Category: writing

I am sitting against the wall in my sister’s spare bedroom. I haven’t had a room since July. But I haven’t been paying my own rent, either.

I keep writing and deleting and rewriting. I wanted to write something therapeutic, but not too personal, and not at all narcissistic, though I’m afraid that that is exactly what a blog is. Oh, well. Here I am in Atlanta, quite literally between phases of life, sitting on the floor, comfortably content enough to stay here until morning, when I will be whisked away to the art museum with my lovely family. And they are, truly, lovely. Though when I’m with them, I forget who I am. All my masks and armors melt away and I hunch forward safely over my curled up legs, listening and laughing and interjecting without fear or pretense.

I just wish that this nasty cold would go away.

I departed Mississippi on Tuesday, leaving one set of my parents and my latest home behind, to come play party guest to Emily’s life. I don’t think my sister has ever told me to sit down before 🙂 Strange, it seems, that she is offering me towels and wine, kissing me goodnight and giving me an extra blanket for the spare bedroom. Weren’t we just talking on the phone about boys?

I dream frequently about my own imaginary home. In it, I stand barefoot on the cool tile of my wide open kitchen, leaning on marble countertops, the sunlight reflecting in my steel pots and pans hanging from the ceiling. I am the quiet despot of my humbly rustic abode, with maybe a dog or two, and enough tea to last until my fifties. It’s Nancy Meyers on a slightly smaller scale.

Of course, this is all an illusion, and every time I look in the mirror I remember that I am far more round about the face then I’d like to be, and not nearly collected enough to be my own homeowner.

My dreams have changed so much with every passing year, yet they never cease to be fully visualized and massively elaborate. They never come true. This is why I need to watch less television. As cynical as that sounds, I am perfectly content to not watch TV, to take walks and stretch about on yoga mats and not look in mirrors at all. I realize this may seem strange to my Buckhead residential older sister or any one else my age, but I don’t think I can help that. I don’t want to help that. I want to like it and not give it another thought, because there is too much tea to be drunk before I turn fifty.

On Saturday night, after arriving in Philadelphia and unpacking in my new home, I will sleep, and, God willing, wake up in the year 2012, wondering how in the world I got to where I now am and chortling at how different my life is from what I earnestly imagined it would be right now.

It’s true. Stephen Sondheim knows the truth, but the rest of us struggle with it.

Sometimes I wish life were as simple as it is scripted to be in a musical. What isn’t resolved in the course of an hour and a half is reflected upon in a lovely, cathartic swarm of melody, and one always leaves with a little bit better sense of the world. This is of course, precisely why I am no longer acting; it’s easy to get swept away in the imaginary world.

This morning my Grandmother ended up in the hospital complaining of hip pains; I saw her this afternoon, with a tube in her nose and an IV drip in her arm, just as bright and bubbly as ever. And I sat there, on the awkwardly square hospital couch (the dreadful ones you find in generic offices and waiting areas that simply repel everyone who dares attempt sitting down), listening to her stories (she tells the best stories) and trying to pretend that everything was normal.

I had been away from home for two weeks, and when my father picked me up from the airport a few days ago, I wasn’t happy to see him. He hadn’t changed, I hadn’t changed, the house hadn’t changed. Everything was just as it was when I left it. Physically, all the elements were the same. I had grown so tired of the same environment. I wanted to go back somewhere that was prettier, brighter, lighter. I didn’t like my family messing with my world, this world I created for myself, where I am strong and people love me and respect me.

I thought about this as I sat cross legged on that couch, watching the nurse inject borderline toxic chemicals into my Grandmother’s veins, my Grandmother, who by the Grace of God gave life to my father, who raised me and is in every way responsible for who and where I am today. I watched him as he drank his juice, battling a cold, emailing his brothers and sisters to maintain updates on Grannamae’s condition.

I’m not sure what to do. I recall seeing my mother a few times in a hospital bed as a much younger girl, and feeling frightened, but I think most children are terribly frightened of hospitals. Yet as I walked in the lobby of Baptist Memorial, I felt a strange sense of calm–or perhaps it was just determination in being present as our questions are answered as to the state of her health. Either way, I took myself up the elevator, into her hospital room, delivered my food, and plopped myself onto the furniture ready to be an active listener and an operative family member, eagerly looking for opportunity to administer medicine or laughter. But I did neither. I merely sat, quietly, and listened, and smiled. When I left, I hugged her and waved goodbye to the rest.

