A Reflection, 6.12.12

The sky broke on her.

She did not stop or break stride, but the course of her thoughts shifted determinedly. It was the sound of her footsteps on the dampening concrete, the the soft grinding of the small, wet fragments of dirt and sand. Beside her, the alleys cast their arms back along the sides of buildings. They seemed so harmless in the soft rain.

She let her shoulders fall.

At this age, it seemed not so much to be disappointment, but the impression of disappointment that plagued her. When she laid it all out in her head, each year of the twenty or so she had lived, she could count no real failures. Perhaps a dozen or so brilliant starts that never came to foment.

But in the rain now, it all seemed so quaintly terrible, and with it washing over her, she let it feel, in that moment, as awful as she imagined it to be. It was her own private travesty.

She didn't know how to feel in the daytime, with the world erupting around her, with breath and life moving in her chest. She could feel it there always, and then sometimes felt a sadness there, also, writhing in her, like a thousand tongues trying to speak at once. She had no words of her own to say. She could only feel. She ached to put them to writing, but everything was wooden and stale. They stood like stick figures, and were subsequently blown down by the torrents of her own criticism.

Nothing was great enough for the mundane suffering that she belonged to, that everybody like her belonged to. The tyrrany of the average. The expense of convenience. She felt the weight of fortune upon her. What was there to suffer for here, except for herself? She knew the selfishness in that, as an instinct, and it tore weakly at her. The thing she was living could not be life, could not be worth the words that she grasped for, that stood just out of her reach. She believed that she should have something great to say, but there was nothing. What was there that had not been said about her life that had not been said a thousand times over? Not any way she could say it made it any more brilliant. So she resolved to keep her thoughts to herself.

Driving home, she let the rain collect on her windshield before clicking the lever down once to wipe it away, and watch it wash in little thin waves over glass stained with precipitation and fingerprints. All the streetlights, tawdry haloes of red, the clear cut of green. Alone and peaceful. That was the strange thing about her world; the aloneness, the certainty of her separateness from all other human beings. So much of the focus of her life was connecting with other people, the love she felt channeling from them to her, and from her to others. Yet there seemed to have been some cheapening of that connection, a hole in the line that seeped away its honesty by some noticeable measure.

Sometimes it seemed to her a selfish kind of need.The act of loving was less important than than the acceptance of her love by others. It was a validation of herself; that one shining moment that she could feel her mediocrity be disproven by somebody else; that she didn't herself have to beat against that terrible, gray wall that she felt holding her in, pressing her down in a death before death, without life to preceed it.

She felt all these things, all this self pity, and she laughed at herself. She wasn't a fool. She was an amateur student of psychoanalysis, and applied it to herself eagerly. She was committed to making herself better, but in those efforts, she felt that she had burned out any small glimmer of greatness that was in her. Before, she had dedicated much of her existence to finding a more perfect way of expressing her suffering. So now she was left there, shivering in the wake of its imperfection, all the subtle, incomplete joys and achings still rattling away inside of her, silently.