Illusive permanence
I keep a notebook beside the bed. This is where I record the dark thoughts, the crazy optimistic stuff, and where, sometimes, when I wake up suddenly, my sleep cut through as if by a knife, I write down what feels like a snippet of insight. I write the insight down to remember it. In the morning, the evidence of my profundity or lack thereof is there in my own writing. I can discard it if I wish.
After a Monday night of broken sleep – the two a.m. wakeup, the nattering worries, the book and the computer muffling my darkness-crazed mind – I slept in the guest room last night. The point was to keep the boy from breaking my rest with his presence (the ghostly figure by the bed, waiting for me to move) or absence (the wake up where I wait for the ghostly figure to appear). I hoped that the guest room's green walls and comforter, oceanic and rich, would submerge me in dreamland. I brought my notebook, planned to erase the day from my brain by writing about it, but my book was more compelling. Asleep by nine, I woke up at one with a conversation dogging me.
Did I say that? What was that all about? Why bring up the ex-husband? I imagined Mr. X’s hangdog face, felt guilty about the house in Takoma Park I left behind in 1998 for him to clean out, my wedding shoes waiting accusatorily in a downstairs closet. I moved out weeks earlier to an apartment in Washington, DC. Mr. X put off his purge until the weekend before the tenants moved in. He tore across four states in an empty U-Haul. The truck veiled the turnpike in shimmering exhaust, rattled past livestock trucks and greasy rest stops. What a difference from the drive he had made a little more than two years before in a friend’s borrowed pickup, Loudon the sheltie dog resting his head on the steering wheel, Sidney howling from a cat carrier while Zoe, who had already soiled her carrier, traipsed across the dashboard.
I haven’t thought about this in years, the story of my brief first marriage, my role in it as villain, the one who wanted out, who stormed and yelled and flung insults. Or at least that is how I continue to present myself: the bad guy. Perhaps Mr. X still thinks of me this way (though we have never talked about it). Does the story require a villain? Why had I been talking about that anyway? I needed to attack the narrative, get the meaning, but did I need to be doing it at one in the morning?
The worries and thoughts and feelings were cracking through the thin crust of my consciousness. I hadn’t given them enough time, enough room to exist, so they exerted their independence, their right to be, by showing up at my moment of weakness. My brain was an egg, my thoughts the tapping of an about-to-hatch chick. Or it was the discarded husk of a cicada, a slit along the back where the thoughts emerged and moved on. I was being reborn in these nightly interruptions, remade. Or destroyed.
I scrawled my image of rebirth/destruction in my notebook. I laid in the dark. I flipped one way, then another, then back again. I pressed the pillow over my head and made a breathing hole. I wiped my mind clean, cluttered it with thought, and wiped again. Eventually, I fell back asleep.
In the morning came clarity. After eight months of waiting, we will be closing on our house by the end of this week or the beginning of the next. How could I not be thinking about my former rescuer, the ex-husband who tried to buy contentment by purchasing apparent permanence, buying first one house and then another, in the face of our unhappiness? These were acts of love and blind optimism. These were also my first houses. It was a trail of purchase, paint, make curtains, and move on. We lived less together less than two years in one house and less than four months in the other.
Houses. Marriage. Permanence is an illusion. Or so I tell myself when I get too close to the flame. It will burn out, it will take me with it. After the blaze I will float on the wind, a speck of ash, transformed.
Image: The first house Mr. X and I purchased in Columbus, OH. I have no pictures of second house, where I lived for less than a year.
Here's what I should have been doing today: working on a longer personal essay for my creative nonfiction class. Of course, the personal essay is my forte and I think I'll tackle something I've written about before, the day of Kevin's death. Still, it will take some work, but here I am, blogging again, giving into my thoughts.
The blog has a new category: insomnia!