Stay
In the middle of the night, when the dreams wake you up (always a bus and an almost stranger, the meeting in a restaurant turned to a mysterious journey. Last night it was Emily with her magic eyes and her reserved manner and there you were on the bus and there she was behind, dragging a fifteen foot bench they had left by accident), quiet your mind, tell your brain to rest, that nothing is so important that you need not sleep. The night is a dark time for thoughts and love. It is the time that ghosts steal souls, that your life leaves through your breath.
But don’t think about that. Think about small, soft things, sleeping puppies, the tomatoes growing out back, the feel of butter sauce in your mouth. If you must go to the bathroom, walk there with your eyes shut and ignore the cat as he rubs his scent against your calves.
The truth is that nothing is really important, that life is a series of moments connected by time. Yesterday in the sunlight you thought you were happy. On the Bay Bridge, the traffic inching for a reason that had not yet been revealed, you thought of the repetition, its “here-you-are-again” nature, the bridge above and below, the bay gleaming out the window .
Then you passed five police cars – it’s a habit now to count things, so goes life with a kindergartner – and a tow truck, but no car. The police officers were looking over the edge of the bridge and you thought: oh no. Oh no. The boy asked you and your husband what you were oh noing and neither of you really wanted to talk about, so you glossed over it instead and besides, the scenario you were both imagining was unlikely.
But you knew the feeling, the desperation, the substrate of nothingness that might lead someone to the edge of a bridge in the mixed weather of a June Saturday. Another person out there who thought that nothing would ever get better, that they were evil to the core, or so sad that they should end the dance early. It’s an edge you’ve been on, though not quite as precipitously, and you wished that you could hold out a hand to all the people suffering, could hug them and reassure them. Together you would form a community of black humor and heavy sighs, a mutual support group of deep sadness, everyone rooting for the fleeting moments of sunshine.
It wasn’t a group that you thought you belonged to, but now they are your brethren, the depressed and desperate, and you love them for their depth of being. Stay here, you tell them, stay here with me and we will prove that we can live.
From the prompt "Good advice."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. Turns out the reason those police cars were on the lower deck of the bridge was because a man had stopped his car on the upper deck and was standing on the ledge. He was later arrested for a suspected DUI.
Image of the Bay Bridge by Thomas Hawk.
blog comments powered by Disqus