It’s easier to share and read the miracles, but it takes effort to stay with them.
(The misery lingers.)
I would like to tell you that the trip is dreamy, full of new smells and fresh perspective, and it is that. But it is also sloppy mornings that start later than I’d like. Missed opportunities to greet the day before it scorches the pavement, but with no drug to blame other than the ambiguous worry and hideous, amorphous anxiety.
There is a family in the park next to us - two girls, a little boy, and strung out parents. Hard core strung out, with a grandmother who paces in and out, her worry thick as mine but rooted in her own reality that something outside of her control is horribly wrong. The mother is too thin - not in a natural way, but in a desiccated, sick way, as though she has spent too much time in the bottom of a shoebox with a packet of poison. She yells, and barks, and is clearly suffering, and I am sitting here judging her with vicious, envious eyes from my awkwardly high metallic horse that cost me virtually nothing.
Because I’ve been lucky.
The infertility that sank her teeth into me ten years ago eroded my marriage and my mental health, but my finances stayed in sufficient order that I get to have, have, have.
When the grandmother’s minivan docked outside of their tent, the little boy scrambled - clad only in his superhero skivvies - to climb into her passenger window - desperate for her. She walked around and plucked him down, with joy and admiration, and the steadfast nature that is maternal. Something his mother has no shadow of.
The mother yells that the kids are hungry and haven’t eaten all day, and asks grandma to take them to McDonalds. And while grandma is getting the kids decent for a fast food drive through in the middle of a pandemic, mom ransacks the minivan for change and cigarettes, hanging her backside out of the same passenger window that her son clung to a minute before.
The misery is thick here, as I’m lost in the field between jealousy, envy, and rage. All of the judgement I can muster in the direction of this desperation to avoid the nagging hollow that is my own mind.
It is beautiful, this life, and this journey.
But in case you find yourself lost in the jealousy of my liberty, it isn’t as tidy as a couple of filtered instagram posts and a ballad to a cavernous grain mill sanctuary. It is as deep and wide as your life, as any life.
And?
I’m lucky.
from the archives, Aug 12, 2020