 I'll Keep Wondering |
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I was driving along the other afternoon, and for some reason or another, S. popped into my head. Sometimes that just happens, and what are you gonna do? I find that when it happens, I check myself. Like, I say somewhere on the inside, "Have I forgiven him yet?" And the answer is always "no," but it's okay. It's not a raging, angry "no." It's just simple, and it's just sure. And then the thought passes, and I think, "Par," and carry on. As this was happening, I heard for the first time a line in a song on Mary Chapin Carpenter's new album called "My Heaven," a song title which would normally trigger my gag reflex, but I listened to the words, and they weren't so bad. (I later read that this song was inspired by The Lovely Bones, and that doesn't surprise me, since she's always based her songs on things she's read or heard or seen and making those inspirations known, which I think is cool. Like the amazing, perfect "John Doe No. 24," inspired by a newspaper article she read about "a deaf and sightless half-wit boy," and the new "Grand Central Station," written after she heard an interview with one of the rescue workers at Ground Zero who would go and sit in there to just catch his breath. In anyone else's hands, these topics could be purely wretched songs, but in hers, they are purely gorgeous. Anyway.) In fact, they were pretty. Just really pretty. And so I was having these thoughts, whatever they were, I can't even remember now, about a certain moment or recollection of times with S., and the line came. More memories than my heart can hold, and Eva's singing "'Fields of Gold..." And I flashed back to a night in his apartment when he lay on the couch drinking beer and watching a football game and I sat at his computer drinking beer and typing out a drunken, nonsensical love letter to him, and I wrote, "Will you stay with me? Will you be my love?" as I listened to the Eva Cassidy version that I'd downloaded and that I loved and that I still love. And it was just one of those stupid things, those associations that you make somehow. That song, that beer, that game, that night, that time, that most magical fall. And so I was thinking of him, and then I heard that line in that song that spoke of a song that still makes me think of him, and as I was processing all of that, another line from that song came on. Up here we forgive each other, in my heaven ... And it just gave me pause, a little bit, as I turned the wheel and headed down the road in the rain. I furrowed my brow, probably, and crinkled my eyes like I was staring at something off in distance, probably, and I knew that I still hadn't forgiven him, and it was just all very par. I have a life that is probably enviable to some. In a few days, I'm going to have a job that I like where I work from exactly eight to five, five days a week and get paid decently for it. I have my house. I have my cats whom I love so much that lately I've fallen asleep at night staring at them instead of reading a book or watching a DVD. I lie on my side and they lie on the pillow next to mine until one of them gets pissed at the other and hisses off angrily, and I stare at them and watch how their ears twitch and how their pupils squeeze smaller and bigger while they fight to keep their eyes open. I've got my dogs who are so awful and so awesome. I've got two healthy parents who are going to Italy this summer to celebrate their thirty-fifth anniversary. I've got three healthy siblings whom I see all the time and for whom I'd pretty much slay dragons. Next week, I'm having a night of beauty with girlfriends, and there will be waxing and highlighting and margaritas. I'm going to Paris this summer, and to London, and to other parts of Europe yet unknown with my hippie genius backpacking sister. I might go to Funroe for the 4th. Before the summer is over, I get to see where she will be spending the next three years. I'm even going to get to see Avenue Q, and I never thought that would happen. The thought of being in New York again, even if only for a single day, makes me want to stand on my tip toes. Because it's Shelley's City of Trash, but it's my City of Fun and Memories. So there is much to love in my life, and that is what I focus on, most of the time. So I know that I am lucky, and that life is good, and that I am an asshole if I complain about anything at all. After I saw Harry Potter on Sunday, my sister lay on my couch with her pearls and a pepperoni pizza while we watched the end of the baseball game, we talked a little about exes, and about how what sucks about being estranged from your ex, even if you want to be, is that you're alone in your memories. You can't share them with that person even though that person is the only one you can ever really share them with, the only one who understands. And I had never thought about it that way, I guess, about being alone in my memories. And my sister was recently reassured that she is not alone in hers, and that her ex remembers everything, and always wants to be her friend, and always wants to share those memories. And I thought as we sat there that afternoon, "She is lucky." And though I know that when I told him last year that I never wanted to see him or speak to him again, I meant it, and I still do, but I still think that she is lucky. Because what a loss. Not only to lose your present and future with someone closer to you than anyone else on earth, but to also lose your past. To have it be like it never happened. To never be able to laugh about those times with that person or to recollect, "Remember that? Goddamn, that was awesome," or crazy or wild or scary or romantic or sexy or sad. And it almost makes me wish that it never did happen. Because if I hadn't wasted that time with him, maybe I would have met someone else. Maybe I would be having the life I wish I could have when I lie in bed at night and wonder if I will ever find a partner who is good and true and whom I love and who loves me and with whom I can build a good life or possibly bear a couple of kids or least be well on my way, instead of being stuck in a place of being too frightened to take a step forward. And I feel myself hating him, and I hate myself for giving him the power to be hated by me and for being so frightened, still, still. And I feel my ovaries shriveling, and I find myself thinking over and over and over, why them and not me, why them and not me, why them and not me. Mostly I just wonder why. And after all of this, the truth that holds me here, Is that this emptiness is something not to fear. I'll keep wondering how we know where we belong, After all the journeys made, and the journeys yet to come. When I feel like giving up instead of going on, Somewhere in between. About this time in ...
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