic here, but I had to burn it along with all the other long, impassioned letters when HYAM dumped me. Apparently I was invading his own ‘personal envelope.’

But that’s for another day, as I got to thinking about *my* personal envelope this afternoon on the drive home from work.

Now, I already know that I’m something of an agoraphobe. I can’t stand shopping in crowded stores, for example; there are too many people, and they’re all moving randomly and unpredictably and just strolling along and I like to stride purposefully to my destination and I have to keep negotiating every step around all these uncontrollable elements.

Traffic’s a little better. There are lanes, for starters (wouldn’t the mall do better with lanes? YES!) and speed limits and fortune definitely favors the driver who is (metaphorically, at least) striding purposefully. It gets dicier when rogue Smart cars start cutting across four lanes to get to the off ramp, and I won’t even start with how I feel about swoopy overpasses and my acrophobia.

But when traffic slows down in the stop-and-go, as it did today, and the car behind me starts behaving like it wants to give me a colonoscopy in the middle of the ironically-titled ‘high speed lane,’ my antsy gets kicked way up to turbo and I find that my personal envelope ends right at the back bumper of my Accord. One of these days someone’s gonna try that trick again and I swear, I’m gonna do the worst possible thing I can think of to do: use my windshield washer and get their car all wet. (Hey, just because I’m neurotic doesn’t mean I’m psychotic.)

Listen, Guy In The Dodge Ram Pickup: in this traffic we’re all going five miles an hour. I can’t see your headlights anymore, you are so flippin’ close to me. If I have to so much as tap the brake you’ll be in my backseat. My idea of close, personal contact is a fervent handshake, so trying to lick my personal envelope is, of course, right. out.

© E.S. Evans 2010