April
26, 2014
In the year (fill
in) nothing happened. There is a sad
story to tell her that has no significance whatsoever.
Eventually we will
all have the same problems.
Who would have
thought that yogurt with prune would be so delicious? Or banana Weetabix. Well, actually that sounded pretty good from
the start. Weird, but good.
In the red straw
network there is:
*no hope
*no telling
*no entrance
*no exit
*no talking
*no timeline
*no travelling
*no sharing
*no laughing
*no smoking
*no milk with
cereal
Thank you for
respecting the rules. Carry on with your
business.
But your legs get a
little bit heavier. And the strings get
a little bit longer. And the knots feel
a little bit tighter. And the joke gets
a little bit harder.
A harsh beautiful
place, this memory horizon. If you
squint your eyes you can see the moon.
There isn’t much I
can see anymore.
I am losing. You don’t just suddenly stop losing. You think about why you’re losing, you
despair that you are losing, you blame the universe for losing, you write
self-pitying poems about losing, you come up with reasons why losing is not
really losing, you give yourself pep talks about losing, you brainstorm how to
stop losing, you develop five-point plans to halt the losing, you wonder if we
are all really losing, you become heavy and tired with losing, you think maybe
if I get a haircut I won’t keep losing, and then you find that after all of
this you are still losing. And not only
are you still losing, but you are now losing by so much that winning becomes
unrealistic, so you start coming up with easier goals, like “accepting,” or
“taking small steps” or “adapting.” But
in the end you will just be losing again.
This is when you
stop and realize that you never actually
believed. Why? Was it a man in a mask and bad make-up who
took that away? A woman with witchy hair
and a purple mantle? A balding man with
a soft voice in a basement room? Or was
it just the old run-of-the-mill no one ever gave a crap about you or let you
believe, so you never learned how to?
Did you have to come up with some fantastical story to make the humdrum,
boring, heard-it-a-million-times annihilation of the self story more
palatable? Would that make losing
better, somehow? If someone breathed in
your ear that you were born of the dirt
and will blow into dust? Does that
make it more romantic, more tragic, more ACCEPTABLE?
I don’t think so. It just makes you an even bigger loser,
because you can’t even lose with your integrity intact. Of course, if you had any integrity you
probably wouldn’t be a loser. If you had
even the tiniest sense of self you might have whispered back, but I will fall from the sky and detonate
like an atomic bomb right in front of you.
But we are not
winners. We are mantras. We are encouraging words sent to each other
in emails that we won’t really mean. We
are inspirational quotes on posters with rays of light piercing clouds while
beautiful people look on. We are the
two-sentence explanation that solves what ails the protagonist. We are the ones who know, not so deep down
inside, that next year will be no different from the last. We are the dozens of therapists who ran out
of therapeutic techniques to lay siege against our fortress of failure. We are winning at losing and you will never
stop us.
