Among the Darbies

I do not believe in fatalism. I understand cause and effect and believe wholeheartedly that a decision as simple as whether or not to board a bus could very well change the entire course of your life. And yet: I cannot help but deny a certain untouchable defeatist element to existence.

And: yes, yes. I know. Everyone feels this way at some point: or else we wouldn’t have clichés about camels and straw; or laws like Murphy’s.

But it’s this precise realization that makes me so quick to wonder: why bother at all.

Imagine for a moment that you did everything to create a comfortable life for yourself: the life you wanted, even. But what if the harder you tried, the further that dream went away?

Just another classic case of Tantalus, you might say.


And I say this: I’m not talking about water and grapes. This is life: a vacant and meaningless existence treading dangerously close to an irretrievably crushed spirit.



Recently someone said he admired me because no matter what happened, nothing ever gets to my core.

I appreciate what I consider to be a compliment, but I doubt its accuracy.


Because these things, little by little, are getting to me. And with so much of everything collapsing around me, I feel at times I have only myself to blame. And yet: I don’t know what I’ve done wrong. I don’t know what I could’ve done differently.



And so: day after day, these experiences tear at me from the inside. I try to heal old wounds and a new one arises; I stop one leak, and a bigger one begins.



But if I must be the girl who serves as a godmother – but never a parent – so be it. If I must be the girl who has to choose between backpacking across Scotland alone or not going at all, I will choose the former.


And yet: why it is come to this, I will never understand. These shelves of unwatched books; lists of “must see” movies and unseen vistas. Hopes and dreams that once seemed inevitable have somehow become insurmountable peaks.


They grow; they loom; they taunt. Fates approach in the distance; growing larger and larger, scissors poised before my string.

This is not the life I fought for. This is not the life I wanted.


This is the life that found me.



But tell me why – like Sisyphus – I scale the mountain all the same.

That Which We Do Not See

Even the most intelligent of our species fail, time and again, to appreciate the beauty of the world around them.

They rush from Point A to Point B with their faces in cell phones,


and their heads so far removed from the best of their reality that they dream only of alternates: bigger homes; bigger paychecks; more beautiful spouses.

But what of perfectly formed snowflakes, glistening on windshields? What of shadows and sunspots

-- simple smiles or autumnal leaves forever orange (frozen in ice)?

It has taken me a long time to realize that not everyone sees the world as I do.


Which isn't to say there's anything special about me; only that it's with good reason that words such as "weird" and "quirky" are so often used to describe me.


But it is this same personality trait that compels me to seek out the like-minded,


ever hopeful that I will stop to take a picture and the person beside me will understand precisely why I'm fascinated by complex equations,

or a certain slant of light.


Together we will slay dragons with our laughter, run circles around Lake Michigan, and wiggle our toes through the morning dew.


But emotion, as with life, is a one-sided beast:

a landslide that consumes the very thing it loves, leaving eternity-old lessons in its wake.

You can depend on no one in this world.

Which is to say:

You are alone.

It is this very lesson that I find myself confronting again, even as I try -- perhaps now more than ever -- to disprove lifelong hypotheses.

But am I falling again?

Failing?


Cornering myself into the circumference of infinity?


There's no denying it, I think, staring out of my window and into stained glass: this life is a loop, doomed to repeat itself.

And so I do, the record and the needle bouncing inconsolably between the bitter and the sweet;

the beautiful laughter and the desolate sigh.

Which is to say, there's only one lesson to be had here, and you already know it:


The people you love will not recognize you even as you stand before them:

And yet they will remember you, beautifully and painfully,

when you are gone.

Being There

This, I imagine, is how it begins.


An entire day spent in silence, readjusting a junk sofa; laying down new rugs and wiping vomit from the old ones.

This is what you never wanted; what so many of you fear.

It is alone.

Not the adjective and not the adverb, but rather the thing itself. It is, for lack of a better description, the genesis of a solitary noun.


It is… orange leaves outside of a window.

Sirens wailing towards Devon.

The gurgle of a seldom used fountain; the collapse of a soap dish unable to carry its burden alongside the tiled bathroom wall.


It is the sight and the sound and smell of autumn; everything falling and crunching and wailing to its own chord.


It is beautiful and sad. It is solitude with little more than a waning desire to be otherwise.


It is giving up.


It is the nauseating understanding of difference; the realization that, hermit or not, there is a profound difference between having the choice of company (youth) and none at all (present).


And it pushes on your chest, dripping your lifeline into the pit of your stomach, pounding to the beat of old memories and moments. Laughs and pranks and walks and sundry other moments where you were not — by any superficial definition of the word — alone.


But time is a lion, leaving in its wake a path of beautiful destruction.


People grow. They marry. They have children. The children grow.


Everyone older and older, their faces dropping from the only circle you’ve known. And so it goes: you are alone, in the middle of everything.


God forbid you should ever wake up to realize what I have: that there’s seldom a need for a telephone. No need for stationery and blank CDs. No need for vocal chords or complete dinette sets.

You will stay where you are while the world spins on; stopping and demanding you dance at their convenience. And yet: otherwise forgetting your face; your name; your voice.


And that, perhaps, is your problem. Your Achilles heel, as it were.

You are always there.



Waiting and helping. Helping and waiting. Like a piece of furniture that brings comfort after a long day, with scarce occasion for reciprocity.


But when the world does indeed comes crashing down — as it most assuredly will — and your ears ache with the sort of silence that only tinnitus knows.

No one — no one — will be there to hear you scream. No one will rub your feet or bring breakfast in bed. No one will answer their phone or call for random hello’s.

And this, I imagine, is the replicating middle. The climax to a story with no denouement except for the endless repetition of the silence; the solitude; and the fury.

But the question remains:

How does it end? How do you break out of the cycle and rebirth yourself into the happy happy joy joy of the faces around you?


It is the hardest feat of them all. An action so Herculean in effort that you can scarcely imagine the thought.


You will have to turn to someone you love and say, anguish dripping from your cheeks, that, no

I cannot be there for you.

Not ever again.


And until you accomplish this one, great disaster of your life, there is only this:


the beginning, the middle and the end – consistent only in their unraveling.