I’ve been looking at the world through a darker lens. I think so many of my friends have died that I’ve started waking up each morning with the same existential dilemma: what’s it all about? Why do we come here?
This love and work and caring; where does it go?
For I do care. More than might seem apparent, from the outward appearance. Everything moves me deeply, and it’s a tough world; you can’t make it if you’re going to fall apart over every little thing.
But that’s just it; there are no little things. No one, nothing, is bigger or smaller than another. What in this universe is not connected to something or someone else?
Last Sunday, driving out into the country, a flock of turkey buzzards kept swooping about. One settled on a light pole, and studied me sternly. It felt like a very bad omen, and I shivered. Do you know how large those vultures are? Very. Like a Grim Reaper, minus the scythe.
“What’s the matter?” my father asked.
“Those buzzards,” I wavered, and likethat, he clapped his huge hands once, decisively, in his authoritative way. The vulture on the pole lifted its massive wings and flew away as if on command.
We stood together, watching it circle us, watching it measure from its great height and decide whether to pursue, or fall back. It fell back.
On the drive home, a small chipmunk ran across the road in front of my car. I had no time. I braked gently, but I still hit it. I saw its tiny body flip over onto its back, on the asphalt, in my rear view mirror. I bit my lip: “oh!”
The boys, like my father: “What’s the matter?”
“The chipmunk. I hit it.” I started to cry. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Don’t cry,” they said sadly. “It’s just Nature. You said yourself Nature is random and cruel. It’s not your fault.”
“It is random and cruel.” It’s the vulture’s fault. Foreshadowing. It was already written I would hurt that animal. I can’t bear the thoughts that go through my own head sometimes. Those thoughts. That I saw the warning sign and still plowed ahead and nothing changed it. That I could have known, and not known. I don’t know.
And it’s hard to do the work I do, making myself as vulnerable as I do, though people don’t realize that either; to them it’s just images and play, and to me it’s a sacred language of the soul.
But then I reason, it doesn’t matter if anyone knows my identity or my intent; it only matters that they feel the caring, and that they pick up some thread, and go on caring, themselves — someone has to give a damn.
Yet more and more it seems no one really does.
One day this week I sat down on a step overwhelmed with tears and I hung my head to hide them. A passerby stopped and interrupted me: “Excuse me. Would you happen to have a cigarette?”
When I lifted my face to say No, he saw me — really saw me– and said, aghast, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, though my face was wet, my mascara melting in great gray streaks, and my voice was thick with the tears I wasn’t giving voice to. What was I going to say really? That I’m mute with emotion that can only live on paper, because when I try to speak to people, no one understands me?
No, it’s better just to speak through my work, and let my heart break on the inside alone. It’s enough if you try to give a damn, and try to give a damn about the people around you. Try to let them know once in a while. No one tells anyone anything anymore.
