7-21-16

Send your words he said. They’re meaningful. To someone, somewhere. The strings of conflicting experiences, the non-stop chatter, they had some value. There were people who would read them and feel something. I don’t know what they would feel, but they would feel more alive than they do, in this world where everything numbs your ability to feel; your wine, your coffee, the lull of the train, it numbs you until you are senseless, defeated, and you have forgotten how to simply exist.

Send your words, he said. They are the things we wish to say, that we cannot summons up in our weariness. In the way that our bodies ache, in the way that we are forced to be so close to each other, head to armpit, I accidentally bump into you, a look in my direction is not even granted, it would be too much effort.  We are crammed into this place, the putrid stench of too many bodies, together in our bustle, yet we have nothing and no one. We’re alone and we all just can’t stand it.

I send my words, I write them for him, in the hopes that he is the one person who can understand.  I live this life of occasional agony, brief glimpses of togetherness, then huge walls of separation where I linger, mulling over everything I did wrong, trying somehow to prove my worthiness.  My pain is nothing and it is everything, it is universal and it is individual, it is everything and it is nothing. It is human.

Around me there are marriages, and dissolutions of marriage, new babies, happy families, engagements, people in my group of friends who have long term relationships, like 30 years, and I am incredulous. When did I get to the age where I had grey hair on my temples and people have known each other for 30 years? I mourn the loss of where I thought I was going, periodically throughout the week. I am jealous of people whose husbands come home from work, who eat dinner with them, who tickle the children and tousle their hair.

My own children stand before me like I am this vast source of knowledge. I want to scream that I don’t know anything, and I should barely be allowed to make choices as an adult, because obviously I choose the wrong thing. I try to smile at them, but my elder child cannot be so easily placated.  She bears worry on her face too. I try not to project unnecessary distress onto her. I remind her I am an adult therefore I have it all under control. Then I worry how I am going to keep my words to her, true.

I lie awake long nights, my head a tally of the choices I made, the reactions to those choices, and whether those choices were the correct ones based off of the outcomes. I ruminate on what I could have done better, how someone else would have used the opportunities before them for something more beneficial.  Have I wasted this opportunity?

I will send my words, I write them for him, I write them for you, I write them for me. I write these words of universal distress. In a world of endless possibilities, and free choice, how do you know that you have used every ounce of your life for the best? How do you know you are not wasting these few days between your first breath and your last?