the last burnt sienna crayon

I tried to run away once.

I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going and I didn’t take anything with me, I just ended up under the bridge over the old creek bed behind the school and cried and didn’t know what to do.

I was probably about 10 or 11, and I failed miserably in my attempt to run. In fact, each time, still, I fail in my attempts to run.

But actually, I was certain I had it all worked out a long time ago, and my failure to carry it out has not put a stop to it once and for all.

I’ve known the answer of how to live without feeling sad or troubled or sorry or judged or hurt or worried or. . . well, add your favourite negative emotion.

I realised when I was about 9 that my friends could make me feel sad because they were mean and disloyal and that they said things behind my back and excluded me from things. I realised when I was about 12 that I was a sponge and I could feel the sad of others. Then I started realising that bad things happened to other people too and it made them sad and so I would feel sad because I didn’t want them to be sad and I was helpless to change it. When I was about 16, I thought that I finaly realised that all of that was probably more likely than not, my fault.

It took me a bit longer to realise that there was probably only one option left.

I was going to become a hermit.

Absolutely, that was the best way to live, I decided, being alone I could do and be whatever and whoever I wanted and no one would make me sad because no one else would be there. I wouldn’t be sad because of something they had done to me nor sad for them becasue of something somebody/something else had done to them. I would choose not to care about anybody, be nothing but a bit lump of introspection and no one else had to get involved.

When I ruled out a mountain cave in Tibet, I decided that I would never get married, never have any close friends, never talk to anyone, I would have an apartment full of cats and floor to ceiling books and would earn my living by being an anonymous author with some cryptic but vaguely mysterious and intriguing pseudonym. Me, myself, and I. . . and the cats. Yes, I had always known that running away was the answer.

And all that stays is dying, all that lives is getting out

Well, so much for my grand plan at life. I joined a church and settled in a community at 20, got married at 21 and now have a daughter at 33. And although I do have two cats and a lot of books, I have never been published under a false name (other than this blog) nor have I ever succeeded at locking myself away from other people. When it comes down to it, I’m a bit of a people addict.

So I have lots of people in my life and I get it wrong. . . and they get it wrong and other people get it wrong and all the things we can’t control or stop from happening so often make it wrong and I have spent a lot of time sad. Because in this world nothing seems to work the way it should, and like I’ve said before, my storybooks said that there would be happy endings galore. And there aren’t. There just aren’t. I don’t like that.

On top of that, people hurt other people and there’s nothing you can do about it. And even when you’re not hurting there is probably someone that you love, or at least care a lot about, hurting which invariably makes you sad because you really don’t want them to hurt and there’s nothing you can do about it. When it comes down to it we all just want to be happy and want everyone else to be happy and for fortune to smile and be fair and for all of our stories to have happy endings.

There’s a part of me that has given up the happy ending, but there’s a bigger part that keeps waiting for the surprise ending where everything is happycheesyok.

But it’s that first part of me that every so often still toys with running away. It’s toys with that mountain cave in Tibet or even better that cat and book filled apartment in another place or a busy buzzing city where no one would ever find me through all the people.

And all that stays is dying, all that lives is getting out

It’s the part of me that rails against the tragedy of life, the part that wakes up in the morning and says “No, No, NO!” to everything that isn’t happy, the part of me that is all too aware that as long as I have friends and family and care for anyone else, that I’m going to be unhappy, regardless. My personal sense of denial is big enough to fantasise about being able to run away and not accept this vision of life, but not big enough to ever actually do it.

So instead I try to keep to myself for awhile. I try to run away. Mentally far away while being bodily present. I try to step out of the bustle and the ties and the responsibilities and don my invisibility cloak, because in my woeful, selfish, vanity and pessimism I know no one will notice.

But every time I try to shut everyone out, I tend to get lonely. It never works, I go looking for where everyone has gone, then realise that it was probably me that shut them out, and I couldn’t really expect anyone to come looking for me, as I’m not 10 anymore. So, I always fail in my attempts to run, just like I did when I was 10. Then they looked for me. Now, I always end up looking for everyone else.

I’ll ply the fire with kindling now,
I’ll pull the blankets up to my chin
I’ll lock the vagrant winter out and bolt my wandering in…
When the sun turns traitor cold
and all the trees are shivering in a naked row

I get the urge for going but I never seem to go.

i sit down for a rest and there is a knock on the bedroom door. Suddenly the door pushes open and a presence enters the room. I am greeted in the friendliest of manners, but with slight annoyance that I did not respond sooner to the request to open the door. The presence jumps up on the bed next to me, lies down with a meow and starts to purr.

I envy her. Though she is no stranger to anxiety and the experience of being a tad ‘high strung’, right now she is the most peaceful creature in the world.

My thoughts turn to jobs, careers, money, disabilities, benefits, mortgages, recessions, goals, health, Flower, attachement, tantrums, creativity, success and failure, rights and wrongs, acceptance and rejections, friends and less than friends, beginnings and ends. . . all at once. I don’t know that Minerva (the cat) does not have any of these concerns (well, ok, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have a mortgage, but I wouldn’t like to comment on her feelings of acceptance or failure within her feline social structures), but I doubt that she would be sleeping so peacefully if she did.

Learning from experience would be so much easier if we were always dealing with the same rule book in life, if the rules didn’t change so much. If there ever was a rule book to begin with. Which there never has been. If it all just went “ok, x didn’t work last time, I tried it again and it still didn’t work, so this time I’ll do z instead. Sorted!”

In fact that’s what I had determined myself to do. Then x came back, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “hello, wanna try again?”

You see, I don’t really. But I haven’t actually got any better alternative at the moment, and z is evading my grasp for the time being and if i don’t give x a go again, well, then I’m just stuck in limbo.

Sometimes I’d just rather be a cat.

i find myself staring out the windown at a canopy of yellow/orange.  for years i had thought that the autumn was something i gave up in coming to this country, but this year it has be beautiful. to be fair, if you were to compare  the autumns here on this crowded island of more people than trees to the autumns in my familiar appelachian homeland . . . well, there is no compare.  but this year i am simply thankful for my city park of yellow and orange.

my recent bout of hopeful submission to the lower echelons of medical advancement (read: new drugs) has dribbled down the drain like too much rain washing away the soggy yellow/orange leaves that have fallen from the trees outside my window.  i’m not too disappointed, to be honest.  i never hoped for much anyway.

i plan to take the remainder of this year to be a bit easier on myself than i am usually wont to do.  we’re at the stage of the year now where there is no use starting any new projects or strivings.  and besides i have enough projects and strivings brewing for next year as it is…