The Beast in the Jungle
Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear. - Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
Monday, May 28, 2012
heat
When I came here with my own little family I felt I had won - I had the best of both worlds - the city I loved, without the loneliness it went along with.
The first summer I sent my son home to his grandparents. When he came back he was all tan from the beach, with sun-bleached hair - a vision of beauty at 7. We went to Central Park and as we were descending towards the little pond near the Alice in Wonderland sculpture we passed by Paul Simon and his then pregnant wife, Edie Brickell. Our son was running ahead of us dressed in a white button-down shirt bought at a garage sale and khaki pants. As they passed us, he turned to her and said "what a beautiful boy." I felt so fortunate right then to be envied by someone who had everything.
My beautiful boy is gone, but that vision of beauty still makes me feel fortunate for having had it.
Friday, May 25, 2012
pain
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
time
"I get up in the morning, put my dreams away. I get up, I get up, I get up again."
It's from a song by a group called Dead Man's Bones. Ryan Gosling's their frontman. My son told me about them, of course. All their songs feature death. In a non-morbid way. There's even a children's choir.
When there is no future, does time really exist? Once we stop growing up, we measure time by our children's lives. That's when time is meaningful. Now it doesn't matter. Yes, I'm getting older, but when you're already dead, age doesn't matter. Just a little bit older and colder every day.
Friday, May 18, 2012
good death and bad death
So why do I feel bad about my son dying? For myself, of course, because I miss him. But I also feel bad for him, though not because it's better to be alive than dead, but because of what I failed to convey to him, because of all the times he felt lacking, because of his self-doubt. I want to make it all better, but I can't, because he's gone.
I don't know where I read this - I thought it was Dostoyevsky, but I couldn't find it in The Brothers Karamazov, it could have been C.S. Lewis - that heaven, if it is to exist as a valid concept, must go back in time and remove the pain that was suffered by innocents. That's what I want to do, but I can't. I can't make amends.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
risen
Saturday, May 12, 2012
reading Batman
I am looking for the key to his obsession. Why Batman? There's a lot about death and redemption. I'm reminded of the novel Fortress of Solitude, but Yassen never liked Lethem. Too close to home? I don't know if I can read any of these. It's an alien experience. But I'm running out of ways to get to know him better. To understand.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
woke up screaming
There was an elaborate assassination plot against my son. We were trying to subvert it with the help of decoys - other tall young men. But I realized they were tracking us by our cell phones, so I went to the terrace to throw out mine, but couldn't because there was some kind of net that I had to claw through first. Then the assassin caught up with me. It was someone I knew. My first boss in the US.
I woke myself up with a choked out cry of "I'll kill you!"
Sunday, May 6, 2012
past life
He didn't see the irony of it. I had to look away because my eyes filled. If that was indeed the case, let's consider how I feel about my present life.
No mothers day
Mothers Day last year was the last day I spent with my son. He had come to NY to meet with a casting agent, who had seen his photos on FB. When he told me he was coming I reminded him it was also Mothers Day that week. He rebuked me for reminding him and said that's why he was coming then.
The night before he quarreled with his father. He almost left then and there, but I convinced him to stay. We went out on Sunday. First I took photos of him, because the casting agent wanted to see natural light ones. They were terrible. I probably cost him the job. If he had gotten it he might have moved back to NY instead of going to California, where he died.
There is also a photo of us taken by me - the worst photo ever, actually, two of them - the second one is worse, but they are the last photos of us together.
We went to brunch at one of the neighborhood restaurants. Waiters were handing out roses to the obvious mothers in the room. He looked at me, not getting a rose, and said - you know it's because you look too young to be my mother. That much was true - we could have been a mismatched couple. We got that a lot on a cruise we went on several years earlier. I was neither flattered, nor upset.
Then we went to the park where I took the photos of us. On the way back he got hungry again, so we stopped at an Asian restaurant. I had undertipped in the morning, just because I couldn't calculate after the Bloody Mary, and he was upset with me. Here I overcompensated and he asked me sarcastically whether I liked Asians better than Mexicans. I admitted I was bad at tipping.
