This is How It is

<p style=”clear: both”>I. The walk to the library. The almost-empty bag flops at my side, rattling at the bottom of it the three books I have emptied, I return. I am alone with my head, trusting the boys not to burn down the house in my absence. I am grateful for the lightness of being able to step out without them, to trust in their judgement and abilities to get along. And still the not being occupied with them all of the time has opened a tiny void at the center of my life, or maybe it was there all along and I had been able to ignore it. And this is my state leaving the house, the awareness of the precariousness of mood and meteorological temperament on a day which fluctuates between sprinkling and brilliant, that this moment of neutral is tenuous, fleeting, and thus it is all a breath’s breadth from being too much to be borne. All of it: the trees laden with drooping catkins, the fragile stalks of flowers bowed and bent under their unbearable weight, rusted magnolia petals trampled and trodden, the worm stranded in a loop on the drying sidewalk, the terrible light reflected off the wet world to eyes unaccustomed to unsheathed sun, the sky and unreachably high branches trembling in puddles, I am trying to bear, to contain, to hold onto, to release, to make sense of, to be part of, to stand apart from. There is impossible, impassable distance between me and the joggers and dogwalkers sharing this sidewalk, that they don’t meet my eyes (and what would happen if they did?) My journal this morning was filled with the (failed) attempt to reconcile myself to the notion that to have the complex self is to be ever enduring sacrifice, the expression of one aspect and the expense of, the suppression of, another. That what is unendurable is the unexpressed straining to be accepted on its own, the chasm that opens between what one knows oneself to be, what one feels others expect of one.

II. Library books returned, new ones brimming with promise handed back to me with the librarians’ impenetrable efficiency, I return a DVD to the video store, deflect the woman sitting in front who calls out, “Ma’am, can I ask you a question?” (I pause, this is a reasonable request) “Yes.” “Can you spare some change?” To be deflected. I have no change, and am displeased by her tactics. I make my way through the grocery store, struggling, even, for the concentration to remember everything I am supposed to get to make dinner tonight for friends. I cannot emerge from my own cloud, and the bright aggression of “And how are you doing today?” at the check-out counter has me frantically rifling pages in my head for the appropriate script, “Just great, you?” “You have a great day.” “You too.” Words that murder more meaning-filled words. But the smile is well-meaning, and what might he be bearing, what if these words make it bearable? (What we are not baring, what will never be barable, the selves that I imagine would be more helpless than earthworm in the middle of damp sidewalk were they left exposed to strangers).

III. The trudge back up the hill towards our house, the bag heavy on my shoulder now fully laden, vegetables and fruit and a baguette poking out, and I can indulge in walking and reading, not having to divert attention to shepherding my boys, it is a peculiar feeling of luxury. I read slowly because these are careful, perfect words wanting to be attended in all of their aspects, sound, meaning, interplay (Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing) that I would absorb, retain, and because they offer comfort. I am not alone in my aloneness. What has slowly suggested itself to me is that maybe the self is less like a complex construction with aspects that exclude and compete with one another than like a rainbow that does not fret about the limits of perception, the small slice of spectrum we can appreciate, that ultraviolets and infrareds are not suppressed, they just lie patiently outside of the range of our vision. And I think that it can all be borne, after all, (cackling chickens unseen behind a fence, the gaudy windchimes, the shrewd complaint of a crow, the lingering cigarette smoke from a passing smoker) not by hope of rescue or transformation but the possibility of understanding. There is formed within me an adjuration to the dead and the unborn, merely to share in the colors that have no place in the shared spaces of sidewalk, library, grocery store.