Walking out into the rain
The weather here is indecisive.
When it’s indecisive outside its hard to decide what you want to do, too. Should we go outside, it looks like it might rain. Regret is something we deeply want to avoid. You get caught in the rain and get your umbrella turned inside out, text your friends you’ll be late. We design our societies around avoiding it, creating systems to tame and domesticate the uncertainty of the future.
Of all aches, regret is the most haunting.
Something I’d trodden over with my old therapist many times is the last call I got from my friend, which I missed and didn’t return before he died. I regretted working too much, what a fucking asshole am I that I think I’m too busy to even text back. Busy me, always something else on my mind, busy busy. And she said, do you think he would have wanted you to show up differently?
And if I realised that if like him, I knew I’d be Done tomorrow, I wouldn’t ask anything different of the people I loved: I would take joy in seeing them operate business as usual, playing out the the same flaws, and the same redemptions; I would help where I could and I would not take it personally where I couldn’t; I would have a very easy time letting go; I would be honest about who I love not in a grand cinematic way but in the way that we already show love just to seize the privilege to again make an utterance in that language; I would readily receive the fussing and impatience and vulnerability and nervousness and overintellectualisation and avoidance as the love it truly intended to be; I would fold my clothes patiently; I would eat a mango knowing the juice and pulp would get all over my face; I would go out into the rain and let my shoes fill up with water. Most of all I would feel very sad to make a last day about myself, and miss out on everything everyone else was doing.
So I think my answer to her question was No, but I still wish I had texted back.
I thought maybe this letter was inappropriate to publish before Christmas, family holiday season and such. I want to stop writing about grief, I really do, but it takes me whenever it chooses, and if I go willingly, I can stop myself being dragged. Also, it has no sense of appropriateness - in fact, it relishes irony. I’m endeared to it for its sense of humor.
Holidays have become a punctuation mark. They collect over years, and eventually become the backbone of the increasingly scarce stories you retain of loved ones. Some holidays your family grows and others it shrinks. Friends move cities, countries, or simply depart your life for one reason or another, but the ones that are here labor lovingly over dinner with you.
Here comes another punctuation mark. Though the ritual of holiday stays mostly the same, many things have changed in between.
Warmly,
Marlene
My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
Oliver Sacks