"A heart resolved after due reflection will not flinch at the critical moment."
*
Everytime I say, "Guess what?" to my wonderful, irrepressible, HIV positive, not-at-all requisite gay best friend in Philadelphia, he says, "You're pregnant?"
Once he said that having children seemed to him like a jail sentence without parole. My dear friend J. seems to echo these sentiments and, one of four children, "conceive" (horrible distasteful, tone-battering pun, not that I can convey an even microscopically appropriate tone for this of all entries) of the procreating stance with skeptism if not faint (though not cruel) scorn. Many people wonder if "all those people from high school on Facebook" can make it a day without posting twenty photos of Junior spitting up cotton candy or what have you.
Yet I can't afford to expend energy defending my strange choices. Isn't it basically a mystery why anyone makes such huge, absurd leaps of faith? Am I just empty inside (not literally of course), no better than one of those high school girls who thinks they know how to cure loneliness, and subject their lack on a blank slate of, innocence. Eww. Who can think? It's been a little less than 24 hours since the impulsive choice to yellow rain a spare stick; and the subsequent-immediate, dizzifying, heartrending wild shaking*, and the resolve which is on some level more terrifying then the hem & haw, youth preserved, the desire to sprawl and to sleep in and to party, and the fear of selfishness. MFA programs, goodbye! The boy who looks like Dylan and exchanged many times scintillating glances with me: fare thee well! Drinking three at Bridge Street and stumbling through this old town with its stone buildings and its bridges and its rambling, urine-reeking crazies with hearts secretly for God, I'm still here. At least for now. ES, the love who stayed weeks in my hospital room, who made a dummy out of medical supplies and brought me daily chicken caesar salads, who snorted my pain medication in the bathroom and loved me through the shit-filled pink plastic bed pans, springing hard ons over a slipping down johnny: I cannot be for you, I am sorry. I know how you loved and how you tried. It's not about who deserves what, always. At least not in any comprehensible way, I don't think.
*Yes, I will miss the false elation of marijuana, the agitated rush: but what can compare to that shaking, that realization? 23 years old. Who will not groan in discuss**, what joke will I not be the butt of? But that is no way to think, and one conquers all with love, and faith.
Did I do it only to trap him, out of sheer desperation, and if so, should I hate myself? I knew what I was doing. I am a sentient being, at least. I've been planning for it for a very long time, really, with all my false starts and I know, at least, these early parts, the heaviness of breasts and eyes, the haze. The bumping into things, the wistful looks at the figure, the cut lines of my stomach, my tiny waist; I am a woman after all nothing lasts after all. And what is real, and what is vanity? Of course I like to be a beautiful creation, but I am no model, and do I live only to preserve through hoarding that little spark that I have, or to share it? It cannot all always be the same? I can't keep dipping my toes in the water forever. As my transpersonal psychology professor used to always say, "It took every single moment which came before this to create this one."
I didn't think it would be easy, and it's not, no matter how much I love the man, and maybe I shouldn't, I don't know, but why think like that now? I can't say the third time's the charm (though I just did), because that is trite and disgusting, but I did, by which I mean, at least this time someone besides me was happy about it.
Can I live? Oh my Lord. Technically, you know, I have my ducks in a row. A solid cushion in the bank, a parttime job, a bachelor's degree, experience with suffering and surrendering to it; a loving, now-sober mother with endless time and real affection for me and my, again, bizarre decisions; a monthly check, and, Thank god, really, health insurance. But what will that matter when I feel as though I am ripped apart? When it seems I am in a personal hell of my own? What will it matter when the mister is out drinking and I burn with cagey jealousy? When I, deranged with sleep deprivation, try to walk out the door to get groceries and then turn around, in horror and disgust at myself for forgetting, and the sinking feeling that nothing will ever, ever be the same?
(** Quite interesting slip, freudian or not.)
And this is all, of course, the best case scenario, barring major tragedies, deformities, etc. -- none of which I have any special God-given right to be spared of.
But this is what I have decided to do, only weeks after a disastrous sort of anti-showdown, ordered out of my lover's house, and he was just a flash of going in the night air. Until he was back, or I was, and he was saying, my kisses were revolting, he did not love me, my faith was a farce.
It has little to do with logic, but intuition, and there will be those who condemn me for it. I will, for my part, try to glorify God, and remember that
"Everything passes,
Everything changes,
Just do what you think you should do.
And someday maybe,
Who knows, baby,
I'll come and be cryin' to you." Bob Dylan, fellow Gemini, fellow four.
*
And it's not that I think I'm a "writer." I've never written anything substantial, coherent, or of note. I wrote a few years ago, in the introduction to my creative writing portfolio, that it wasn't so much that I didn't know how to say, noting that I had a certain natural facility, a certain fluidity & technical inclination: it was that I didn't have a what. But angst aside, (my "too personal story," as Dylan puts it), Victor Frankl said something far more interesting, that, "once you have a why, any how is possible."
But I want to write. I want to write and write and I don't expect to change the world but only to, as W writes, be the next nobody but be, as fully as possible, myself. I don't want to lose luminosity. I don't want to stop caring, and I don't want to stop feeling the great melancholy and vivid untameable wildness which runs to the core of the earth. The attractions and aversion which pass wordlessly between us all, who Lawrence called ships passing in the night, or was that someone else? (perhaps Lawrence just said something about two strangers on a highway) And I don't want to write a goddamned mommy blog. The crack, is it closed for me? It opens when a woman has her period. Mine may not come for over a year. It will be lonely and swelling, at times. It's not death, even if it feels like the end of a very much, even if I vowed not to do it until I was sure there was nothing I'd rather do. There are advantages to being young. To being fresh-faced and healthy and in love, though I do worry about circulation and that poor old foot of mine.
I want to have friends, though perhaps many will be disgusted, and the wheat will be separated from the chaff. What great loyalty do I deserve, anyway?
I want to go hiking, and to be under the sun, and drink coffee with multiple refills with adults, and all of these things. I don't know but I just have to go on. I wish I could be a man, sometimes, but why think like that?
When I was shot, I was not happy about it, but did I not embrace reality? Did I not bow to the fact that my life would just be a bit different than others, the same as it already was? And did I not always know that I didn't, actually, know very much at all about great suffering? That there were only a very few shaky minutes, and that really I was safe, coddled, comfortable, in good hands? I learned to move in a new way and I will learn again. My birth name means "industrious." I'm not sure I want to change my last name, and no one is forcing me, though it may be a concession worth making to set certain people at ease. He will work, I think, wherever he has to, and hopefully give music lessons with his great and often hidden intelligence. The new one will most likely be a Virgo. We will have the influence of Mercury in common, at least, and some great if difficult communication. Perhaps I will surprise myself with my strength when the "critical moment" arrives. Better yet, perhaps God will surprise me with the hands-on experience of His mercy. Which is, ultimately, infinitely more interesting than any veneer of "strength" I delusionally imagine is native to myself.
