All Those Years

Her soul's eater was ignorance, disappointment, and a diet of chocolate and tobacco. At sixty-five she seemed barely locked away by her membranous skin, which freely bled at the slightest bump or brush. Once, as the red flowed in streamlets down her leg, she remarked to herself, "There's not much holding me in here"; and, as the comment held the spark of wit and profundity, she repeated it for weeks in varying intonations, patting her arms and legs as she hobbled through the house.

No one had told her that she was dying, but she knew it to be true from the inside out. Her body had been disintegrating for years, but upon her last birthday, which she refused to celebrate, earth caught her up suddenly. She had passed a mirror, and feeling a disquieting urge to turn her head, saw nothing but ruins, her face an ancient burial site, each feature a ravaged mound that offered barely a glimpse of the once-was—lifeless, fruitless and terribly, distantly, alone. There could be no inspiration here, no wells or columns or inscriptions. She knew she was already forgotten.

After that, she spent her nights in sleepless anxiety, wondering not about death, but about life and how she had lived it. She didn't get far with these thoughts, but at least came to two conclusions: she had not been dealt a fair hand, and she had done her best.

Each night, upon finishing her ruminations, usually around two in the morning, she resigned herself to the peace of a smoke. As her apartment was small, with only two windows, she was able to bury all light in heavy drapes, take a seat at the kitchen table, and fumble with her matches until the cigarette caught on. Within the blackness, the only light being the end of the cigarette, she imagined herself not even there, erased from the now, and heading toward a home far away, whose warm glow—perhaps from an old coal stove or fireplace—was as close as her face, but miles and miles from this life.

Once, another thought came to her, but she couldn't articulate it: Age is not measured by years, but by corruption. This notion—or feeling, as it were—she wasn't proud of and tried not to think it again. In the dark, the corruption revealed itself in memories of sorrow and lost dreams. She thought a lot of her daddy—how she had loved him!—yet remembered only his broken years, the Depression years, when poverty was a disease that ravaged the little river town she called home. Her daddy had found no cure, just the release of corn whisky and rage. It was during such a release that he had set her on a track of aimlessness, for he had smacked her with his palm in thanks for making his life hell. It was she, he said, who had kept him in the town, she the tie to a worthless wife, she the prison that held him down, she …

Why he had hit her was nearly gone, but she vaguely remembered a ruined supper. What had burned in her mind was watching him fall to his knees, weeping like a child, begging forgiveness. Because she loved him, she soothed his contrite form, feeling the age, the corruption, that was destroying him. "Hush! It was the whisky talking …"—but she had been around long enough to know that whisky was the great shaman, bringing forth demons whose insidious goal was to unleash the real spirit of a man. That's when the eating began, and her soul had been shrinking ever since.

Without a mother at home—her mother had found work in an even less honorable profession than unemployment—she learned not what it meant to be raised, but only to raise herself. When her own children were born, she found her lack of natural education an insurmountable nightmare. Her first little boy—the boy!—was a gift from heaven, but more like a doll that moved and grew. What was she to do with it? she had wondered secretly, and had only nature to thank for solving the dilemma. The boy, a sullen, handsome little brooder, was the joy of her life, a feeling so new and confusing that she reproached herself for receiving the blessing. Yet, undeserved as it may have been, she gratefully watched the boy from afar, watched as he played with friends, dug in the yard, threw stones, climbed trees; watched as he hung from limbs, showing off; watched as he strutted among peers, wrestled fiercely, took a punch squarely, refused to cry, determined, cold, affectionless.

She loved him, deeply, truly, and felt the pangs of her life begetting his life every day, every hour. But it was a secret that even the boy could not know. Her love protected him, she hoped, against life itself, whose goal, it seemed, for so many years, was to seek and destroy such attachments. And so he, too, learned nothing about being raised, but, having reared himself within a world not so wasted by poverty, at least managed to get an intellectual, or psychological, grasp of his situation. With an eye ever suspicious of the woman whose hidden heart pumped the blood of his own life, he made a precocious vow to become an adult altogether different than those he knew. As brothers and sisters were added to his circle of acquaintances, he remained apart, and grew as one marked by alienation. His mother became "that person" to him; and his siblings became "the others."

"The boy is coming," she thought peacefully as she drew deeply upon her cigarette. "The boy is coming, and he'll see that I can't live here anymore. He'll remember me, and that'll be enough to take me home again. It'll be okay to die if I can see him just one last time. That'll make up for all those years."

She took another puff and discovered that she was oddly fond of that phrase, "all those years"—remembered thinking it countless times in the last few days, and thought it many times now, letting it flow through her mind slowly, deliberately, without the attachment of substance. If she tried to let the phrase expand into memory, she drew a blank, for indeed, all those years were very empty ones, especially after the boy had gone. It was much more satisfying to let the phrase stand alone, as if to think it, intentionally think it, was enough to endow it with significance. What had she done during that time? The question was an affront, and she let it flicker and die. She was too worn out to answer it, anyway. Instead she trapped the phrase again, and this time sounded the words out in her head carefully, blowing out smoke before and after each one.

She reached boredom long before the cigarette was finished and decided to return to her bed. She sought the kitchen's light switch, an arm's length from the table, but bashed the back of her hand against the sharp corner of a countertop and felt a fresh, wet glut of warm blood rush between her fingers. Pain and instinct allied to send warnings of self-preservation to her brain, and she was alarmed to discover that the bleeding was heavier than usual. She sat for a minute, wondering what to do, and tried to put out her cigarette, but couldn't find the ash tray. She fumbled again for the switch, and felt the blood rolling down her arm. A sudden mix of panic, confusion and, strangely, apathy overwhelmed her as her heart sank in her chest. She laid her arm on the table, feeling suddenly very tired, sensing that her entire life was draining away in a few thick droplets.

The cigarette lay on the table, still glowing faintly, struggling for air between her hands. She could feel the blood on her left hand gelling up. The whole arm felt heavy, as if weighted by indifference. "It's not time yet," she thought languidly as she realized the bleeding had nearly stopped.

She dipped her right index finger into the blood and stirred it a little, just to see if it was still flowing. She suddenly recalled a small thing, a time when the boy was to come home for the holidays. She had been cooking, making a broth that she couldn't get to thicken up just right. She stood by the stove, frustrated, hoping for that same perfect supper she once wanted to make for her daddy. She watched vigilantly out the window, anxious to catch the first glimpse of him walking up the steps. "The boy is coming," she thought, still thinking of him as a real boy, even though he now had a wife and a son of his own. "If he would just show up, even for a little while, he'd remember … and understand …"

She stirred and stirred, and added starch and a bit more water, and stirred some more, and thought about those years again, how inexplicably wonderful they had been, how she wanted them back. She could see the boy, still the little man, sauntering up the walk, stomping at the porch, fist poised to rattle the door. She felt pain shooting through her body, felt the little man coming out of her all over again.

"He'll find me here," she said aloud, then sighed, then tried to speak once more. But she was too weak and could only mouth the words: "He'll find me tending the fire, stirring, watching, just like the old days." And the thought managed a faint smile, and brought on a fresh wave of life for the soul, and kept her inside herself long enough to give her a bit more time to think about where those tired old years had gone.

READING: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

LISTENING: Vampire Weekend

STUDYING: World War I

VIEWING: Sister Wendy

READING: He That Cometh, by Sigmund Mowinkel

VIEWING: Sons of Anarchy

WRITING: Sheol

VIEWING: Sons of Anarchy

WRITING: The Year of Mythical Living

LISTENING: Mendelssohn

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