letting the heart breathe

something spontaneous for a monday

Some days you wake up wretched. Your whole room needs rearranging. Nothing will be right if you don’t fix it. First, you blame anyone: Your therapist, your neighbor, a street rat, someone you’re seeing, the cashier at the food-coop who is not an employee but a member, the pitbull sitting obediently outside the corner store in the rain, your longtime acquaintance who is now a real friend. But you know it’s you. You who encounters all the errors. Who must endure a pressure in the chest and a knot in the throat, and maybe for days. It was only this past weekend at a party when a friend told you that you seemed especially upbeat, a bright star. You agreed, you finally felt as confident as you usually appear, and hopeful, but didn’t quite know why, and still don’t—you had exactly the same problems then as you do now. How could you have felt so good, being the same woman in the same clothes, with the same stretches of loneliness and companionship negotiated through the same span of hours, minutes, periods and transitions? With the same thoughts, incessant thoughts, turning themselves over, getting bored, and forgetting, before returning again?

No one likes to see a pretty face pulled. You don’t wear despondency well. Your companions might turn against you. And how embarrassing if you wake up in a few hours feeling better. Did you just need to cry? Well, you can’t. So you write. You write obliquely about every pain you’ve ever felt, which are all the same sort of pains, blurring eventually into one big bruise. It feels silly now. Aren’t you happy? Hasn’t everything necessary essentially gone your way? The extra things, the things which you don’t need to survive, but desperately want — even if you refuse to put it this way to your therapist — if you never get them, you will still be, by any reasonable account, a happy person. The wanting, not superfluous, essential actually, but not needing to end in order to celebrate.