Stuck At The Grave Of Future Regrets
No doubt at some point you've referred to something in you as "deep" or "hardwired."
Yesterday Kirk gave me a better image for this.
What grave am I stuck next to? After listening with his usual unwavering tolerance to my complaints and self-pity Kirk asked about that buried thing from which I refuse to walk away.
There are things we try to change about ourselves which give way to the warmth of attention or the file of habit. I used to be an angry person and now I am not. I once had many needs and now I have few (though not as few as I might wish, which contains, you might say, another need.)
But then there are those things which will not melt away or be scraped free.
Do you have old friends or siblings who you have see in some regular interval? Not someone you live with but someone you know in middle age you knew in youth too who you see once or twice a year, over decades? Or some such? If so, you know, first, a richness of experience and relationship that hints at the roots of time and, second, the shock and horror of how little these people change, at least in parts of themselves. Even as the skin droops, even after the divorce or the fight with cancer, even with the big award sitting in their office or the titan of a house they can afford to build, they still laugh a little too loud, forget to tip as they should, trundle on the story you ache to tell.
And with this mirror comes the inescapable truth it is this way with you too. "How can he still be just as he was in high school?" You friend wonders.
Who knows? Maybe on one's death bed you really do think of the pub in Prague you never went to, the trees you feared climbing, the person with whom you never slept.
Or maybe you think of everything you did that only you or some loved one can know lifted you up and out.
Maybe you watch yourself walking away for the first time. Maybe, like everything else, life only makes sense in its absence.
But until whatever that last flicker reveals, the boy who is father to your man lives in that stupid suit, the one your mother dressed you in. And there you stand to mouth words you assume adults understand, the impotent prayers that keep you from running off to play.
--
Half of the time we're gone
But we don't know where
--Only Living Boy In New York