i
I came home to a lamp I had left on by accident one evening last winter. It split my heart open,
just a little, to see that golden glow half hidden behind green stems and yellow flowers in the vase with the yellow flowers painted on it. Back from the grocery store in a murky grey December evening – the kind of winter walk where thoughts and feet follow the same path in opposing concentric circles. The day had slipped away from me and the world, no twilight to speak of, just a dull grey dusk. It stole all sense of proportion from the neighbourhood, buildings flattening themselves in uncanny ways until they seemed stretched out, eerily tall, too close together and too far apart at the same time. I wanted to cry when I opened the door to the light, familiar, comforting, saying to me I can live here, I take care of myself here.
ii
I began to run in earnest that winter, the winter of the accidental lamp – I can live here, I take care of myself here! It felt like I had my sanity in my hands and was clutching at it, the end of the thread slipping out of my cold palms. I used to have friends that were vehemently, morally opposed to running as a sport. The path is the last refuge of the wanderer, they said, the last haven of the people who have no set destination. Keep The Paths Sacred! they said. One of those friends died and I became estranged from the other; instead, I ran into grey dusks by the river and let everything tighten inside me, plans for the future and regrets about the past and knots and spirals and worries about Faith Money Love Success Etcetera. One foot after the other, left, right, a repetitive motion. Repetition should be soothing, but somehow pounding feet only compounded anxieties. I take care of myself here, but I was doing it in the wrong way, had only known wrong way after wrong way after wrong way for so long. I had coping mechanisms that others would call basic habits; God only knows how unnatural they were, making my bed and washing my face and praying on my knees. The pats on the back and the slaps in the face kept getting mixed up.
iii
Change twists the bowels as it comes. It is jarring to wake and realise this with a brain that has been so focused on surviving for such a long time. It was late September and I was at a tram stop, holding onto a minor heartache and a lonely clementine with both hands. The city I refused to call home was welcoming me back the only way it knew how, opening boxy arms for a dusty dusky hug I didn’t want, and I peeled my clementine, pungent skin coming off in one piece and leaving traces under my fingernails. I felt disembodied, looking at hands that hadn't touched real dirt in a year. I had spent all my time in this city building something Esoteric and Transcendental. I had forgotten what growing a garden meant. Throwing the skin away, I wondered that the sun didn’t care for my heartbreak, setting anyway, streaking the non-existent twilight with a distant fire and disappearing into gently burning pinks and reds. For one moment I was in the moment. And I was angry.
Most of the friends I have hurt in my life, I have hurt because I think their actions matter more to me than mine do to them, because I think I love more than I am loved. This strange mixture of pride (I love them more, I am better at loving) and self-loathing (of course I love them more, why would they love me?) leads to an even stranger callousness. Why would they care what I do, what I say?
iv
Of all the thieves of joy there are, having one eye on the future and one on the past is my familiar one. It is generally insidious. Plans to be made and daydreams to dream, and either living in nostalgia or looking back in horror at who I was and what I said. It is all the same thing, an inability to live in the present. To someone prone to melancholy it is a way of living in constant self-flagellation. But then, to put one foot in front of the other with a mind that takes relish in the foot and the body – who can honestly say they do this? The present is a hard country to live in, let alone find joy in. This is what we are called to do. To find the Esoteric and the Transcendental in the everyday, in these accidental acts of self-preservation we pepper our lives with. Such is our task. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil, says Jack Gilbert. It is the Devil who wants us to worry about the future and dwell on the past, said a friend to me on a boat, an evening in a winter long ago.
v
That winter, the accidental lamp winter, passed. Winters always pass. Stepping into the stillness
of a spring morning here is its own kind of sacred. It reminds me of camping, opening a tent flap before anyone else is awake, sitting on a rock in red dirt and listening for something imperceptible. Maybe the sunrise has a sound. It reminds me to live in this moment, feel my feet as they leave and touch the earth again. I am cradled by an air with new life in it.
If each morning is a new resurrection, why is waking so hard, why does peeling eyelids open take the same effort as it took to roll that stone away after three days? Maybe because it is the first choice of the day: to live and to see the light. It is all to do with light and breath, in the end. It is four girls and a boy and their parents and me sprawled across the living room, lights off and windows open to let the rain overtake our senses. Heads and shoulders are inclined as we pray the rosary and I can feel Molly’s jaw moving as she says the Hail Marys of her decade. It is the release of steam from wine glasses on the drying rack. It is the clouds in front of our mouths as we wait for a train in the chilly morning air, these visible reminders of life changing commuters into a community. It is these small acts, accidental or not, that gain their intention from our ability to take and hang onto the joy inherent in them. I leave the light on for myself and my heart splits open. I run by the river and it pounds too fast, I sit in adoration and sometimes it comes to rest. This life is a poem and I am lucky to live in it. I can live here, I take care of myself here.
This essay appears in Volume I of Agony.