January 21, 2003
Nice and Slow
Yesterday's entry/stream of consciousness, written too far from a keyboard with fingers otherwise engaged:
Moving again. Without vans, without heat, without July and all the hope that month held for us.
Mike's brother Freddy to take the empty bedroom and the desperate third of the rent. He's leaving the woman whose life is both faulty and certainly someone's fault... but whose? Not Freddy's. None of those children belong to him.
I can't help but look, and wonder. Two little girls, a littly boy. I glance at the eldest girl: long hair, red coat, a face like her mother's, but without age or experience, without knowledge of failure and empty sex and mistakes. Idealism leads me to believe that giving her a copy of Little Women or The Secret Garden will give her a chance for the future.
Realism grips me and I know that such a gift would gather dust in the corner with limbless Barbie dolls and old soda cans. Yes, this is the kind of house where a festering dream is bound only to rot.
Books like that changed my life as a child, but, then again, I was already well adjusted. Only on television does Sara Crewe have the ability to change someone's life. Only on television could Christine's eldest daughter (there is something in her eyes, some wild, raw potential) be A Little Princess.
Mike thinks there is hope for the children yet. When my ears open up for him, they follow only the motion of my heart.
Loving him has never been an idle occupation. I'm glancing at him in the side mirrors of the truck: navy hat covering the low black spike of his hair, pale face made paler by the contrast of the snow and a day's stubble on his chin, on his sharp, square jaw. There's something determined and deep in his eyes, something childlike and consuming. I'm scared of what I see there, sometimes, because it is so much bigger than I am.
What sort of father would he make? What sort of husband?
And me? So many times vowed, an oath taken in fear, what of motherhood? Of wifedom?
Who would marry such a fragile tangle of nerves and temper? What tongue would search for eternity in this mouth full of classic literature and modern flaw? My hands, dry and raw despite the delicate nature of the work they perform, who would hold these hands, what ring glittering and eternal could ever fit such small and awkward fingers?
He says that he is afraid that he is not everything I believe him to be. I am frightened because I am everything I appear to be, small and weak and full of hot, empty words. I used to think that I was unable to give myself totally over to anything but my writing.
I know now that I was wrong.
And that I can't expect the same gesture on his part. He is a whole person. I was only ever half.
astera at 10:17 a.m.