The fallacy, the push-pull, the conflict
04 July 2011 07:33 AM Categories: The struggle | Quotidian existence
Here’s what I can tell you: I still struggle with mattering, with being heard, with feeling invisible. I shadow box with copies of life from days long dead. The film projector gets caught, we run it backwards (remember how funny that used to be? The belt returning from the ground to the Easter coat, snaking around my waist, proprietary, the pile of leaves reassembling itself as my friend flew backwards onto the porch steps? I laughed until I almost peed my pants watching those things, at the way living life backwards makes a backwards sort of sense, but is impossible. You can’t make life the way it was before. The leaves will never be the same and the belt doesn’t care where it lands.) I point a finger, just like a toddler, the point of recognition, but there is nothing to point at but faded images from almost forty years ago. The moment of imprint. Let’s set the film aflame, shall we? But destruction of the images is useless. They are written on me.
We’re having a heat wave. The tomatoes blossoms are turning into fruit, not dropping off in the fogchill of a Berkeley summer. The ground out back is parched and cracked and the boy finds baby praying mantises hopping from leaf to leaf in the front and back yards, newborns from the egg cases we bought at the garden store. Nick the cat wants to be part of it, wants to lie in the dust, to sleep in the bamboo patch, to kill mice. He got out while we were away last weekend, an escape that whetted his appetite for freedom, and now he howls at all hours to let him out please let him out.
It is cruel to keep this animal trapped and we keep on talking about ways to make it work, some sort of personal cat door, a set of protective inoculations against outside disease, the acceptance of the risks of an outdoor cat (injury, disappearance, early death). This morning he and Asher were growling and meowing at the back door at a puffy-faced lanky grey kitty who was taunting them on the other side of the glass. I remembered the dangers of outside life, of others, of cat fights and attacks in the dark. What do you do when you feel stuck and then you force another living creature to be stuck, too, for their protection? It’s for our own good, Nick, better that no one opens the door so that we can dart into the dark corners, hide in the vines, get ourselves in trouble and have the family cry over our bloodied bodies.
Still. The two of us could slip out in the middle of the night, me in dark formfitting clothes, Nick dapper as usual in black and white. We would part on the sidewalk and I'd shamble toward University, walk on to the water. In the moonlit fantasy of a clear summer night, the wind at a standstill, my short sleeves mysteriously comfortable, I would stare at the glowing apparition of San Francisco across the water, the Bay Bridge lit up like the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island. I'd imagine a life where I am not me, where everything within shines like gold, the gold that can always stay, I am a goddess, untouchable without a need for touch, pure, good, inhuman.
I am a sucker for the fallacy of independence, of not needing, but even Nick craves human touch, wants to curl up on my lap. He purrs in my presence, drinks the fresh water I provide. This isn't a zero-sum game he reminds me as he brushes against my ankles. He can be free and I can, too, free and connected, the tiger in the grass one moment, contented homebody the next.
So teach me how to do it because I have no idea how to get beyond my emotional perimeter. I'm tired of feeling it, of writing about it, of pressing my face against the glass. Or tell me that I am getting there, that the glass is cracking, that you will be there with a hand outstretched when I emerge, or that I am perfectly capable of doing it on my own, that I need to embrace the fallacy of independence before I reject it. Tell me it will be ok more sooner than later, that this transition is only months and not years to the finish. Lie to me. Smile sincerely. But please don't reject me for who I am. That keeps me in the box.
I need you. I can't remake the past without you. Or maybe I can. So go ahead and turn your back. Let me prove to myself how strong I am. But don't walk away. Or go ahead.
I don't know what I need.
Image of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge from Berkeley hills by ianan.
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