You buy that? I don't know. It seems like sorcery.
Dark magic.
They say that every dog has its day, but, clearly, that's not true. The world is full of abandoned dogs. There are people who torture dogs for fun. When do they get their day? And if we're being metaphorical, well, that's just fucking dumb. You ever open your eyes?
The world is full of misery we created. Children starve. Still.
Stop listening to what they say. Find a quiet, natural place. A place where you can hear the thoughts that are in you already. You need to trust that voice inside of you. That's where your solace lies. That's where you can find epiphany.
You just gotta shut up for a little while.
They don't tell you that, and it would behoove you to wonder why.
(Reserved for Mr. Mader comments)
ReplyDeleteYep, truth. Sometimes you gotta shut up for a while.
DeleteIt was nothing, in the overarching picture of the world. A spit of rocks tiptoeing out into the Pacific off the beach they’d come to think of as theirs. But it became hers: it became her. He’d first found her there after their first argument, which had been mostly his fault, and after a night on the sofa, a day of work, and what he decided after buying them had been a paltry peace offering of flowers and pastries from her favorite bakery, he left them on the kitchen table and met her out there with what he hoped was a sincere apology and an understanding of why she’d exploded like she had. After that, what had become her solitary thinking place became theirs, the flat rock at the end big enough for two cozy and not very large people.
ReplyDeleteIt was nothing, but it was everything. It was where they’d meet at the end of their days, share triumphs and fears and frustrations and what they could reveal of their war jobs that wasn’t classified—and sometimes even those—or where they’d just watch the sun sinking into the ocean, the end of another square on the calendar.
It was nothing, and now, as he’d discovered when his daughter showed him the map on her computer, it was gone. Blasted away to make room for the future. An outdoor mall, a boardwalk, industry, commerce. Like most of the tiny neighborhood off the beach where they’d made their first home. A fixer-upper, but they’d had such joy and love in the fixer-uppering.
It was nothing, and as he stands on the weatherproofed boardwalk of that mall with his tiny granddaughter holding his hand, remembering the spark in her eye when his wife turned his way as he approached her on the jetty and sat by her side, it becomes everything again.
No one tells you it never stops. They tell you it’ll get better and that time will soothe your pains. They say that in a year’s time you’ll be over it and you’ll have moved on into a life without chaos.
ReplyDeleteBut who are these people who’re so confident? What experiences have they had to live through and survive? Are they guessing about how they would have managed if their circumstances had put them where you are now?
The pain is eternal even though we are not. It lives though our every hour. We wake in the morning with a feeling of loss and an empty space yawning open beside us. We try to forget and feel guilty for that; our conscience flaying us emotionally raw. We choke back a scream, and we bury our brain; an ostrich with a head filled with memories that burn.
And yet we persist. We survive. We go through each day, expecting remorse, counting backward to the last incidence of pain. Anniversaries of everything that happened to us before – births, marriages and birthdays, dates of diagnoses and scans. There’s nothing that exists that can’t cause us grief; it’s the knowing that they happened that hurts.
But eventually we do better. The wounds become numbed. The scar tissue that forms will bring us feelings of hope – a life beyond all that we had. Our missteps will become surer; the sun will still rise. We will find our new beginning and move on.
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DeleteA quick comment. This was a response to a prompt elsewhere that sparked a host of feelings in me. It's an extreme reaction that's very much an exaggeration of how I feel now, although less than a year ago, once the shock and the numbness that followed the loss of my wife had dissipated, it was probably a fair description of how felt then. I'm a different person now, that's for sure, but at least I feel blessed for the love and the happiness we shared for more than three decades.
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