Throw those crutches away!
26 July 2011 11:00 AM Categories: Writing prompts
This makes it tolerable, the lack, it lets you wallow in it, brings dreams of escape, of the trip across a continent for love, the feel of a stranger’s hand on your fishnet-clad thigh, the adoration from hundreds (ok, dozens) of readers, writing you about the way you captured it, you nailed it, you got ‘em right in the eye.
Then? Nibble. Rip off a bit of bread, shove it in, chew surreptitiously as you chop the garlic. Allow yourself a bit of cheese. Sample the vinaigrette, a drop here, a dram there. Listen to the sounds of your family laughing, playing, arguing while you are there in the sanctum, the kitchen, the locus of creativity and loneliness, your task to provide, to pretend that you still get 100% satisfaction out of caregiving.
At dinner you can eat, one helping is all because that’s all it takes to fill you up, the plate sparse with pasta, the asparagus piled next to the sandwich. You’re stuffed. If you've been drinking beer, now is the time to move on to wine. Wine burns a trail down into your stomach, it clears a path for tears if you’ve been holding back, for fantasy if that’s what you need.
It’s the only way you can take it, the tasks without interest, the empty life of dust removal and scrubbing and wondering what is next. You love them, love the people in your life, but they are not enough. There is something lying ahead of you, some quest or discovery and you will not let the alcohol get in your way. You can cap the bottles, let them remain in the refrigerator, on the shelf, these substitutes for feeling, these maudlin tear-producers. (Or, let's not kid yourself, you could just cut back.)
The wine days are over, a memory of the need to loosen after holding it together. The key to maintaining a self is to listen to your heartbeat, to what stirs the pain, to building a flexible framework for love and self-support. Where wine fails, conversation and action take over. You are on a path now, necessarily alone, naked, your feet moving forward while your mind, two steps behind, looks back at what you once were.
From the prompt "Too much."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I spent a little time editing this. Clearly my brain starts out in the old way (the melodrama, the desperate wish for escape) and then is surprised to find itself in a more hopeful paradigm.
Image by cabbit.
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