The forever passenger?
01 March 2011 12:00 PM Categories: The struggle | Writing prompts
At 41, I'm still more than half a lifetime away from old old age. I don’t feel like I’m in my forties, though I am more tired and less connected to pop culture than I ever was. I am afraid for the future, for what is to come, and once again, I wonder what the point of it all is, living. This isn’t a new thought for me, worrying about the meaning of life in the face of sadness, seeing life's trajectory as expansiveness followed by loss after loss after loss (and the losses start early for some of us). I am prone to seeing life through cracked and blackened glass. Still, if we’re lucky (??), we get old. Our bodies melt and harden in place. Our minds leak information. We lose ourselves to time and free radicals and the sun. It’s built into us. We were made to deteriorate, to go from growth to rot in an alarmingly short period of time.
The best that I can hope for is that my memory will hold the beauty of my youth, the baptism in muddy river water, the singing in my bones as I walked under cherry blossoms, the spring night I pulled my boyfriend into a spreading azalea in full bloom near the Capitol building, the taste of good bread and ash-covered goat cheese and basil on a slow Illinois summer day. Imagination and memory allow a perpetual escape into youth, into love, into a rich internal world that almost mimics reality. Slowly my body will give up and fade. My eyes will become watery, my eyesight hazy. I will hear nothing but the buzz of my own fritzed mind. The past and present will intermingle in the never-ending movie in my brain.
I want to remember the good things: the feel of my grandmother’s bed in the air conditioning on an Eastern Shore July, the sway of my swing as I pushed against the maple tree, the first time I felt love, hot, intense, sensual. I want to remember the leafy smell of spring at Hollywood Beach, the thrill of first touches here and gone, the feeling I get when the words rush out of me and make sense without effort. Memory is the only escape I have. I am setting the stage now for the good ones. I don’t want to spend my last years caught up in the Little House, the waits, the quietness at dinner tables, the feeling of grief revisiting me again and again and again. That scares me more than losing my ability to walk, to see, to hear, this idea that at the end I'd be trapped, stuck in childhood, weak and dependent, the forever passenger.
The forever passenger. A funny thing to come out of my fingertips, rushed and without effort. Because that's what I am at the moment, a passenger. I'd like to believe I could just think my way out of this one, come up with the proper memories (the sweating glass of Coke on ice on my grandmother's bedside table; the moment of escape from school, pulling out of the parking lot in Lisa's car on our way to somewhere, anywhere, else; the conversation that doesn't stop, that is pure comfort and challenge and attraction) to inoculate me against the bad memories (waiting for my Dad to never show; waiting for D to eventually show; the ache of never being good enough, for being left in bad circumstances). But the first step is to leave the passenger's seat, to take control, to propel myself on my own power.
How long can I write about this shit without taking action? What does action look like? If I start at the beginning of this blog, go back three years, I can see progress. So I'll have to trust in the process. I'll have to give myself a kick to get started, too. Tomorrow, tomorrow, right? After the tears have dried and my heart has healed. I'm taking small steps to get there. I'll be there eventually, in spite of my current emotional wasteland. I'll make a plan. I'll trust in small things. And, hopefully, I'll stop writing about it, letting off steam in this safe contained way.
From today's prompt, the winner. Edited and expanded.
Image: Chair outside the Little House, circa 1986? I've used this before, but just like I have certain songs I return to, I have certain images that stick in my mind. The earlier incarnation was in the post Thanks for the memories, from a little over a year ago. It starts "To scrape your memory clean, you need only a handful of pills washed down with gin. You need a good wallop to the head, a fall on Mexican tile or sharp granite." Memory and selective forgetfulnes. A theme.
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