“I’m so far from not caring.” (DeYarmond Edison, “Bones”, 2006)
I know that it is only May 5th, but I’m sitting here at this desk and looking out the window and I’m already gone for the year. The song on the little stereo isn’t helping me: “Bones, lying in a trunk at the foot of my bed / they're always open to show me that they're still dead / and everyday it's harder still”.
I’m not sad, not depressed, but there is a dull ache (a mini-melancholy) somewhere near the marrow. I guess it’s been there for years. Most of the time, I’m smilish and have a habit for telling stories—whether the audience wants them or not. Another version of me, one I cultivated for many years is quite quiet, nearly silent (boy, can he brood). He’s still my chauffeur most mornings and afternoons. He stops the car for me to take picture, keeps it running though. Today he must have entered the building, knowing that it’s Wednesday and the extroverted version won’t be needed for hours. But introversion breeds thinkiness and thinkiness breeds loneliness—sometimes.
But then a friend dropped in and stopped the seclusion. Sensing the mood (and the music?), he confessed to a predilection for “premature nostalgia.” The end being already envisioned, the getting there becomes less important; he explained that this has lead on occasion to a dampening of happiness—or a quickening of its always-eminent departure, but this friend is far from a kill-joy. In fact, he has a talent for making people happier by just showing up, but he’ll also let you wallow if that’s what you need. Today, we broke the wallowing with conversation, only a few minutes, but we broke it well.
Alone in the room again, and soon I’ll get back to the work I’ve been avoiding (and I have, I had to so that I could get to this, I’m not that bad of an employee), I let myself listen to that song one more time. The last verse gets back to the bones: “skin, and it's warm enough to hold you and keep you breathing / but it locks me out and makes me lose my needing / and how long to be alone / how will I carry these bones? // and I'm so far from not caring”.
What I am nostalgic for is both already past and yet always arriving. I have passed decades of Mays and ends of school years; I have felt their relief more often than their wistfulness, but I have felt both, feel both. After all, it was as recent as this January I was ready to hang it all up for good and find that second career, but things, especially mood, always & often change.
This year, I want June. I need June. I’m already mid-way to June in my mind, but I can already feel the end of summer too. All the things that won’t get read, written, cleaned, organized, thrown out, painted, played with, and on and on.
And there are the things of this year that still need to be processed and accounted for or left behind. And maybe this is it. Maybe it’s a nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake I’m feeling. Maybe, sitting by myself in this room—by myself here for the first time in months it seems—I am coming to terms with the changes that have already occurred (that every survived year brings). This year there is much that I haven’t caught up to yet. I have a lot of people to say thank you to. I have a few to let know that though the summer drought is about to begin that I’m not too far to be reached, and not just electronically.
Time is no straight line, but rather, it folds accordion-like back onto itself, separating and coming together. I won’t talk about the music it makes (like it or not), but I will end with that song again:
Pain, I'm good with the ways there are to erase
And I'm pancaked on the floor, you can't see my face
Cuz it's buried like the moon
Sober morning's come too soon
And I’m so far from not caring; and I’m not going anywhere, not yet.
"The end being already envisioned, the getting there becomes less important"
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly the sentiment I was struggling to put into words all last week.
"it was as recent as this January I was ready to hang it all up for good"
Have I mentioned lately how EXTRAORDINARILY thankful I am that you didn't just walk out the door? Thanks for that.
Try starting tomorrow on a different note:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYCzDhaRV60
:)
There's something about the spring that makes all of us--well, okay, some of us--ache for what was and what could be. We put things in the ground and hope the life in them is somehow transplanted into us, that we burst out of what winter has turned us into in that same way.
ReplyDeleteIt's been an odd few months, many of us in our wing living beyond those walls, beyond the day to day, already into June, July, anywhere else. But, like Amanda, I'm happy you chose to stay, too.
Thanks friends, I'm glad too, and Amanda, thanks for the Goats--you read my mind--that was last Fall's themesong!
ReplyDeleteI remember once, long ago, you said "I hate monday for what it does to sunday." This essay reminds me of that. You were, and are, right on the mark. Back when I had a job, I'd start to get anxious about the upcoming school year on July 4--that was the beginning of the end in my mind--with still an entire month of summer left.
ReplyDeleteI love your description here: "Time is no straight line, but rather, it folds accordion-like back onto itself, separating and coming together." Perfectly said. Sounds like a poem. :)