That's all I remember of that day. Next day he left and four months later he was dead and I never got to see him again.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
can't breathe
I went to the bathroom and temporarily forgot the dream. But then when I went back to bed I kept having trouble breathing and was wondering why I was upset. Then the dream came back to me.
The thought that first came into my mind was I must scatter my son's ashes - he shouldn't be in a box. Then I thought: maybe this is what he went through when he died. Did he dream he couldn't breathe and he couldn't wake up?
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Didion
"She hoped that although he could not hear her she could somehow imprint her ordinary love upon his memory through all eternity, hoped he would rise thinking of her, we were each other, we were each other, not that it mattered much in the long run but what else mattered as much."
Saturday, April 28, 2012
the horror
I always felt sorry for couples who were childless by choice. Maybe even felt superior to them. I know, that’s not very nice. Do I feel chastened now? To the contrary. A child is not an investment. A child is the closest an atheist can get to God. That’s what I felt when I was in labor. I was just a vehicle for life to come through me. That’s what I always felt it was – a sacred responsibility. That’s why I feel like such a colossal failure. I had a treasure – I held the meaning of life in my hands – and I lost it.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
forgetting
“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”
This is its continuation:
“We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
Except when death freezes things and the present stops obscuring the past. Surely then we don’t forget.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
from a reader
Thank you, E. for making me feel understood. And thank you to all of you reading this and making me feel less alone.
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Second-guessing
He told me I was in denial, but really he was hiding the truth from me all along. ‘Can I trust you now?’ I wanted to ask him. I don’t want to relive my whole life, I just want to redo that conversation. Even if it fails to change anything. I just want another chance. There are so many things we think are impossible to change, but death is really the only one. There is always another chance before death. We just don’t want to take it for fear of being wrong. I didn’t ask him ‘can I trust you now’ because I thought he would fly into a rage as he did whenever I doubted him. I predicted his behavior and acted accordingly. But what if I was wrong? What if that would have been the right opening? What if even if he had still died we had had a different conversation from all those other ones. There are signs that he really changed towards the end. I missed out on the opportunity to acknowledge that.
“Every day I wake up and spend five hours training my body to exhaustion just so I don't have enough energy to actually throw myself off a bridge. Everyday I am forced to reconcile the mangled peices of a human being and I don't thinly you've even noticed.”
Of course I noticed. With a mix of pride and terror I watched his boastful postings about his injuries. A really bad shin scrape, the ‘still prettier than you’ almost broken nose, the bruised ribs he complained of a few weeks before the end and which I suspected had caused him to overmedicate. The Fight Club therapy he was practicing. Was he rebelling against me? Against my emasculating power. He ended our last fight with: “I have to go hit people now. Thankfully.” Three hours later he apologized. It was self-punishment, wasn’t it? Freud’s melancholic, who rather than hating others turns it upon himself.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Our Dark Knight
I got up last night to write down this dream.
Batman had to withdraw from the world because of a super villain who was after him, so he feigned his death and from then on would live in secret with his family. And that would be enough because being with the people you love is like being with everybody. This was a movie in the dream, but the ending was only revealed after the movie ended, so it was real.Some writer said you never have to revise what you get up to write in the middle of the night. I guess it's true. I was questioning the title of my book, but I have a reason for it now.
Friday, April 6, 2012
acceptance
Sunday, April 1, 2012
live in dreams
When I woke up I wasn't pained that it wasn't real, because in a way it was. I got to hug you again.
Friday, March 30, 2012
money
You were right about that, as about so much else.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
writing
Writing is becoming a tyranny. Not just this, but the 'book' I'm writing. I'm tired of judging my emotions by how good a writer I am. Yes, a lot of it is trite. That doesn't make it less true. 'Trite', a word I learned in creative writing class in middle school. The worst condemnation. Enough. I just want to feel.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Spring
Saturday, March 10, 2012
more dreams
Then last night I had quite a different dream, a very Freudian one. He was 6 or 7, we had gone back home for good and I was concerned that he would forget English so I was going to get my father (a former Ambassador) to ask at the American embassy if they would accept him in their after-school program so he could go there maybe once a week. I was concerned that he would grow up not speaking English. There was also some other opportunity - a play(?) that I wanted him to try out for. The embassy's back yard abutted on our own (or what appeared to be my grandparents' village house yard). We could hear the kids playing. As I was formulating this plan there was some urgency to it, but at the same time I thought, well, what's the point, when he's dead now, but I still planned to go through with it.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Sunday, March 4, 2012
End of the day
Such a blessed relief. Especially on weekends when I'm at a loss as to what to do with myself.
