“I come from childhood as from a homeland.” --
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little
Prince
“But
the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the
years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or
hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or
dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never
went away. That one touch of her hand.” – PK Dick, A
Scanner Darkly
***
It’s
a beautiful night and you’re not here.
The words form in my head
unprompted. Before their arrival, I haven’t even noticed the brisk but not
uncomfortable breeze, the orange-tinted moon, and the muffled sounds of the
city. Now I’m acutely aware, but a
question remains.
Who are you? To whom is this thought addressed?
I’m all
too acquainted with the answer, but I don’t like it; it’s messy. You isn’t always singular, especially
when you only really exist in my mind,
with all your overlapping and converging memories and hopes and dreams.
Oh Megan, you think this
is all about you. It never was, and it never will be. I don’t know why I ever
told you to have a good life. I said it with the tone usually reserved for fuck you, so that likely negates the
literal content. In any case, fuck you. I refuse to associate myself with anyone
who thinks Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice contain perfect model
examples of healthy feminist relationships ever again. Also, he looks like a
bulldog. But really now, spitefulness aside, here is a story:
I like
you a lot, I said. I love you, you
said. Really? I said. Yes, you said. After you left, I went
out and sat across the street from the empty city pool, because the weird blue
glow of the smooth water against the night sky was the only thing in town
surreal enough for the situation. There, alone except for inane late-night
radio chatter and the tail ends of corny pop songs, I decided I would open my
mind and guts to you, in the honest way I hadn’t since I was a child. So this is love, I thought, tangled
around you. And so I told you. But no, because the moment some random dude pays
more than a passing glance to you it’s not “I love you,” it’s “I’ve always
wanted nothing more than a warm body and this person, by virtue of his
masculinity, is an upgrade, sorrynotsorry.” If you stepped back from your
self-absorbed life for a moment, maybe you’d realize that you have far more in
common with Ayn Rand characters than you think.
Okay, so maybe I didn’t really put aside all
malice, so go ahead and tell me again that it’s unjustified, as long as you can
look me in the eye this time.
There’s you, Izzy. Of
course. You’re so easy to acknowledge, I sometimes worry I’m using you as a
scapegoat too often. You’re an acceptable past demon, one that elicits the I’m so sorry response, the one who is most
appropriate to write an entire blog about. People would probably tell me that
this is a silly problem to preoccupy oneself with, seeing as people literally
died, but it’s okay, because there’s like a hundred more questions that beg for
airtime too, the most pressing of which is how long you’d known of your end. If
someone were to ask me right now, I’d answer that I’ve known for over six years
for sure, and forever uncertainly. Maybe that question isn’t concerning to you
at all and I’m just being selfish and relating everything back to myself and my
inner life. I’ll never know, and I still can’t accept that.
And if one pushes back the
layers of old mothbally sweaters hanging in the back of the closet of my mind, anther
sits trembling, both excited and fearful of acknowledgement. For many years, you
were a neglected child, resigned to a life of silent rage. Remember how they
told you that unless you could get those emotions under control, no one would
ever love you? And then this was immediately followed by how it’s not healthy
to bottle things up? And so, even then, mourning clouded your days, although
you didn’t recognize it as such and it lacked impetus or direction. It’s not
that you didn’t want to verbalize, but that you lacked the vocabulary to do so.
The medical establishment fails in creating adequate perimeters of expression
and it takes the world’s greatest poets and authors pages upon pages to fully
explain, so of course to expect a child with no sense of literature to detail
her own collapsing psyche is unreasonable.
There’s a photograph of you and Izzy that I
keep hauling around with me and pulling out when I particularly despise myself.
I remember the day it was taken: scrambled eggs, kickball, a dead bird in the
road to remind you of your mortality. Izzy screamed when she saw it; you didn’t.
You poked it with a stick and she told you it was gross. You said that it had
to happen sometime, shame it appeared to be a juvenile though. You don’t look unhappy in the snapshot taken in
front of the house; your eyes are brighter than mine are now. Which is more trustworthy: the camera or the
human mind? In the end, you too are now forever lost to me, but because I knew
you so intimately, there’s a dull ache just in remembering, and again the
desperation in lack of certainty.
I’ve written tens of
thousands of words to you, that girl, so many letters, love notes, pleas for
help. Each and every one has gone unanswered, but because I’m human and humans
are irrational creatures, I keep sending them off, somehow hoping that this time I’ll get a response. I know
you don’t reply because you can’t, but that doesn’t stop me. With every shout
into the void, I become more frantic.
I don’t
want to blame you for my woe. I’m the one who’s a mess: I can’t hold a
minimum-wage job down for longer than six months, I “forget” to take my meds,
sometimes I can’t remember what day of the goddamn week it is. And, um,
dependency isn’t a part of healthy relationships, so it’s probably a good thing
you’ve abandoned me, at least for your sake. I want to say that this is
goodbye, but I know it probably isn’t the case, at least if statistics hold
true. So many times I’ve tried to say goodbye, claiming that this time, it’d be
forever, but every time some part of you finds me again, no matter how many
miles I’ve travelled or what new hiding place I’ve found. And every reunion
hurts just as much as every abandonment, but I don’t resist, because at least it’s
a different kind of pain. So I remain hopeful. You’ll be here sometime, and
then the panic changes course, attempting to banish you. Please don’t pull out
one of those abusive relationship checklists.
With each
separation, you change. Or maybe it’s me that does; it doesn’t really matter.
Instead of being excited about discovering the new you, I grieve the loss of
the old one. The homecomings mark knowledge of something I’ll never get back,
and nostalgia pains me almost viscerally; it’s not at all like a nice vacation
from which one returns exhausted but refreshed. Nostalgia is far too pretty of
a word. There is no sense of finality or of sharp breaking with what once was.
There’s just a wistful dainty lady patting at her damp eyes with an embroidered
handkerchief.
None of
this is a particularly new revelation to me, but I still cannot shake the sense
that you should be here. I don’t try
to torture myself. And yet, here I am.
As much as I rearrange the
jigsaw puzzle pieces of my life, they never quite all fit. Maybe it’s because the puzzle’s too
complicated for me right now, but I’ll figure it out later. Maybe I lost some
of the fundamental pieces long ago, or maybe there was never a complete set to
begin with. Maybe I didn’t really lose the pieces, I just misplaced them and
I’ll find them when I clean out that one junk drawer. Maybe the puzzle was put
out by a weird post-modern art group and the pieces aren’t supposed to go
together in any meaningful way. Maybe this metaphor is really terrible. Lately,
I’ve been finding the saying “life is short” to be odd, because no matter what
happens, life will be the longest thing I’ll ever know.
And there is no moral to
this story.
No comments:
Post a Comment