Masks and Anniversaries

My grandmother died today. Well, six years ago. But today was the day. So, today was pretty much scheduled to be a bad day from the get go. At first, it was just a bad day, period. You know the kind, like it doesn't really need a reason to suck. It just does. Then after a few hours, she reminded me that today was the anniversary. So I had a couple of all new reasons to feel miserable. I couldn't decide which made me feel worse: the anniversary, or that I hadn't given it any thought until she told me. And then I was angry at myself for not really caring as much as she seemed to. Seems to. Miserable day, for both of us.

So I've spent most of the rest of the day thinking about her. My grandmother, I mean. I'm not usually given over to sentimentality, or nostalgia, or whatever you want to call it. She believes in heaven, an afterlife and all that stuff. I don't. I wish I did, I really do. I wish I had her faith. Everyone around me seems to have it. Not me. I used to, maybe, when I was little and couldn't think for myself. I sort of miss that, a bit. It was easier. I think sometimes that's why everyone else believes, because it's easier. But I know that's not why, not really. They really, honestly believe it, I think. Maybe it's just never occurred to them to question it like I did. But question I did, and it all fell apart. Like a house of cards attacked with a shovel.

I think I probably shouldn't be writing this thing. My thoughts aren't really coherent enough for anyone to enjoy reading, and getting them written isn't really doing anything to solidify them in my head. I hoped it would. Maybe I just haven't been doing it long enough. Give the medicine time to work, she'd say. My grandmother, I mean. Actually, she wouldn't really say that; she never said that or anything like it in her life, at least not to me. But that's the sort of thing you expect grandmas to say, isn't it? Little pearls of wisdom that are really just common sense, but since it comes from someone older we instinctively think 'wow, that's really smart' or something.

Damn stream of consciousness.

I was driving into town today, digging on the radio for something to help pull me out of my funk, and I heard part of a commercial. It was for some local clinic or something, and it's hook line was 'We treat you like family!'. I thought to myself as I sat at the next red light, why would anyone want that? Being treated like family? Part of me recognizes that that's supposed to be a good thing, that family is supposed to treat each other better than they treat other people. That's the rational part of me that doesn't really give a damn about my feelings.

But the feelings part of me thought it sounded horrible. In my experience, being treated like family means being ignored. It means going to holiday meals and sunday lunches and being largely shoved out of the way for everyone else. Being treated like family means feeling like you could vanish from everywhere and nobody would give a damn. Because everyone has their own things to deal with, their own problems, and you're never that important anyway. It means being excluded from birthday parties and family milestones, because we didn't think you'd really be interested and you don't really matter anyway so what are you getting upset about? And it means that when you've got troubles, well, you've got troubles. Not them. They're doing fine, thank you, good to hear from you sorry you've got it so bad but don't worry, you can be certain we're not going to lift a finger for you, good luck with that.

It wasn't like that when she was alive. Grandma, I mean. They were, sure; they haven't really changed a bit, but she wasn't, and she was enough to make me feel like I had a family. She made me feel like someone cared. Now all I have left is her. She fades a little more each day, and it's an endless fight to keep her spark from failing completely. The others still don't care. Fine. Fuck them. I don't need them. I don't need anyone. I'll carry this weight on my own, for as long as it takes. It's just heavy sometimes, that's all. Not impossible.

Goddamn stream of consciousness. Joyce was an idiot, and so are his fans.

I suppose they might find this. I don't care. They might not understand why I feel like this. I don't care about that either. Maybe they'll never know. I'll never tell them, that's for certain. Keep that mask in place, man. Masks for everyone, and everything. Never let them crack. Never let them see. It hurts sometimes, a lot. I just want to scream, lash out, revenge myself upon a world that neither knows nor cares about what I've lost. A monstrous father. A fading mother. Beloved grandparents, lost just when I was really getting to know them. Relatives so closed off they may as well be on Mars. Abandoned by old friends. Ignored by new ones. The walls close in, and no way out appears like all those Imovies and cartoons of my childhood said it should. A lifetime spent as a slave to other people, chained down and taunted, teased, tortured with the inevitable promise of freedom that will only come now when it's too late. What happens to a lion when it's released from captivity into the wild for the first time? Nothing good. It can't fend for itself, because it doesn't know how. It was never allowed to. All I can do is fend for others. I know it won't be returned in kind. Never is.