I did my yoga, I cooked lunch, I did my writing (thank god for that), I'm having my drink (never enough, but I resist overindulging) and soon (not soon enough) I will be unconscious. Overall a success, I think, considering I have no hope for the future.
'Life is how it is, not how it was.' - Bright EyesTuesday, February 21, 2012
the question of self-pity
How many times did I say this to people - it's only self-pity that makes me sad. I'm not sad for him - he is no more, I'm sad for me. But I'm also sad for who he was. Now that I'm writing about him the hardest thing is not writing about the death. That gives me a certain comfort. I can feel a certain detachment as I'm describing what I'm going through. But when I write about his life, everything makes me sad - the good and the bad, the things we did and didn't do. I wish we had done more.
I wish we as humans didn't dread death. What is death to us? I just wish we knew what we have while we are living. But we can't. We just can't.
Monday, February 20, 2012
writing
Thursday, February 16, 2012
reading
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
W.H. Auden, Funeral Blues
I first heard the poem in "Four Weddings and a Funeral". Was reminded of it reading Joan Didion's memoir about the death of her daughter, Blue Nights. Went on to read the one about her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking.
I never liked Joan Didion, although she was one of my son's favorites. I always found her cold. Now I think she is just like me. Or maybe all people who lose their only child are alike. In any case, it helps to read about someone else experiencing the exact same thing. It makes you feel less alone. Thank you, Joan. You take comfort where you can find it. I have always looked to literature. Never thought I would find it in non-fiction. It has changed my perspective on writing. That even the most profoundly personal can be universal.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
just deserts
You told me I lived in denial. Not exactly. It's not that I couldn't see. It's that I couldn't act. My sins are all ones of omission. I never did the wrong thing. I just didn't do the right thing. Because of fear. There are instances that come clearly to mind. But this is not the place.
I said in the beginning that I knew I was always meant to write. The reason I haven't is not because I think my writing is not good enough. It's because I have no imagination. I'm always amazed at how wildly imaginative my dreams are. But in real life I have no access to that power. But there's one thing I can do. I can write what I know. I was kind of a journalist after all. I can take what I know and make people understand it. Maybe even feel it. That's all I need to do now. I need to write about you. Because you were amazing. Because you had no fear.
Another reason I gave myself a pass on becoming a writer is because I thought you could do it better. You were as good a writer as me, but you also had a life. But although you wrote, you didn't leave behind much. You were too busy living. Well, I have no life now, so I have all the time in the world. I will write about your life. I don't pretend to know all of it. I was in denial, remember? But there are people out there who know about it. They can help me fill in the gaps.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
no love
And you were right about me - I did live in denial. As cynical as I am, I could never face up to how ugly things really are. I was always secretly hopeful that truth and beauty will prevail.
I am no more.
Friday, February 3, 2012
love
"everything passes before you get to scream I LOVE YOU out the the window of the train"I hadn't seen that one before. I know you meant it more than literally, but that's one of the biggest regrets I have for you - that you never really found a deep romantic love. I think that if you had, it could have saved you. I know that mine couldn't.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
black hole
Now it can't hide from the knowledge. I don't have to remember it each time I wake up. I know it even in my sleep. There is no place to hide.
It also gets harder to evoke your existence. Your words are still fresh. I get a fix of them every day, but there are only so many of them. They are only you at a certain point in time. They are not your essence, which was ever moving and evolving. The hardest thing is not that I miss you. I missed you even while you lived - you were away most of the time and the phone was a poor substitute. The hardest thing is that you are frozen in time.
You lose a child continually as it grows up. You miss the different stages of its life. But you never expect its life to be complete.
One thing that I did not miss while you lived was your love. It was as strong as when you clutched me with your chubby baby arms. I feel supremely unloved now.
