12 February, 2012

The sun came out

And then the sun came out, the world was bright and it's beauty was undeniable.  We were surrounded by songbirds of many colors. There were wild turkey strolling under the older pine trees. I saw a fox trotting along the edge of a bog with some sort of animal in it's mouth. Sunday  has become a day of reflection, a time for being rather than doing. A time to stop figuring out problems and attempting to rescue the world. This is a day to take the world as it is with all its pain and transformation. None of this is permanent and the changes can happen so fast that it is easy to miss the moments of pure bliss. Like a string of pearls, yet I catch myself focused on the string, wondering if it needs to be replaced. I lose the story of the pearls, the oysters and the ocean. I lose sight of the suffering, the annoyance of the creature slowly forming deposits around the sand until the pearl becomes luminescent, iridescent. My marriage was never the story I imagined and I found myself living with a man I did not know. I knew little about him when we said our vows, and he managed to hide much of himself during the years our children were small. I lived with a projection of my own assumptions about him, never stopping to gather evidence regarding my beliefs. And as it turned out, he had a long list of secrets that he hid from me. I blamed myself for not discovering them sooner, yet how can one discover something that is perfectly hidden. It is silly to think I should have known he was lying, I didn't even want to know. I wanted my projection to be true and real. Just as I now want his deceit and betrayal to be exposed. The truth may be that no one really cares. And I am determined to care about my life more than I care about exposing his. But how to do that? How to make up a new story of my life. People love romantic comedy and we all believed most of the details of the 22 years we spent together. But looking back it reminds me of a horror story like the pseudo romantic vampire films of recent times. I recoil in disgust, grateful to have escaped the repetition of our co-dependent pattern. Sunlight fading, I pack up my books and walk outside.
I seem to have an insatiable need for solitude and daydreams. I still amazes me that I lived for so long with an extreme extrovert. I come alive in the silence, it is what attracted me to dance when I was younger. Entering college as a theater student I was exhausted by all the words coming out of people's mouths. It seemed to be a distraction from what was really happening in our hearts. As if the words would form a kind of protective bubble around our budding identities.  

1 comment:

Denise Emanuel Clemen said...

Hooray for solitude and daydreams.