New image up top, to reflect what’s going to be a new theme around here for a while. This is the best metaphor, the best way of putting this new chapter of my life that I can imagine. The image is carefully selected: there may be lights along the way that offer the chance at reaching points of new light, but there’s really no telling if it’s a tunnel or a cave. I’m calling it a tunnel because of my incredible faith and pure buoyant optimism. I’m sort of serious. The more that I talk about people and life with other people, the more I realize that what separates me from others is my ultimate idealism. That I spend most of my life sad and disappointed because of how far short things fall from the ideal – most other people have given up on or never believed in that ideal in the first place.
Today Fish dragged me out of the house to run errands with him: bank (my errand), grocery store, cell phone shop, Home Depot. I got sad. Really sad. Sort of unshakably sad. I’m still waiting for the anger. Emily’s waiting for it too. Everyone knows it’s coming, can sort of sense it on the horizon like the palpable evidence of a thunderstorm two hours before the lightning is first visible. But I think I may drown in the sadness before I even get the chance to be mad. I realized anew, wandering grocery store aisles or staring out the window of the Verizon store, how much of my own self-worth and self-perception was wrapped up in being Emily’s husband. How I would prop myself up day-to-day with little thoughts of something nice Em had said or done for me, some little evidence of concern or care. How all I ever wanted was to truly be loved by and love one person, how every one of those 2,568 days was a blessing, even if I didn’t appreciate it enough on every one of those days. How I got used to the best thing that ever happened to me. How I would’ve done things differently if I’d had any idea this was even possible.
I had gotten scared of dying again. I had noticed my vulnerability, my fear of death, my sense of having something to lose. I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t care what happens to me. I feel a sort of vague intellectual pull that I should care about this, but I just can’t bring myself to really care. The idea of finding another person who I love and trust even half as much, who I can think about marrying or discussing offspring with, it’s just ridiculous. It’s unfathomable. Emily and I were so compatible and so profoundly matched that I just don’t even want to go through the emotional conceptualization of thinking there could be someone else who could compete in my heart. It’s exhausting. Breathing is exhausting. Picking up one foot and putting it in front of the other is exhausting. I just want to sit and stare into space and be listless until my muscles start to atrophy and my body folds in on itself like a limp punctured balloon.
Tonight there will be bowling. Tomorrow a haircut, probably, though the thought fills me with dread and fear even though a certain removal in mourning is necessary. It’s about putting another little headache lamp up in the rafters to maunder aimlessly toward. An artificial light to offer simulative promise of the real light to possibly come some day. There were so many times during these past seven years that I felt unbridled jubilation and euphoria over one thing or another. Some things directly related to Emily, some only tangentially as part of the life we’d constructed together for ourselves. And I would catch myself in my happiness, in my elation, and try to hold it like a lightning bug in a jar. I would know that there would be sorrows and depths unfathomable to come (again, I was more concerned about death than divorce, but still) and I would try to bathe in the warm light of the moment’s satisfaction, to bank it against future withdrawals. I would tell myself that no matter what happened to me, what I lost, I would always be capable of getting back to that moment, to that feeling, to that incredible sense of rightness with the world. I would grab on and say to myself, sometimes literally aloud, don’t ever let yourself lose sight of the capability of this joy.
I am trying, dear past self. Dear naive, unknowing, complacent past self, I am trying so hard to listen to you, to hold on, to find a way to drag myself through the hard unforgiving rat-infested stone tunnel. Oh God, I am trying. It is so hard to care, to want to try, and yet I know, today at least, that I must. Or I should. Or there might be some vague reason to.
Future self, send me a signal. Tell me there’s reason to hope. I’ve spent so much of the last decade trying to send reassurance back to my 1990’s self, telling him I wish he knew that it would be okay. I need it again, all the more so. Life doesn’t get any easier just because it passes. I thought it did and I was wrong. I was just lucky for a while.
I was so lucky.