Worse - I feel all my love is going into a black hole, never to be returned.
Monday, January 23, 2012
four months
And yet time goes on, to no avail.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
dream where I die
I have some where I die, I have some where we all die." - Bright Eyes, Hit the Switch
They say you can't die in your own dream. Nonsense. Here's how I did it.
I was in my parents' apartment. The time was twenty-some years ago. Everything was correct - the topography of the apartment, everyone's age - my brother and I in our twenties, my parents fiftiesh, my son (who was absent) around five. My parents and I opened the door to the bedroom and there lying on the floor by the bed were two bodies. One was my brother, who was in some kind of fit, but conscious. The other one, lifeless, was me. I cradled my brother's head trying to calm him and I told him my son would need him as a friend. My parents were strangely detached, just there as observers. Nobody mentioned the body, but it seemed to be the reason my brother was distressed and at death's door himself. And, of course, my son would need him, because he wouldn't have me.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
pity
But as for you - I feel you got the best of it. I read some speculation, just to confirm, that your death was a painless one. You stopped breathing and your brain was tricked into not panicking at this. I knew that already when I saw how peaceful you looked in death.
You were free while you lived. You even traveled across the country like you wanted to and you loved it, despite the discomfort of being confined on a train. In one of the comments on your photos you wrote:
"The country unfolds in your heart. The landscape is such a powerful message. Makes you want to run wild like a comanche. Brother I am in lov with this life."
You never had to compromise. Yes, 26 years is short, but it is well beyond the time when most people find they have to settle, and let go of a limitless future. When I was 26 we came to this country and I started on the 20-year grind to sustain our precarious existence. Now I am safe, but with nothing to show for it. The reason I lived for - you - is gone. You, on the other hand, never lost your child-like optimism. You still felt anything was possible. What better way to end.
Still, I can't help wishing for my sake that you were more ordinary and less foolhardy. That you are still here.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
remorse
I am sorry, my son, for making you feel worthless because you didn't conform, for making you feel like a burden because you made my life difficult. At least that's what you heard. It wasn't what I meant. I was angry at you for making yourself suffer. Your suffering was my suffering. Your well-being was my well-being. You were never separate from me. I told you I loved you more than anything. But that doesn't begin to describe it. I love you more than being.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
purpose
Figures that the first new book I like is about a young suicide and his converse - the guy who "wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was."
What kills me is that I knew this when I was young. I just closed my eyes and hoped against hope that it wasn't so. I irresponsibly created another life, just to justify my own. And he had to die in order to open my eyes to the ultimate meaninglessness of what I had done. He died for my sins.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
remains
I know there are heavier burdens than mine. I will try to be generous with what I have left to offer. I sent a contribution to the project that made his last days brighter. I know he would have wanted to keep that promise unbroken. A part of him will live on in the extreme passion he lived and preached. That's all I can do.
I decided I don't want his remains scattered in this country. It wasn't kind to him and he railed against it. What I didn't expect was that shopping for an urn to keep his ashes in would bring me down so. Hiding him within a pretty object is not what he would like. His friend, who visited on New Year's eve asked to see them and cried. I look at them every day and feel nothing. I know that's not him. I knew it even when I saw his stiff body emptied of its organs. His body let him down. He was so much more than that. He was light. And darkness. His father painted a shadowy half-angel just before he died. There is more of him in that than in the white ashes in the black box.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
drama
Thursday, December 29, 2011
things I look forward to
2) my mid-morning cigarette
3) my after-work drink
That's about it.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
foretold
That must be the novel that went missing with your stolen laptop. I wonder if it's still out there somewhere.
won't you try?
Believe me, there are days longer than nights
And you will be happy the minute you try
So won't you try?
--The joy in forgetting/The joy in acceptance, Bright Eyes
I had the first line of those lyrics inscribed on the iPod I gave you one Christmas, which you promptly lost. But who was I kidding. Days longer than nights? Never for me. Did I instill in you this sadness you couldn't bear? You tried to be stoic, but you were too exuberant. Not like me. I can trudge like this forever. But you said:
"Everybody wants to go forever. I just want to burn up hard and bright."
