Morning. I realize, surfacing to consciousness gradually, who I am, what has happened. Sadness first. Crushing heaviness in the chest, pain like a jagged bullet blast through the heart. What reason is there to get up?
Then, as necessity dawns, dread. Pulse-quickening fear. Ripples of anxiety burning through my gut like a sulphurous acid. What will I do today? What will I do tomorrow? How will I live? And what, exactly, do I have to live for?
I want to go back to sleep, but the adrenaline won’t let me relax. My racing thoughts are running a familiar track. Going over and over the abysmal loop about the little girl whose dreams never seemed to come true, who grew old alone, destitute, scarcely having lived life, as the world’s ecosystem and economy disintegrated around her.
At that point the only course of action seems clear. And it ain’t sending out résumés.
**
49:49:2. These numbers popped into my head the other day. My coach friend has pressed me to talk about my “dreams,” has encouraged me to run wild with my imagination, and I’ve had trouble explaining why this prodding feels so cruel to me. I might elaborate now that my life often seems to me to have consisted of 49 percent daydreams, 49 percent suffering, and 2 percent actual living.
You see, from the time I was a very young child, I have always been able to vividly imagine the way I would like things to be. And I typically suffered (from feelings ranging in intensity from mere disappointment to heartbreak and total despair) when what actually happened around me — nearly all of the time — was radically different from what I envisioned. (Woody Allen dealt with this conflict between imagination and reality brilliantly in The Purple Rose of Cairo.) Those rare times when there was a match, or more accurately a near-match, between what I wanted and what really occurred, make up the other 2 percent. Some might call me lucky for ever hitting that 2 percent. Some might say, “Welcome to the real world, sweetheart!” Then there are those who would fault me, like the Christians with their mustard seeds, for not having faith enough.
I wonder, in response: how can a young child who believes in Santa Claus and the resurrection not have faith enough?
So I can’t help but react viscerally when asked about my dreams. Especially at times like these, when everyone wants to know what I intend to do with my life. If I could even tell you, friends, would it matter? At 41, is the question even still relevant?
All this historic angst resurfaces when the routines and relationships and duties that have defined me and paid my way for a time are completely stripped away, and I’m left with the pressing immediate question of survival — but also the perennial (and still unresolved) question of life purpose. While the clock keeps ticking.
**
“Unknown” called again on my cell yesterday. “Unknown” has been calling me a lot lately.
If I pick up, I know I’ll most likely hear Officer Frank Lipinsky from the Fraternal Order of Police or Sargeant George Dodd from Disabled Veterans of America or Something Somebody Something from the Society for Blind Homeless Mormon Puppies making a persistent guilt appeal to me for money I don’t have.
If I don’t pick up, I can pretend it’s Sonny (to borrow an old alias of his), calling to see how I’m doing, if I’m okay, if I want to meet somewhere. He’s blocked his number because he’s not completely sure he’ll be ready to talk to me if I pick up. He didn’t respond electronically, after all, when I replied to his brief expression of concern with a heartfelt plea to stay connected.
So I don’t pick up. As usual, there’s no message.
You see how my imagination works?
**
I honestly don’t know what I mean to this man, now, if I mean much of anything to him anymore. I only know what he’s meant to me, and if you’ve been reading me attentively for a while, I don’t have to tell you. He did liberate himself, at last, from the clutches of one of those Fascinating Women who look supermodel-pretty from a short distance, but when you get close to them you see the perpetual discontent drawing down the corners of their mouths (rendering them oddly plain), and hear the chronic disapproval dripping from their voices. I extended her the benefit of the doubt way past its expiration date because I honestly believed she was contributing to Sonny’s happiness.
When it’s quiet at night I think I can hear the dull thwack of him rebounding off of half a dozen headboards around the city. I know the opportunities are there, attractive and ruby-ripe for the picking, and he’s definitely got the appetite (as well as some of the attributes) of a young Warren Beatty. Now that he doesn’t have to behave, he’ll probably be making up for lost time. (I once likened his pleasure-loving nature to that of a five-year-old boy left alone with a tub of ice cream.)
It’s all right, folks; I don’t own him. I know I’ve never had any claim to him in the slightest. None of us ever really do, even if we decide to play by the rules and stand up in front of a person of the cloth or the law and repeat after him or her. We made that stuff up to create a safe boundary, to protect our vulnerability, to not have to relive the irrecoverable losses of our helpless childhoods. The fact is that people are born free, and if what they really need to do isn’t what we would have them do…well, if we love them enough to want them to follow their bliss, we’ve got to let them go. (Once in a while, as happened for the fortunate Joseph Campbell and his wife, two people decide that being together is folllowing their bliss.) From almost the very beginning, three years ago, I knew I’d found a soul brother I would have to wish the best, even if he wound up breaking my heart into a million bleeding pieces.
You may not want me to feel the way I do about Sonny, either, but that’s what I’ve elected to do with my freedom.
**
A friend and I go to see “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Brad Pitt, comely as he is, has never been my favorite actor, but the film is deeply affecting because it’s essentially about change, and, ultimately, loss.
The title character, a man aging in reverse, weathers everything that happens to him with a sort of melancholy equanimity. Raised in a home for the elderly, he becomes used to seeing his companions vanish and new ones take their place. When Benjamin, in his wizened early twenties, finally comes to know the father who abandoned him at birth, he brings the fatally ill man out to the lake where he was happiest. One of the film’s most memorable quotes occurs as son and dying father watch the sun rise over the lake: “You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went, you can swear and curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.”
