When I got the news that Janet died I came out of my body and stopped caring for a moment, stopped caring about my own self and what I should do. And then I didn’t add right and was angry and sorry and not thinking and I can’t afford to put the thinking aside and the counting and the measuring and I was overexposed in the insulin department, over by quite a few, enough to sock me in the head three or four times and I wasn’t making sense and then it was the first time I really lost my noodle a little bit.
I didn’t know about the glass of water and yes to it and getting it, there is time lost though I guess I was still there in some way and then I was confused. I didn’t know my self from the details of a show I had been watching on the DVD. I was mixed. I was combined with something else and I had to ask what happened. What was just happening? No, really what just happened here? give it to me step by step as if I wasn’t here. I think I lost some time. I think I lost five minutes. And I lost a little more self and I gave it away from being sad.
And now I have to not let that happen again. And I have to be more strong than I was before or just recently. And I have to not throw my body in the way of my hard feelings. And yes I am alive and if I cut that finger off it will not grow back. I have to remember that some things are for ever. I shouldn’t have to but I have to remind myself. I sense I have only so many turns, let’s say one hundred, to get it wrong and I have to keep it low—the number—so that I can survive until it’s time to die.
Janet, who I haven’t seen or spoken with in more than twenty years, got a new kidney from a friend in 2002 and then lived with the trouble it gave her until she died last summer and I didn’t know about it until today. And still it sucker punched me all the way to yesterday. I felt the need to see her and was making my plans. She would be there just like so many others who are out there, my satellites, my possibilities.
Even though I hadn’t seen her in years, I held her there in a place I could reach her and now that place has to be buried. Hard to bury a place that only exists in my head. Memories are there but possibilities not. No more this is what you are like now and this is me, no more remember when you took me as a child to the island, no more why was it like that for you. Now between the two of us it is only me.
2 comments:
Thank you. It meant a lot to hear this right now. Hard but necessary. Thank you so much.
re:Janet
Could it be that this is similar to the experience Janis Bellow tells about Saul in her preface to "S.B. Collected Stories?"
"Saul told me a long story about his stepmother's nephew. Over the winter he had learned that this nephew was dead, and he had been oppressed by the fact that the death had occurred some time ago, and that he hadn't known that the man was gone. At one time he had been very fond of thes chess-playing sober young refugee. They had sought each other out at his stepmother's boring Sunday gatherings. What does it mean to say that you are close to someone, Saul wondered, when you discover that you are relying only on scraps of memory about that person? From these musings came Saul's notion of the 'warehouse of good intentions.' Someone occupies a place in your life, takes on some special significance - what it is, you can't really say. But you have made a real connection - this person has come to stand for something in your life. Time goes by, you haven't seen the party, you don't know what has happened to him, he may even be dead for all you know, and yet you hang on to the idea of the unique importanace of that individual. What a shock to discover that memories have become a stand-in for that warehoused person."
Maybe this experience is one of those universals brought about by the mobility of modern life. The present condition of complicated interpersonal (or not so personal) relationships. A fact of life, but we still feel regret.
Maybe it is a case of having an intuition or inkling, but nothing more that certain of our relationships in this life carry strings from a previous life that involved that person more deeply than we are conscious of.
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