That you did. That you did.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
godlessness
But there's only so much other people can do for you. I regret every decision I ever made. The difference between a world without God, I read today, is not lack of morality, it's lack of redemption. There is no redeemer. Everything is cast in stone. Loss is forever.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
unreality
As a result, it's not only his death that seems unreal, but my whole life has taken on that tinge. It's like - you can't be serious. I am not going to play along anymore.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
nightmare
I woke up with the old familiar pain gripping my stomach and my chest and couldn't go back to sleep for hours. I still feel hungover.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
record
I never knew we were so alike. Though it figures - a misfit will beget a misfit. This line, especially struck me:
"I'm too judgemental for a real relationship. I always think people should be harder on themeselves than they are."
But I'm so glad you had someone to say it to. And to see your growing self-awareness:
"the things we hate in others we learn to recognize from ourselves first. its nice being a little bit more enlightened but it sucks to have to go back and undo soooo many mistakes. I feel like i have maxed out all my existential credit cards. Its like living on bread and water my greatest achievements involve not fucking up that day."
"'We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget' joan didion"
It used to drive me crazy when you would write off the past with a simple 'but I'm not like that anymore.' I'm glad you came to see that it's not that easy. Our actions define us, not our intentions, or our words. I feel all the weight of that judgment now. How I wish I had dropped everything and flown to you when I realized you were alone and lost. I offered to come for your birthday, and though you dismissed it, you mentioned it to someone, so you were not averse to the idea. Instead, I mourned you on your birthday. The birthday party you never had as an adult. I wish I had celebrated you more.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
his words
I just feel like there are parts to a person that you have to go somewhere to find. Moving around helps you feel new. It makes you braver.
Shakespeare says being born is like being kidnapped and sold it to slavery. I don't want money I don't want power I don't want any of the things they tried to teach me to want I just want dignity.
I am constantly in love, with all of it. I'm just not strong enough to carry it. It tears me apart. I have to face the horror of it all to be able to really feel that love. At least that's how I have it figured.
Happy is just one thing, it can't be permanent ever. I want more than to be happy. I want to be strong. I wanna be strong enough to carry the weight for those that i love
I miss my country that deep distant part of it. Everything becomes kind of hallucinatory when you feel so far away from where you are.
I have a need to be wanted. It's a massive cruel weakness.
I feel like my intentions are so good, something just gets lost in translation. That's why I separate myself. I feel like I just hurt people. This monastic lifestyle is some sort of penance but sometimes I still fuck up. Because I'm needy
When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in he has no choice but to become an outlaw' nelson mandela. That was hanging on the wall at the farm. I don't understand why the world around me seems like its fabricated from my thoughts.
I just assume that people are with me until they find something better or newer. Like everyone is just playing to win not trying to love.
Because you are what you love, not what loves you back.
Because love must be courageous.
I'm probably always going to be alone. It's just how it is. I make people sad when they are close to me. It's unfair to drag people into that. I have to much love for the real world.
It's rare that I feel that I inhabit the same world as most people.
I was writing for a while, now i feel incredibly agitated. I need some sort of catharsis. I have been reading like 3 books at once like 200 pages a day on top of training and I just feel so FULL I could fucking scream.
I don't know, just trying to live my life I guess. I'm always hungry for more even now its never enough.
I feel my rich imaginary life helps me live my ordinary one. Ordinary life isnt really that ordinary and when you let your mind swim with really lush shit it gives you faith that you can do anything. I mean maybe its hard to actually become Batman but I think I'm doing a pretty good job.
There's so much more to life than what happens. There's an entire world inside people.
Ive sacrificed fun, I have sacrificed companionship, I deal with enormous amounts of pain and frustration on a daily basis. Sometimes I am crawling on hands and knees but if I don't get better that day I can't sleep. I don't get bored, I fight for my spirit from when I wake up to when I crawl into bed. It doesn't define me it is only one expression of who I am. It teaches me how to live. It teaches me how to persevere.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
2012
Sunday, December 4, 2011
13
Saturday, December 3, 2011
The stable bow
I read Kahlil Gibran's famous poem when I was very young and I took it to heart. Despite being so young when I became a parent, I knew that it was the end of youth. Youth being the contemplation of the many yous you could become, the many paths you could take, the many people you could love and be with. I was one thing - a mother. Everything else was incidental. My job was to keep still, so my son could wander freely. And we stuck to those roles, although as he grew up he would exhort me to 'get a life' even as he never relinquished his right to eschew stability in favor of pursuing whatever struck his fancy. That his life would end before mine, emptying mine of its purpose is, of course, the ultimate irony.