I don’t know about you, but at twice his age I’m still having trouble with that.
Benjamin knows, too, when to exit stage right, when his lifelong love Daisy is obviously not open to being with him — first at a smoky, boozy dancers’ after-show party in New York City where she is surrounded by male admirers (he walks away), and later after a crippling injury in Paris robs her of her livelihood and her pride (she sends him away).
Eventually they will “meet in the middle,” when he has grown substantially younger physically and she has grown substantially older emotionally. Of course Benjamin has no way of knowing if their time will ever come; that’s one thing that makes his surrender to the inexorable conditions of the present all the more admirable.
I can let my time at the studio go, the way Benjamin let his father go: mad as a mad dog at the way things went, swearing and cursing the fates, yet knowing when the end is the end.
But Sonny…I can’t go there. Not now. I can only hope for Benjamin’s equanimity, the gracious exit stage right after seeing the crowded room and the competition (and, perhaps, the injury). The time isn’t right; we aren’t welcome.
Maybe someday.
**
Like Benjamin, my life’s trajectory has been shaped more by haphazard coincidences and personal connections than by some grand overarching plan. His early years were played out on small stages: a house, a tugboat, a hotel — while mine were equally circumscribed by classrooms, kitchens, bookstores, and coffeeshops. I was 38 when I left the country for the first time and traveled to Italy. (That was my “2 percent“ year, the year of exceptions, the year I met Sonny. I could write an entire post on that spring, broad and sunny with possibility like the early years of life.) I honestly can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone who knows exactly what she wants to become from childhood and spends her life pursuing that path. My ideas kept changing: today, a nurse; tomorrow, an artist; the day after, a veterinarian; or, on second thought, maybe an actress; a mother; a pilot; a poet.
The only constants along the way, truthfully, were a burning desire for approval, and an even fiercer desire to be loved by those who elicited my own affections.
Which is funny, really, given the way things have turned out. As if everything that has happened since was meant to teach me that in order to maintain my integrity I might have to relinquish those very fundamental desires. Just as an example, I can introduce you to a few people at my former job who definitely don’t approve of me (!), but I didn’t submit to their bullying in order to be liked — did I?!
As for the second part…well, I’ve discovered along the way that it’s true what the otherwise astringent Christian mystic Anthony DeMello postulated: that the human spirit needs to love more than it needs to be loved. (He identified our two basic existential needs as to love and to be free.) For sure, not getting what you were after from the people you think you love will inevitably teach you the meaning of “unconditional.”
**
A fairly random, heart-driven existence, with no great accomplishments to cite: this has been my résumé, much like that of the curious Mr. Button. I only wish that I were aging in reverse right now. My chronic pain has been intensifying recently, perhaps as a response to all the new stresses. A friend of a friend who does Network Spinal Analysis has just told me that I’ve stored multiple traumas, both physical and emotional, in my spine, and that the blockages are cutting off my healthy nervous system functioning. (This is also, apparently, the reason why I’ve spent so much time in the overstimulated state of fight-or-flight.) It could be treated, if I had several hundred dollars to spend, but right now I’m more likely to be treating every dollar like a plank in my life raft, and seeing what I can cut out of my grocery bill.
The uncertainty and anxiety of poverty and unemployment in dismal economic times, the specter of encroaching physical breakdown and even disability, the prospect of being forced to give up my home and return to the bleak Northeast to live stifled within my relatives’ claustrophobic closet of millennial Puritanism… all of these things have driven me, in recent days, to the handrail of George Bailey’s bridge, staring at the water, wild-eyed. (Where’s that paunchy, bulb-nosed angel when you need him?)
**
Which is where we began. TAKAHO, my best friend from college always says: Tie A Knot And Hang On. I know my body can’t withstand another bruising stint in food service. The prospect of cubicles and fluorescents and sales calls gives me waves of existential nausea. I don’t even know whether I should put the yoga studio on my résumé, or how to talk about what happened there. The mere thought of paging or clicking through classifieds and job boards, attempting to find a round hole I can try to force my square peg into, is enough to make me break into a sweat.
The world of cold, hard survival is no place for choosy daydreamers.
And yet…the little girl still daydreams. Of kindred spirits and of giving help, of creating, of contributing, of having enough.
What she needs right now, frankly, is a miracle.
**
Sonny once wrote to me, “ask and you shall receive” — the irony of which was utterly lost on him. It’s a thing I have only found true, myself, that lucky 2 percent of the time. It’s hard to hear that particular Bible verse quoted, at any rate, when part of you is convinced Jesus fast-forwarded through all your fervent, begging childhood messages, including that one about Grandma’s cancer. Nevertheless, like those raving Secret people, I try to visualize the checks coming in (from where?) and to imagine fortuitous meetings and life-altering chance encounters. We can’t all be Forrest Gump, but poet David Whyte has mapped his life that way in the past, and he’s not exactly a member of the rah-rah manifestation crowd. The angel intervened when George Bailey was at the end of his rope and out of ideas (except for a very permanent solution to a temporary problem). If ever I needed a freakish coincidence, the time is now.
So I’ll refrain from drinking bleach for the moment, and let myself surrender and fall. As if there really are forces working in my favor. Even if the forces amount to nothing more than my belief that forces are working in my favor. I just don’t know. Maybe, sometimes, you simply have to trust that the net will appear.
As Benjamin’s adoptive mother Queenie was fond of saying, you never know what’s comin’ for you.
Recent Comments