Still, gotta keep the masks in place. Don't let them know. It's my pain, not theirs. She couldn't handle it. They wouldn't want it, or understand it. You probably don't care. You probably won't understand it, either. That's fine, really. I'm not really writing this to share it with you. Sometimes, the mask just has to come off for a little while. Sometimes, one just has to breathe. That is absolutely something she would have said.

I miss you.

Starlight Wonderings

I live out in the middle of nowhere. Well, maybe a bit off center, but pretty damn close, anyway. The sort of place where, on a good and windy day, if you scream as hard as you can in just the right direction, your neighbors might be able to hear you. Maybe.

During the day, it's like living anywhere else, I guess. Except, you know. More distant. But at night, it feels like living on a different planet. On clear nights, the stars shine with such an amazing beauty, it feels wrong to try and describe it with words. I sometimes feel a little ashamed of myself, because I'm not always as completely overwhelmed by this incredible celestial wonder as I maybe should be. It seems kind of bizarre to think I can live surrounded by something so fascinating, and yet only notice it every now and then instead of being totally enraptured by it.

I have a dog, a little one. A Chihuahua. He's not very bright, and he's too small to navigate the steps on the back porch. So I have to pick him up and carry him down on the ground, where he invariably bursts out of my arms and runs around the yard like a little black and white, four-legged rocket. In the fall when the dead leaves carpet the ground, it sounds like machine gun fire when he runs through them. And in winter, those rare seasons when ice and snow actually touch the ground, he's too scared to actually run, so he sort of pads his way around the yard. A dog scared of snow. It'd be funny, if it weren't so damn stupid. I guess it's kinda funny anyway.

He needs to go out about two or three times a day. When I take him out at night, that's when I end up sitting outside for an hour or two sometimes. Looking up at the moon, and the starlight. There's no other light around, not really; like I said, the neighbors are all too far away for the lights in their windows to shine too bright, and the county's emergency light only shines one night a week or so, so there's almost zero light pollution to obscure the night sky. If it's warm enough (pretty much from March until November, around here), I'll climb up on the roof of my car and lie back and just watch the stars twinkle. Chasing satellites, and tracing airplane lights, imagining distant alien civilizations. Composing stories of brave astronauts, thinking about all the scientists our there sending signals into that great black. Wondering if ever they'll maybe get some kind of answer back.

And contemplating how all those stars formed, each one starting as nothing but a little speck of hydrogen or helium, the miniscule gravity of those little clumps of matter slowly attracting more and more matter onto themselves over the course of countless millenia until finally their mass and their weight under all that increasing gravity sets them to spinning until they start getting so heavy, so dense, that the matter in their cores start to generate nuclear fusion and they ignite into enormous spheres of glorious light that will burn and shine for hundreds of millions of years.

(If you read that whole thing out loud, take a breath before you pass out.)

And I look up, and I wonder about humanity. Will we ever leave this world, really? Will our kind ever travel into that big black, the way we hop from continent to continent now? Will we ever, ever put aside our petty, childish differences long enough to work together to accomplish something so amazing? We could, I know it. If everyone woke up tomorrow and decided they were tired of all the bullshit, if we all could just put our minds and, yes, hearts, together, we could fly out into that unknown and make it ours within a lifetime. Not just like we've already done, a few manned space flights and a couple space stations and who knows how many satellites, but really conquer that wild frontier. We could find or build whole new worlds, create a whole new age of humanity.

I don't know. Maybe that's stupid and childish all on its own. Probably is, if someone like me thinks it's a good idea. But it seems to me the world needs this kind of stupidity a lot more than the kind it's already got. Can't hurt to dream, right?

Anyway. That's what I think about, out under the stars. While I wait for the dog to shit.