I haven't left yet, Pt. 11
More perfect weather I could not conceive: dark and gloomy, wet, making everything incredibly green and lush, a vibrancy you don’t see any other time of year, and warm.
Unexpectedly, after several weeks of eating mostly meat and a few handfuls of produce from the garden, the veil of poor health that has hung over my life for the past three years lifted. I woke up the other morning, looked in the mirror, and recognized myself.
I don’t think this is a coincidence, or a surprise: a situation can become intractable to the point that you’ve built your life around it, as I had, until that life breaks, and once everything is shattered and lying on the ground, the solution is released from the unconscious. Nothing left to lose (having lost everything already), and no one left to please, I was free to make a socially unacceptable choice, to set myself apart in an unpleasant way. I freed myself to grill at breakfast and boil whole chickens to share with the dog, and to watch the days tick by in leisure as I thought about why, indeed, the refigerator needs to be so big?
To think what percentage of urban life revolves around meals being complicated affairs, undertaken for pleasure, that we incapacitate and disfigure ourselves just to keep busy: the logic of it all has been falling apart in my mind. Really, having nothing to lose is the most edifying thing, it makes it so easy to lose illusions, too.
Maybe it’s this very sudden return to beauty that has me trolling through the Daily Mail wondering what it is that makes an already beautiful woman hack away at her face, and walk around without pants, or with her fake breasts visible through her dress? At least when women made their own clothing, they could show their taste, their natural figure, they were respectable, and human. Now they are neither.
Over those three years of not feeling like myself, and in fact through other periods of more intense illness, I had it out with God many times: why did You give me beauty only to take it away from me? Why won’t You give it back? What are You trying to get out of me, putting me through all this pain, and making me lonely, making me hide away? Will I get a reward for this? And I read passages from the Book of Job many times, I wrote them out and hung them on my wall, and memorized them.
It’s a matter of hours now until I leave. I spent two long weekends with my lost love, but now I am racing to finish some sewing: a blouse, two sun dresses, a pencil case, a computer case, in-sundry bags of printed Indian cotton to organize my clothing. I’m breaking in a pair of white Keds around the house and my mother is helping me with the hemming.
We talked about when I come back in September, but by then it’s all too possible that he’ll be lost for good, which is why I’ll be spending tomorrow night with him, my last night in America for the summer.
After all these years: the phrase that keeps coming to mind. After all these years, everything that I have done as a fact of my own nature seems to be coming to its fruition.
Next month I will be the exact age that my mother was when she gave birth to her first child, my brother: and at that same moment in life, I will be off in the hills of the Old Country, encouraging some divine spark of my own to come to Earth.
My Arbëresh grandfather left southern Italy eighty-eight years ago. I’m bringing his English rhyming dictionary with me, which I use often, plus ‘Leaves of Grass’, an Italian grammar book, a lot of blank paper, and a box of unused pencils that appears to date from the 1990’s.
I both dread and look forward to the first time I wake up in the darkness of a Sicilian night without anyone next to me. Will the moon shine through the window? Will there be frogs in the trees? What will I dream? Will I be afraid?