But that's not the only reason my life is barren without him. As mundane as most of our communications were, he was the only person I know, who lived for the sublime. In practical matters he was frustratingly inept. He told me a few weeks before he died that he admired me, but had no idea how I do it. How I did it is I had him as a flame I had to keep going. At any cost, through winds and storms, through barren days and nights. How do I do it now?
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Vale of tears
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Beauty
"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."
I wish you could have borne it a little longer, for my sake. But I understand that you couldn't.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
The weight of your heart
"It wasn't me, I wasn't there...And it doesn't count 'cause I don't care."
I forgive you. I know you didn't intend it and I will gladly suffer the pain to know that you didn't know it was the end.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Words
This is from a review of "The Tree of Life," which deals with the loss of a child in terms of its cosmic significance. Not a bad attempt. Not a good one either. There was another movie I saw not long ago on the same topic. It said a mother's grief never fades away, but feels like a brick you carry in your pocket, which you kind of become fond of and touch, because you don't have your child, but you have that. It's all been said before. What could I possibly add to it? Just that it's not a sharp pain. Not at all. It's just always there, sometimes getting heavier, sometimes receding. It's worse when I think of it as something that was not accidental, but maybe inevitable, when it's not something that was just inflicted on me, but something I had a part in. Even if that was just bringing him into this world. Bringing him into suffering. Not that I regret it. If I had a choice I would do it over. That's it - I wish I had a do over. But you never do with life. That's the unbearable lightness of being.
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
Again, nothing original to say.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Depression
Depression. I've always thought of it as realism. Smart people are depressed, because they see through things. It doesn't mean they don't try. But they know that in the end it's only sound and fury, signifying nothing. My son was diagnosed with it when he was barely a teenager. They put him on medication. The kind they issued warnings about only a few years later, because it leads to suicide in teens. He didn't commit suicide, but he committed social suicide and got himself expelled from his prep school. He said it made him not feel anything. And he dumped the pills in the toilet one day. I saw his point. But why did I agree to it in the first place? That is perhaps my biggest regret. It was his gateway drug. I've always been leery of mind-altering substances myself - legal or illegal (the only time I tried pot I turned green and puked, and another time, just from the second-hand smoke). He, on the other hand, probably tried everything he could get his hands on. He almost died twice before. Third time was the charm.
But back to depression. It runs in the family. My mother had it, my grandmother had it - along with migraines, they passed it on to me. But at least I got some of my father's dogged get-on-with-it-ness. My son got it from both sides. Sometimes he blamed me for picking his father to procreate with (never the other way around). It was useless pointing out that any other child I would have had would not have been HIM. But I see his point - we have qualities that get exacerbated in our children. My son's height for one - my own height was taken to arithmetic progression in him - he ended up at more than six and a half feet. My depressive tendencies, as well. To that he added anxiety.
In the movie the character of Kirsten Dunst, the depressed one, appeals to her mother, and tells her she's scared. Her mother tells her everyone is and basically to get on with it. That cuts uncomfortably close to my own attitude. But in the movie the world ends. I'm longing for that ending.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Writers
"After my father left us, my mother cried all her sad-sac tears into the meals she fed me and my brother. All those tears are no good for a boy -- they sit in his stomach like broken glass, eating away at his strength. .... All her fears leaked into my brother’s dreams, and his heart became like an attic full of trapped animals."
This is from a story my son wrote a few years back. It's about two brothers, one of whom dies. The narrator is the survivor, obviously. When I reread the story now it is so clear to me how he wanted to be the strong, cynical narrator, but was afraid he was the weak, sentimental brother - the dead one.