I think I got my sense of imagination from my Grandmother. If you read her blog, you’ll understand. She passed on her immense passion for the creative to her children, who in turn passed it on to me. It has been the biggest blessing, and sometimes curse, I’ve endured thus far. The more stories I hear from her, the more I understand an essential part of myself–the part that stops and stares into the sky, searching first for Venus, then Mars, then the Big Dipper. The part that takes pictures of food as if trying to preserve tastes and textures, wondering which amalgamation of flavors is on my plate this time. The part that looks at babies and marvels at all the innocence and purity therein.

It’s frightful to realize the fragility of cursory life. But I think it’s necessary. I am a child, and I don’t listen nearly enough. But I am trying. And I will try, and I will make a better effort to listen to my Grandmother’s stories just as I listen to the wind at night, to the rain outside my window, to violins and flutes and songs. And it’s true, that you can learn an awful lot when you close your mouth and just listen.

I’m going to be unabashedly honest, because it’s my blog and I can do that.

There is a voice that creeps around inside the mind. It goes by many names. If you’re familiar with the musical Title of Show, you may know it as Vampire. If you suffered from anorexia, bulimia, or disordered eating, God Bless You, you know it as the hated Ed. If you’re Christian, you may call it a demon. I am Christian, but I don’t think it’s demons. I just picked up a copy of The Screwtape Letters last night, so who knows, my opinion may change.

No one knows the origin of this voice. No one knows when, in psychological or physiological development that it first appears. Surely it’s different for each individual person. For some, it may appear as early as five years old, in ballet class, when your daughter notices that her belly protrudes further out in front of her than the other girls’ bellies. Congratulations, she just felt not good enough.

Why? I can’t understand. It’s easy to point blame: the media is an obvious target. The perpetual images crammed in front of our faces, on billboards, in newspapers, on the computer, everywhere we look that isn’t outside at a tree or flower, can stick in our minds like glue to rough skin. But if you’ve ever watched Mad Men, you know that these images manufactured by companies “selling something” did not just appear out of thin air. Advertising companies, product companies, have been catering to populations since they had the tools and the means to, and they took, and continue to take, careful notice as to what consumers are willing and wanting to buy–sex, beauty, love, and companionship, to name a few. These are not recent inventions.

Study antiquity. Study Shakespeare. Study any work of art worth its salt and you will find that it caters to the emotions, the mind, the parts of ourselves that make us uniquely human, the desires that separate us from apes and chimpanzees. I read an article recently that referred to it as the “foolish gene.” It’s the part of us that wants what we cannot see; because, as our logic dictates, there must be something better than what we have in front of us, because if we had it, we would be satisfied. And we are never satisfied.

This gene is not all evil–well, maybe it is, but it has lead to remarkable things. Discoveries. The world isn’t flat, it’s actually round, and there are these giant balls of gas burning millions of miles away from us that give light to our entire planet, which is simultaneously spinning around itself around the most giant ball of gas, and so if I am here and you’re in Antartica, you have one season and I have another, yet we’re both on the same little rock that’s spinning and spinning madly in space, which is, oddly enough, a feat of matter that is too big for our small brains (and yes, they are small) to comprehend, and we cannot survive in it because there is no oxygen and we need oxygen to keep on living.

Phew. That’s a lot to wrap our tiny brains around!

So how is it that the voice in the human mind that encourages us to measure the speed of light and launch huge heaping metal ships into space can be the same voice that can convince us that we are worthless without a certain title of power or a bicep akin to steel, for example?

How is it that some people can smoke all their lives and die at ninety-eight while others contract pneumonia and are dead within twenty four hours?

Life is so not fair.

And it can’t be. I know that. I’m sure you know that, too.  Every time I ever relented the fact to my parents, I heard “Well life’s not fair,” and I could never understand why! If we have control over our actions, surely we can even out the playing field?! But sometimes we just can’t. There is no other explanation for it. Oh sure, we’ll keep on trying to find one. It’s engrained in our “foolish gene.” Just as the great big ball of gas keeps burning, giving me winter while Australians play in the sand, the evil voices will climb all around our brains, working with chisels and ropes and things to try and capture us and keep us prisoner.

Fortunately, or maybe not so fortunately, we have other people’s mistakes to learn from.  We have old wives tales and Pilgrim’s Progress and children’s stories, songs, plays, paintings, poetry, oral tradition, religious tradition, parenting traditions. These things have been going on far longer than you or I have spent on this rock. In fact, they’ve been going on longer than any one person has spent on this rock. It’s foolish to think otherwise, and I know that, and you know that, though we’re so damn stubborn when it comes to admitting it. Because, somehow, for some reason, like our hair and our smiles, it’s in our genes.