Have you ever looked back at something you’ve written—a letter, a journal entry, the beginnings of a story, long or short—and wondered, “Who is that person who wrote this? Where did this come from?”
Coming back from a recent bout of COVID, trying to get back to myself, I’ve been spending time looking over old journal entries, essays, pages of musings and scraps of writing. It’s funny to me that I don’t remember writing a lot of what I’ve kept in files and journals, a collection of ramblings that seem unfamiliar but nevertheless strike a chord with the me of today.
She walked quietly through her life like a shadow, keeping a low profile, offering a smile and kindness to strangers, love to her children, and support and strength where needed, often without a word, usually with patience, always with restraint, afraid to open her heart and her thoughts, unwilling to disturb the chaos within. If the door opened just a crack, out would slip the wild creature she believed herself to be, that wild haired, laughing soul of ricocheting emotions, uninhabited, uninhibited, running freely into the wind—and more than likely off a cliff. No, she kept her battened down, silent, trapped, barred from life in the sun, anemic, craving, wanting life, a dry corpse tethered to fear. And that was on a good day.
I wrote this passage almost ten years ago in 2015, back before a move to California, way back before my move back to Ohio, but a very long time after my move from Santa Fe. There is nothing autobiographical here, yet I recognize that woman, the one closed off and empty and craving. I think we must all have those moments when we recognize some element of ourselves, good or bad, happy or sad, that resonates and makes us think about the past and the future—or the present. I look back and see a spiral of events and incidents that have moved me forward in time if not in evolution. I think of that line in True Detective: “Time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again,” which is a reference itself to Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, and I wonder if everything I write is a remnant of a former or future self.
The road was dusty under her feet. She shuffled along, angry, frustrated, willing the hours to fly by and the road to contract somehow, magically perhaps, so that she would find herself closer to home at the end of the day, a day overcast with intermittent rays of sunshine peeking out from behind gray clouds casting shadows behind her eyes, pressure on her sinuses, and a glare that made her eyes water. One fucking foot in front of the other, she recited in mantra-like fashion. The ohms and namastes of her former life had been left at the dusty edge of the desert along with her old beater Prius and the two worn black leather bags that contained the remnants of her life: clean jeans, underwear, two t-shirts, her grandmother’s bible, her mother’s wedding ring, assorted letters, books, and keepsakes, and the last photo of him she’d taken before he left her stranded in New Mexico. He looked dark and brooding in the photo, his eyes flat and hooded, his hair and beard windblown and tangled. They’d been living rough for several weeks, giving nature and their relationship a second chance. She’d been happy enough to live hand to mouth with him in those final days, exploring, hiking, living on the edge of life physically and metaphorically. They had hit their peak and begun the descent into oblivion when he’d simply rolled away leaving the fumes of the Greyhound’s exhaust settling in her lungs. She’d boarded the next bus herself, headed in the opposite direction toward home and had arrived with a broken heart, a damaged spirit, and a shitload of determination to begin her life again. Alone.
Sometimes it feels as though every day of my life is a crossroads. Forget the fork that turns ever so slightly in a new direction. My choices are hard right, hard left, back or straight ahead. Most days, I choose straight ahead but on days like today, I choose a detour that leads me back.
Cave Dweller: Alone in a Social World 