I've stopped looking up, both literally and figuratively. I am paralyzed, for sure, my body moving at an embarrassingly slow pace, my spirit barely keeping up and for some reason, I cannot tilt my head back without closing my eyes. It's as if I refuse to see, yet I can't say that I'm willfully doing so -- I feel like I'm at the bottom of a well (or an elevator shaft, depending on which metaphor one chooses to revisit of mine), the walls too slick for climbing and not a ladder or rope in sight. I cannot get out, not without a real rescue team.
I'm interviewing one, a team, consisting of state-paid social workers, food-stamp givers, forgiving bank clerks, empathetic friends near and far, shoes with wheels, pills, injections and tissues, lots of tissues. I ate something the other day called a Thousand Layer Cracker and thought, "I am this, this is me," for as much as I wanted it to be light, crispy and evanescent, it shocked me in its density, dampness and cloying sweet flavor. It lingered too long after, clinging to my teeth and imploring me to rinse, rinse...I had a strange flash of guilt, a realization that I impress this way: I appear to be carefree, light, digestible but instead I surprise -- and often disappoint -- with my heaviness and residue. I wash and I tidy and I purge, yet I still cannot lighten up enough to build my own ladder; with this admission I can at least contract the work to those more capable. I am too tired to swing a hammer, or tie a knot; I am stuck in the loop I've only once been outside of, but that once was enough for me to at least yearn.
I didn't know better for 35 years. I believed, wholeheartedly, that exodus was not mine, I was born to this fate, adversity was my hand and I'd play it with wit and word and skin so well that no one would ever know the weight it held, the burden it brought. Content in my martyrdom, complacent in my unhappiness I pushed forward, flesh diminishing to merely a sheathed skeleton named Me and it was fine, I managed, things were always falling apart but I lied well and no one knew just how disassembled I was until my son was born and I no longer had the energy for dishonesty. A child is not only exhausting but scrutinizing, if he's a good one, and mine has always been a good one, a blueprint of his father but rightful in his insolence by virtue of his age. Blameless and questioning, demanding, not through word or audacity but with humor and a well-honed gaze born of parents of too much knowledge. Funny, what we don't know we bequeath.
He looks at me as much as he looks to me; it is said that they all do this but I see other children -- not a lot, but some -- who don't see their parents at all no matter how much they appear to be watching. I wonder if this isn't a virtue, for I looked and saw what mine were and I had a chance to be different from the start but it wasn't unlike climbing out of this shaft: They were slippery, my parents, leaving a mossy film on everything they touched, every exit out of a life like theirs. Nothing had a tooth to it, not a thing to grip yet their denigrating manner clung to me, bore itself into my every conceivable entrance until I was bogged by their way and too heart-heavy to do anything about it. I shed what I could, every bit of fat gone from my body, every hair from my head and a good bit of my dignity that I didn't know would regenerate; I ran on the fumes of anger and resentment until the Boy was born. It were his first years that showed me the exit, and he was small enough that I could carry him with me. Not that I needed to: He was up and running before the end of the first year, faster than I could keep up with him, I could have followed him anywhere and it probably would have been far from this place. No matter; I got enough of a taste to know that it doesn't have to be this way.
What did I do and how did I do it? I barely remember. I can reread this journal, try and decipher my own metaphor but this two-year-long fog has crippled my cognition, my talent I'm most proud of. I never didn't understand: I just didn't care. Now, I care so much that it disables me and my lack of understanding is maddening, it's a role reversal worthy of quantum physics as it relates to things I don't get. And I'm stubborn, mulish, I am old and what I do understand, more than anything, is how old people (actual old people, like great-grandparents old) become this way, how things can fall apart when they don't have to because they are too proud to ask for the help that they need because they are old enough to know already. I don't want to start over, but I'm just young enough to realize that I have to, we won't survive on false pride and blind eyes.
