I bought a last June-load of groceries today. The month has gone by quickly. The only other significant task that remains is the filling of the last little formalities of my entrance into school, which I have almost neglected these past three weeks. Oh, and I forgot, a haircut as well. “Party in the back, business in the front,” my cousin told me as we went out for the midday meal yesterday; “That hair needs to get cut for the summer weather.”
It’s true, I haven’t cut it since I was in Presidio with Ryan, all the way back in April. Things are finally beginning to turn around. I feel a slackening in the bonds I have had, but it isn’t easy. It’s so easy to add romantic connotations to these sort of situations, but I’m trying to steer away from categorizations like that. The most recurrent image I have is of three angels coming out of Heaven to let me loose and take me away.
I was depressed Friday. I cried and just let out alot of stopped up emotions, mainly blame and guilt, mostly all concerning my Mother but some of it was about Paul and I guess I was just grieving. I know my Mother will always love me for whatever I do, but deep down I feel shame for not being what she has always expected to me. My “best quality”. I grieve for him quietly. At the grocery store today we saw CJ’s (his ex-girlfriend) grandmother, and Paul’s face was a pale white and he was terrified of staying in the store lest she see him. I said, “There is nothing to worry about. We are not disturbing her, and she will not disturb us. We are private citizens attending to business quietly.” When we finished up he felt better, but it was maddeningly crowded at the grocery store today and I suppose it added to the consternation he felt.
It would be so easy to leave. Too easy. To just walk down the street, or just get in a car, and never to come back. But why? I asked my mother why she wanted me to leave and she said, “I know what you can do.” That definitely gave me hope. She mixes her hope with unbelievable despair: “I would have never thought my life would ever be this way.” And no one ever knows or asks about it, but simply keeps on doing what I am doing now, recording their own private pain or causing it for other people.
When I told Aleks about it he was characteristically compassionate right off the bat, but I am reluctant to open up because he has said that he doesn’t want to be burdened by people’s emotional distresses (even psychologists are human beings, too, I have discovered). He said in his very loving way that I could open up. I cried and cried typing like a silly child at the computer, squinting through my tears to type on the keyboard, feeling bad and terrified of the future–a future without my mother, without the comforting sight of her in her room, with the television on, the smell of evening coffee, and her white curtains rustling in the evening breeze. The empty room, like my grandfather’s empty room, would be the final sword, the ultimate pain, the thing I am more terrified of than my own death or eventual disease.
My muscles are pumped. They’re at that summertime bigness, only because I’ve worked out and ate so much because that’s how I deal with stress. I don’t cry but when I do it’s either out of sadness, frustration or desperation. Rarely out of a need to feel attended to by someone, thank God. I can’t really envision myself like so many of those young, thin, pale boys and girls who listen to bad alternative music and wish the world in which they are given everything were somehow summarily worse or possibly better than it already is. Nor can I envision myself as an essentially sociopathic, remorseless entity that goes about destroying people’s faith in society purely for his own self-gratification. I think that I deserve to be in a better place–I deserve it–but it can’t come about by just expecting things to happen. If my grandfather could make things happen then I too, must make things happen. Then the eventual move will come, the push forward and outward, into a wholly different place altogether.
There is a higher world, I know. It is not a place of fantasy but one in which people are waiting for my appearance there. All I have to do is simply ascend to it.
