Week: Weakness

My weak point isn’t usually my lungs. Some might suggest it is my heart, at least in a metaphorical sense, as I am unusually soft in all such matters, and, well, these days I’d have a hard time refuting such claims with any material proof, but, truly, my stomach, really, my lower intestinal tract, is my weakest link. After a lifetime of managing gastrointestinal distress, I’m more or less an expert in calculating how sick I will be and for how long, (depending on if it is food-related, beverage-related or stress-related malaise) whether I can safely venture out of the house or not, and if so, what precautions must be taken. Of course there is always the occasional misstep, the extra-long wait at the traffic light, just as you’re exiting the highway, almost home, but not quite, that amps up the urgency, and has you desperately tapping out rhythms on the steering wheel to distract your mind from the impending doom of your twisting and tumultuous viscera… but I digress.

Today what ails me is my lungs. After a long-awaited swing-shut of the door that has been dangling precipitously for months, all that was left was the emptiness, the dust-bunnies of absence, skittering around the now unoccupied spaces, and a dose of late-summer cold, ironic in this unending desert heat, that has settled, after a brief stint in my throat, into a raw, grating of the trachea, and a tightness of the lungs.

As a younger woman, I used to fall ill more often, I think back to epic infirmities, like the months-long rib-cracking cough that I caught from my students my second year teaching high school. I remember thinking that I should have sprayed my students’ papers with some sort of decontaminant before bringing them home to grade, diligently, before my modus operandi became procrastination, before I learned to kick the can just a little farther down the road. To avoid the hard work that must be done.

It occurs to me that sickness of the lungs is a ripe metaphor in and of itself. It reflects injury to the very mechanisms that sustain the immediacy of life. One’s need for oxygen, increasing, ever-increasing as the drowning death throes of a relationship abandoned, a bobbing, solitary boat out on the ocean, leaking, and wounded, struggling to make it to a welcoming shore. Or maybe I’m just sick and there’s nothing more, nothing transcendental about it, nothing in this feeling of loss, of this failure to thrive, of this never-begun journey.

I hate myself a little when I’m so self-indulgent, this should come as no surprise.

I cough, and wheeze, and think back to other iterations of this gape-mawed abyss. I sip an infusion of furry mullein (known mostly as gordolobo) and eucalyptus with honey, and I think of the smell of Santa Barbara in the fall, and the deep, wounding loss that I provoked, that I required, that I cannot regret, save for the ways in which it occurred. The loss I am feeling in my tightening chest tonight pales in comparison. It gets easier to walk away from pain and codependency the older one gets, one learns to shed their snake-skin, sloughing off in slithering esses, with less ado.

I came home the other night and the space once inhabited was empty, save for a few items that had been lovingly lent, and were now carefully folded in what only felt like a rejection, but might have been something different. (How can one know the motives of others?) I had dreaded this exact scenario, for months and years, always worried that one day I’d come home and his things would be gone, as if they had never been there in the first place, whoever he might be or have been. The concrete fear of abandonment, the particular cruelty of an unannounced relinquishing of care, was one I have always feared, despite never having experienced it. And it wasn’t the case here, either. This departure was long-announced, and even anticipated, marking a return of the status quo: you on your side and me on mine, and never the twain shall meet again. And yet, the absence was still doled out with shocking abruptness, still stung, like a slap to the face, or a smack on one's back, to dislodge something that is causing an attack of choking on air, or nothing at all.

Someone once said, maybe it was Nicanor Parra? that everything has already been said, and that we should demand an answer from the abyss. I don’t have much energy to demand answers from anyone about anything, not even myself. I just know what I don’t want anymore.

I don’t want to feel like I must make excuses for someone else’s behavior, their lack of care, twist myself up in knots to convince me, and the world, that if it weren’t for such-and-such a situation (or such-and-such a piece of baggage) they would be gentle and attentive in the way that I need, in the way that I am. I refuse. People either show up or they don’t. End of story. Hallelujah, praise be! Not a few of you, out in the world will say. Of course, you, who love me, will be gentler than that, less celebratory, more hushed in your tones. But the collective sigh of relief will be palpable. And I know. I realize that I am too kind to others and not enough to myself, that I make too many accommodations, until I decide to make none. That I have the power to excise this lingering tickle from my lungs. And I will. I must.

But tonight, I will sit in the darkness and meditate in the only way I know how. Fingers flying furiously over a dark keyboard, backlight, black letters marching across a white screen. I suppose there is and always will be tomorrow. And you can always rock yourself to sleep. You can’t ask for comfort from the person who has broken your heart, just like you can’t offer solace to the person whose heart you broke, have broken, will break. It is a simple impossibility. You can’t get blood from a stone.

You, too, will be looking for something in the darkness, in your travel, far from home, to expiate your guilt, to extirpate your demons, to soothe children who by no fault of their own exist in this world that we accidentally created for them. They, too, will be leaning out for love, like Suzanne, maybe forever. Maybe.

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My weakest point was never my lungs. I can fill them up, and sing.