Week 9, with Dakota
what I’ve begun has ended, what’s to come hasn’t started yetSome truths
I didn’t feel much like writing this week. My mind feels empty, tired. Still, perhaps stupidly, there’s a kernal of hope somewhere in me. I can feel it, though I don’t know where it comes from, why it stays. When there’s all the obvious reasons to give up, I keep trying, though nothing comes as naturally as it used to.
And I refuse to believe it’s a symptom of age, that art comes easier when you’re younger. Though I can’t stand what it becomes when you’re older, all the impatience that attacks it, all the eyes that can’t stand minding their own business, the panic added to your own panic, the doubts piled over your own. It all feels like too much, the art that’s trying to come out, the retribution that waits for it by the exit. It’s like creativity’s trying to find her way out, and there’s a self-imposed guard right there, asking it why it took so damn long. It only makes her retreat again, long enough for the memory of her last attempt to fade. Then she tries again. We approach her not with tenderness and forgiveness, but with a penalty even less sparing than before.
Blame it on God. We do it with everything, don’t we? A dad hits, a mother leaves, and we’re angry at God for giving us a pair of rotten parents. We abuse our talent, then we bang at God’s door again, threaten him, warn him that either he gives it back or we won’t believe in him anymore. It makes no sense. We mess up, others mess with us, and we’re at it again, shaking our fist at the sky, refusing to pray, thinking we’d like to borrow God’s pencil for a moment and write in the justice we think he forgot to write for us. We can’t bare to wait. We can’t bare the idea that we simply won’t know why we have suffered. We want vengeance, and when every other person in our life is walking out, God seems like an easy and reasonable target for our rage. But if we’ve got a minute to spare, it starts to make less and less sense the more we think about it.
I don’t know, I want everything I’ve lost, and everything that hasn’t come yet, and I want it all now. I’m at fault. I’m most susceptible to the kind of behavior and cycles I can’t stand watching in others. Being self-destructive, self-pitying, self- deprecating, displacing blame and rage, losing control. I can’t stand watching someone giving up, someone not making a desperate effort at happiness, at defying all the odds, and yet, I am doing just that. If I were a character in a film, she’d be the most frustrating, the most mocked, and maybe, with some understanding, the easiest one to feel a mixture of rage and pity for.
There’s a story about a man who stands in God’s alley for 20 years, and every time God passes, the man says, “If you have a minute sir, I’d like to …” But God raises his hand politely, says he doesn’t have time to talk. Any other man would have bowed, thanked him for his time, and left. But our man is stubborn and won’t leave. The years pass. His wife dies without him, his children grow tired of searching for him. One by one, they leave the village. Winters come, summers too. He loses an inch, then another.
After two decades, God’s coming back from the bakers when he turns to the man and says follow me. They reach his office with the oak desk, the stucco windows, the cigars, the coffee. God says, “sit.” The man sits, runs his thumb over the frayed hem of his coat. “Tell me,” God says, “what was it you wanted to say.” The man lowers his head. He wants to leave, wants to return to his cottage in the village, sit beside his wife, read his novels. God asks again, a little gentler this time. The man shakes his head. He can’t remember anymore.
He rises from the chair, but before he leaves, he takes out a thick stack of parchment from his pocket. He ties it with a piece of string, hands it to God. “Just something to prove I was worth the trouble.” God says nothing, so the man adds, “I spent the better half of my life writing it.” He opens the door, and just as he is about to walk out into the rain, God says loudly, “But I can’t read.”
A thousand things that could go wrong
Each of these entries feels like a letter to myself, a shove at the end of every week to snap out of it and live. I keep trying to translate what has to simply be, all the pain, the mistakes, the chaos. There's no logic to what I have gone through, no possibility of peace unless I let it be. And if I am being truly honest with myself, there's no need for forgiveness, for a neat and tidy resolution, for all to be repaired and well. Not that this is an option for me anyhow. But the need to know, to understand, to fix can be an all consuming, draining effort that leaves me with very little, if anything at all.
I've lost something precious along the way too. What once felt like a "marching order" within me has become nothing more than a barely audible whisper--that still voice of the phantom in me that remains untouched, immortal, young, careless, unharmed. I can't hear her anymore. Sometimes I sense her presence the way a body half awake vaguely senses the coming morning. But I never manage to come closer. There's too much hurting and rage in the way.
And once you get stuck, once you begin to experience for the first time the feeling of not wanting to rise from bed, not wanting to speak, to see anyone, to dress, to write, to act, to eat, it becomes almost impossible to imagine, let alone pursue, a life in the opposite direction. It does not feel permanent to me. It is permanent. The idea of rising eagerly in the morning, of facing the day's work, work I have chosen for myself, without fear, without hurry, is a fantasy I try to entertain many times, but it's no use. It's all become too familiar. A life without it, though I've once lived it, now seems entirely impossible.
It began with a man's hands, shoving me against a wall, throwing me over and over onto the bed like a sack of wheat, threatening me with killing himself. I was losing it before, I can't blame it all on him. But his hands finished me off. That was it for me, my finale, the last domino. Whatever stick was holding the last of me up snapped in two and that was it for me. I haven't been able to recover since. Nothing feels the same anymore.
I want so desperately to go back to a life when I didn't know this could happen. I want to see myself the way I used to. I want to go back to a time when I loved a boy and a boy loved me and all was well and there wasn't a pair of hands I had to forgive over and over. I wanted to love him, and be loved. How could I have known then?
I must have known somewhere in me that there's a thousand things that could go wrong, but was I wrong to believe then that there were just as many that could go right?
