A funkiness has been following me these past few days. Not funky bad, or even funky good, just a rumbling feeling that pretends like it wants to signify something, but won't yet. I'm leaning towards identifying it as motivation, but that's not exactly right. Motivation always simmers way down in there somewhere, and this seems more insistent than that, somehow. A bit more action oriented, maybe.
In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.~ Mark Twain
Titled Ordinary Life: A Love Story, it is the story of Mavis, a 79 year-old wife and mother who has decided to lock herself in the bathroom for a week. She's not mad, or upset, or anything at all, except ready for some time to herself, to think and to contemplate. She has made up the tub with blankets and pillows, a cozy little bed. She's stocked Wheat Thins and Heath Bars under the sink. There is a stack of books and magazines she is all ready. She tries to explain to Al, her husband of forever and a day, why she's doing this. He thinks it's crystal clear she's lost her mind. "I just got an idea that I really wanted some time completely to myself. And I'm taking it. I don't see the point in running off somewhere. We can't afford it anyway."
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"What the hell would you do if I did this, Mavis? What would you think?"
"I would try to understand," she says. "I wouldn't think it was so crazy, needing to get away from the world for a while. I would just let you do it...and I would not try to make you feel bad and guilty."
Silence. And in it, his recognition that she is absolutely right. So, eventually, Al does come around, bringing her a nightgown, or a clean towel on occasion. They have conversations through the door, Mavis content in her little retreat, Al counting down the days until she comes out, comes back to him. She spends the week thinking back over all of the ordinary moments that have added up to the sum total of her life, the tender ones, the mundane ones, the hits and the misses, wondering what it all meant, and if she lived it well enough. Washing her face before her last night in the tub, she sees her reflection, and it strikes her.
"I am seventy-nine years old," she says, into the towel. And then, into the mirror, "And I have done everything right..."
She leaves the bathroom, walks down the dark hallway, and climbs into bed next to Al, already asleep in the room they've shared nearly every night of their married lives. She is thinking that all of life is accidental: the pink smudge of dawn, the depth of the oceans, the turning of the earth, everything...And so, one's own small life. What could you make of it? Who knew whom you would be born to, befriend, live out your life with? Those were accidents too, weren't they? Completely arbitrary things, barely noticed, most often. And yet...Couldn't there be just a bit of a grand plan, she wonders, maybe just a touch here and there; couldn't there be some benevolent intention that graced some lives?
Deep Subject
If you found out today you had exactly one year to live, is there anything you'd change about the life you're living now?
Absent
There are a million and three places I'd rather be right now, but for the first time in my life, I can't see the way from here to there. Everything I feel at the moment has already been written on these pages before, to the point where words have lost all usefulness. I write the shittiness out here, in most of its gory detail, imagining it helps. Fantasizing that by wrapping my head around it, thinking it through, examining it from every possible angle, I'll find some sense hidden in it. Except there is no sense to find.
Where the hell is the sense in being forced to abandon someone you love in order to save them from themselves? In order to save you from yourself?
I don't think I'll ever understand, not if I write one billion words.
So much noise.
I can't stop myself from wondering how the hell we got here, even as I know there is futility in clawing at the dirt left on the path behind us, scrambling for answers that likely don't exist. I can't stop myself from wanting, with everything I am, to make it better; to fix it, even as I know I don't have that power or that right. I can't stop myself from sinking in the pit of all of it, joined to it as if by chains, shackled ankle to ankle.
Every time he lashes back, tells me we're overreacting, I stop and question my own sanity. I give that to him, that moment of conflicted self-doubt, and in that blink of an eye, he smirks. He must.
And so, for every time I've lifted my sagging shoulders with an intake of hope, for every time I've used guilt to prop up my emptiness, for every time I've mustered enough resolve to open my eyes to a brand new day, for every one of those times and more, I feel a certain stupidity.
I accept that I can't change him.
I accept that I accept too many things.
I'm oscillating between a furied rage that leaves me nearly blind and a devastating, overbearing sadness that carves me hollow.
The in between is missing.
I can't accept the feeling in my gut that it might be gone for good.
My saddness for the death of my aunt has overwhelmed me and yet I feel the envy for her ability to leave it all behind......
