Essence

I am certain that I have written once or twice, or maybe a thousand times that I am lost. I think I wrote it when my oldest was born, and then again when number two took her first breath. I wrote it when our lives had crashed and burned and sent us hurling into the world seeking foundation. Solidarity. I wrote it again when the entrance of a third-born child into our lives ruffled the feathers of a thinned family structure. I wrote it from the desk of a news room and from a third-floor bedroom on Sumac Street. I wrote it through loss, suffering, and most of the sadness with which I’ve been stricken. Not the unique kind of sadness that one is stamped with upon the altar of losing a child or parent. I’m referencing ordinary sadness. The kind we cultivate when there is nothing else to feel. Nothing else to indicate a pulse.

When I look over my shoulder, which I do all too often, I don’t see the lost component in those thousand and maybe one entries that litter my journals and are threaded throughout every story I have authored. What I see from where I am standing is that my children grounded me on the three days that they were born. And the city has never been less than an adventure. I harbored Sumac Street as a mile-marker to the end of something fantastic, yet what a fantastic and exciting new life that had begun right there in that very stone house with the blue trim. And who would I be if it were not for news rooms? Because I know no other way of life beyond pecking at the keys or scratching a pen against the surface of the pages in a sketchbook. I don’t sketch, of course. But I don’t like writing on lined paper.  To avoid the lines, I write in sketchbooks. For spacial reasons.

Then sometimes I blame being lost on the city. Always somewhere to go and someone’s voice to hear. The clatter of this town swells my brain. There are days when I wake without a sense of direction. Without a map or a timeline. On those days, I float. Downstream. Hoping to catch a rapid. Or drown. Either way.

Most recently, I’ve blamed being lost on the house in which I now live, which is not the one on Sumac or Jamestown. Jamestown was good. I loved those bones. I laid my hands on them, smoothed my palm across the surface of its moldings, grazed my fingers along the walls. I’d tell it so. I’d whisper, “What a good house you are. I feel myself here. I am alive and vibrant here.” So many things poured from me onto pages and screens on Jamestown. Three screens, to be exact. Two PCs and a laptop served tenure in that house.

But this house, this house is different with its sterile surfaces, straight edges, and clean lines.  I’ve tried lying on the sofa in the middle of the day after the girls are off to school and only the fish tank has something to say. It gurgles regardless of the term Whisper written on the side of its filter pump. I let the algae grow because that’s how I think the fish want to live. I think they like the green and sometimes they eat it off the sides. But usually only when I go days forgetting to feed them. I do that. Forget them. Sometimes the gurgle from the tank falls on deaf ears. Unless I try to lay on the sofa in search of myself; then I hear it. So loud it crashes against my raw and irritated mind. Like a blister. My brain. Not the fish tank. The tank is not like a blister.

I beg for the quiet when the sofa doesn’t work. I request it. To myself, to God, to the Universe. To anyone who is listening. I say things like, “Do you realize that there is still this dream?” It’s the one I fashioned as a child from the surface of my bedroom window sill that faced east so that I could watch the sun rise in the morning and watch the fields turn orange against the sunset’s glow just before supper was ready. It was there where I thought about it.  It was there where I fashioned my first book. I called it, My Book. It was about me. And the very first line reads something to the extent of, “I want the world to read what I have to say.” Something along those lines. I could get it out of the closet in this house and quote the line. It’s fifteen feet from where I sit now. But I am far too lost for that kind of business. Rummaging through crap that reminds me of how much crap the world has yet to read.

I asked him today if maybe I wasn’t good at this. Maybe, for my whole entire long-lived life, I had chosen a dream that didn’t match even a small part of me or my capacity to fulfill. I tried to find the roots. I vaguely recalled winning contests, writing for the local newspaper as an adolescent. Then I remembered the sixth grade autobiography. Her note beautifully written next to the A+. “You should be a writer.”

That’s all it took. In fact, I was a little irritated that someone hadn’t mentioned it earlier because I had just devoured two weeks of my life preparing a report on practicing medicine for the career segment in my language arts class. Of course I would be writer. And not a pediatrician.

I do not practice medicine. Following the receipt of my sixth-grade teacher’s note, I practiced writing. I thought briefly about medicine in 1999, following the birth of my second child. I researched schools, programs, financial aid. I hadn’t written since the babies had made themselves comfortable in my life and consumed my every waking and sleeping hour. I acknowledged it as a sign to become a doctor. Who wouldn’t think that, right? It seemed like a perfectly natural process to me.

I targeted a start date on my higher education. I had essays to write, of course. Letters to the officials who rule the kingdom of that caliber of education. I logged onto my PC, circa 1985. One of the original McIntoshes. And thought it wise to clean out the plethora of documents and files that had collected for more than a decade. I wasn’t a writer. I no longer needed the stories. Clean house, ducks in a row, all was good. Except when I stumbled upon that one story. The one that was inspired by the dream I had had with the orphans in Guatemala. I couldn’t pull myself away. I printed all 347 pages of the manuscript and crumpled it into a folder that I tucked into the outside pocket of the diaper bag. I never completed a medical school admissions package.

I don’t have an end to this. Other than to say that lying on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon, listening to water gurgle from a tank that is green from the inside out does not make me feel that inner self. It reminds me of the wooden swing my father installed on a branch of the maple tree at the corner of the house in which I grew up. The hours, the days, I sat on that swing and gazed at the landscape that neither moved nor transformed other than the occasional tractor that interrupted it seasonally. It was the same view from my bedroom window sill, the one facing east. Because the swing was below the window, to the left a little. I inserted the landscape and tree swing into the Guatemalan story.  But in the story, the view becomes exhausting for the character and forces her to retreat from a place she once held dear.  I take photographs of the field and the hillside when I go home now and again. I stand in the spot where the swing once hung. It’s no longer there. But that’s where I stand to snap the shudder.

Actually, I have a digital Polaroid that cost me seventy bucks at Target. I don’t think it has a shudder. I don’t know anything about digital photography other than to say that it captures what I see when I press the button on the top.

Regardless, the view from my sofa is now exhausting. The yellow walls smother me. The sound of the fish tank is deafening. I like the green, though. In the tank. I don’t believe that the average keeper of fish can hone the talent of nurturing green algae like I do. It’s a delicate situation. That requires patience. And tenacity. Sunlight helps, too.

I assume, much like the former one thousand and one times I have issued a notice on being lost, I will look over my shoulder after having passed this way, and realize that the content upon which I base my negativity, is the very essence of my life. Not the sofa. Or the yellow. But the rest.

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