Life’s So Different

… than it is in your dreams. (Tom Waits)

Writings from here and there, fairly recent on the whole, although I have been writing very little of late.

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When the morning began the boy was outside the window sitting on the bus stop bench looking straight ahead at the hedge on the opposite side of the street with straight back and no hat on his head. It was springtime and the crocuses were popping from the earth but the boy looked only at the hedge and there were no crocuses there, only unmoving predictable green shrubbery. The bus drove up at a quarter-past seven and stopped before the boy, who stood pleasantly and mounted the steps of the bus. There was no one else aboard apart from the driver when he walked down the brown aisle to a brown and peeling seat two from the back and sat politely down. The bus driver was a woman with curly gray hair coming from under her police-blue hat and she was moderately plump and wore a blue button jacket to disguise it. The boy liked her rather well and had given her a nod as he stepped on the bus because she reminded him of himself for they were two lonely people who rode the bus and this is how they recalled their days, by watching the hedges pass by.

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If there is nothing in the breaking of a heart
What are the pieces on this dirty floor?
The broom is made of soggy wood and cannot serve this place.
Besides the wind is blowing cold, the window’s gone,
Not even the birds will sing.
There is grief on the face of everything.
A throat if it could would swallow it down
But there must be room for air
And the only thing you want
Is a voice to shake the stillness of your night.

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If you have no happiness more to take from life,
then you have got your despair, and that is after all something.

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The traffic light turns and there is not a word spoken, not a thing that catches the passing notice of well-dressed people gliding by. Lucy squats on the corner of the street, shaking a tin can, but there is nothing inside, and no one will know her name. We call her by name, it is true, but this is merely in the telling of the story, and the telling is a distant thing, removed from the reality, of course. She has got a mass of mousy hair tangled in a knot and it must not have been brushed in months. But it is no matter, for she is an invisible thing, and splitting hairs when the affair is already small – pinch upon pinch – approaches impossibility.

If she was pretty once, you would not know it now. Her skin is grown sallow and her cheeks are grown lean, and she may as well board with Mr. Sprat. Her eyes, brilliant before, are dim and all ringed with purple, for though she spends the days asleep, the sleep is not easy and there is no pillow for her head. In the darkness she weeps for hours on end and the window lets in a constant chill.

When she was leaving home, she left a note nicely writ in cursive ink. It was only half a sheet of paper, neatly cut along the bottom, and the words were plainer than most she had ever used. She wrote:

I have loved too much and it is going to be the death of me. I will not fill up the house with sighs – there is already a draft and it is better that I should not make a sound. I will miss you. Good-bye. I do love you all.

Your own
LUCY

That was all, and she was gone. The family closed all the windows when they noticed a chill setting in.

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How can I have writer’s block if I don’t even approach the writing? Maybe I have just been avoiding the attempt in avoidance of the threatened ghost of just such an affliction. Well, I may as well ride it out by biding my time through the illness. Rilke says you must be patient; as your own doctor, you must be patient, and sometimes there is not more than this that you can do. I am trying to incline myself to the philosophy that we must abide and even pursue that which is difficult (as Rilke counsels); thus I am tapping my old ways on the shoulder – in my old ways, I sidestep the things that make me tight in the throat and addled in the mind – and asking them to please move aside. I have some responsibility, I think, to do something more with this life than sleep and sigh it away; though there yet remains a place for both these things – it is just that they cannot be the only tenants of the house. They are not too rich, and it is better to split the rent more ways than two.

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BOY: If I can give you a piece of advice, it’s not to put all your eggs in one basket. The basketmakers are striking, and the scabs, they do a shoddy job. And once you’ve seen the real thing, doggone it, you know there isn’t a substitute’ll ever do.