The portrait of the sad mother is damning to me, although I'm not divorced, nor had he ever seen me crying, except on his account. But I know he blamed me for being sad. Hell, he blamed me for bringing him into this world. Now we're even.
In the story, the brother dies at war and is given a hero's funeral, but the narrator knows he really died of his own weakness and stupidity and he can't bear his mother's exalted mourning of him.
"People never remember the dead for who they were, everyone’s life becomes the television biopic of itself."
I am guilty of some of that. I want people to remember the good in you. I know you do, too. You were all about the image. People actually think you lived life to the fullest and were always happy. I know better. I remember all of you. You are part of me. Sometimes I feel the best part.
I got a tattoo in your memory. I hate tattoos. Your father hates me for getting it. This morning I looked for it and stupidly missed seeing it for a moment and got scared. But it's there. It will always be there. I can always look at it. You didn't mark me in childbirth. I was too young - my body bounced right back. But you have marked my life. I know you had many fears, but you never accepted living in fear. Losing you was my all-consuming fear. Now I am fearless. But I have no life.
Friday, November 11, 2011
The Unconscious
Sunday, October 30, 2011
The Beast
And so did I spend 26 years of my life - my prime, as they say - afraid of losing something that I never really appreciated while it was here. Sure, I cherished the early years with my son - it was hard not to - he was like a magical being that every day brought me new wonder at his precocious mind and he was lovely to look at - with a clear amber brown gaze that even when he was a baby appeared unchildlike and thoughtful.
But when I had to release him out into the world, it just killed me. Thinking of him out there unprotected filled me with angst. So I tried not to think about it. That was easy enough - I had to work hard to keep our family afloat financially and to get ahead. I was the sole breadwinner. I was also only 20 when I had him. So instead of confronting this world alongside him, I let him fend for himself. And this was in the new country I brought him to. As the years passed I understood less and less what he was going through. I trusted in his intelligence and social aptitude. I let teachers bully me into things I never should have agreed to. And most egregious of all, I never got to know his friends.
When he died I found out what these friends thought of him. Their response was overwhelming. So many of them spoke of how well he understood them, saw into them, taught and inspired them. How could he be that to so many? How could I not know this? Of course, I thought the same of him, but to others he offered the best of himself. To me he often entrusted the worst. Perhaps not the very worst. That he kept to himself.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Dreams
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Writing and Life
Literature has always been more real to me than life. Growing up isolated in a foreign country, it taught me the language and it taught me how to live. It made me happy.
My first boyfriend encouraged me to write. He said he knew I had it in me. It was mostly a long-distance relationship, so I wrote him many love letters over the four years we were together. When I didn't want to be with him anymore, he returned them and took his back. He wanted to be a writer and thought his would provide good raw material. I dumped most of mine in my grandparents' outhouse. I couldn't bear to look at the childish handwriting, often veering off on a diagonal across the pastel unlined pages. I never looked back, either to him, or the writing.
The writing that I did keep still feels like I could write it today. I'm the same person I was at 16. I haven't learned a damn thing in 30 years. Not about writing, not about life.
Which brings me to life. I never aspired to be a writer, because I had no personal ambition to speak eternal truths. I thought if I could just be understood by one person, that would be enough. I wanted an ordinary happiness - a lover, a child, an occupation where I could be useful, some friends. For that I would forsake the eternal truths. That's the bargain I made with fate.
That bargain failed.
I kind of always knew it would. Somehow, I knew my life would be spectacularly shattered. That's why I made the bargain. If only I was never too happy, I would never be in too much pain. But life thrust on me something, which would make me so happy that I couldn't bear its loss. My son. And so I spent my life in fear of losing him. When he was a baby I would wake up paralyzed by a nightmare that he was falling from a height. But I didn't lose him then. My fears were lulled. Until he grew up and refused to live by the rules, refused to stay safe, refused to accept an ordinary happiness. Recently I started waking up again, with that paralyzing pain that spread from my stomach to my chest. I tried not to think of him. I tried to think of my petty happiness (or lack thereof) instead.
And now I've lost him. And I know I made a false bargain. If only I had loved him without fear, I would have had a happy life.
That's not possible any more. So all I have are words. They will have to do.

