What I want to tell you about is how things get away. How they slip through our fingers while we are running to the grocery store. And we come back three years later, forgetting what we were going to make with the fennel and pickled carrots. We forget where we are going and how we are going to get there. We arrive at what we want only to fear our own wants, hold them up to the light, curious what they were ever made of. How do we make dinner? How do we say, I still love you? How do we find out way in the dark? Entire sections of our lives folded up like lawn furniture.
Life in these years has been a revolving scenario of how to make sense of the interiors of the night. I am groping around in the dark for the light switch, still half in a dream about a boy I met on the internet. We don’t change, even when we do. When the sun does come up the cloud hang low above the lake and make the world feel inverted, just a small crack of light. It doesn’t matter where I am, you’re always with me.
I am curious lately, or always, how we live with ghosts.
Once when I was broken about a boy in Montana, I came home and slept in my mother’s bed. The air conditioning up too high, buttered toast on my lap. She told me I was in my “basement heartbreak.” And while the words themselves felt like an apt metaphor, it wasn’t the whole point. She told me a story about when she was young and her first real heartbreak. How she lived with the boy, who sold weed in 1970 in Minneapolis in a walk-up near the lake. How she’d spend their relationship spending his money at antique stores and furnishing their apartment. How when he left her for someone else, she proceeded to take all the furniture, move it into her mother’s basement and reassemble the apartment as best she could down to the record player and the china buffet. She lived down there all summer until her mother came down and insisted she go to Ireland with her grandfather as a chaperone. He didn’t need one, but they did need to draw her out of her basement heartbreak.
I don’t know why I am telling you this story. It has something to do with my state of mind and the clothes drying outside. It has something to do with how she carried this story with her all those years and didn’t tell me until that summer of my own basement heartbreak. How the stories we tell about our life are our life.
What will I tell you about these years? What will be the stories I tell you about my own life when you come with a broken heart? It never really goes away does it? Even the things that get away, the ones that we forget or willingly leave behind, they’re still there. We’re still here.
THE LITTLE BLACQUE BLOG 