It's silly, you know. It's just a post about a sandwich. How hard can it be? Yet nothing works. It's all too serious, or too funny, or just weird.
I tried to describe that time, how it felt, the white heat haze and infernal geometry of the streets. The dusty wind that rattled the palm trees. It all meant something, though what that was, it's beyond me to say. The way that despair shrinks all your existence into a tiny point in space and time. How surprisingly sad it can feel to leave a place you hate.
I was about to give up, when by pure happenstance an old email to a friend coughed up the original tale:
April 25, 2012 -
The adventures of sad cheese sandwich and the she-hulk, part 1
Okay, so...the only bright spot in my life right now is the purchase of a cheese sandwich at a shop not far from the Silence of the Lambs storage facility (not it's real name :p) which I have in the afternoon between shuffling my furniture around. (Don't judge! Even if my life has dwindled to this sorrowful and lonely point, it's still a pretty good sandwich.)
However...yesterday, a couple of guys tried to interfere with Sad Cheese Sandwich time by giving me grief. I remembered your advice to go all She-Hulk on anyone who gave me grief, so I did. Of course, these things are relative - I'm not very Hulk-like, but I did give them the German Sneer, which is quite devastating. So yay me. ;p
This amazes me, reading it now; not just that I'd totally forgotten the She-Hulk bit, but the chirpy, almost cheerful tone I'd taken in one of the most unhappy periods of my life. So unhappy that - that particular day while sitting in the parking lot with the fabled sandwich - I'd considered running away to the desert and letting the situation implode on its own.
Oh, but of course I didn't, I couldn't. Chirpiness aside, I made the reasonable and responsible choice. I couldn't risk my marriage or take the kids so far from their father, or send my mother to a home. No, I must go back, yield to family pressure and effectively put myself in bondage for the indefinite future. Yay, me.
I suppose that's why it still rankles, and why it haunts me. It was one of the last moments of autonomy I had. Victoria meant freedom to me, and I'd be lying if I said losing that doesn't hurt every day.
7 years later, what is the result? One child grown, one nearly so, the baby not a baby any longer. Of the pets we brought, only Misu, the fearless warrior queen, survives. The children are happy, they swear. My husband is happy. They have taken to this sere and rocky place in a way I never did.
I still have a cheese sandwich sometimes, but it's not the same.
We retrieved our belongings from storage long ago. Yet I still keep the key. It's symbolic, I guess.
Waiting for the day I can retrieve my autonomy.
As someone who did this in a less severe way for...most of my adult life...and now looks back at that from the perspective of someone whose exterior constraints have been replaced by physical limitations contained in my own body...your autonomy is still there. We are all, even the freest of us, constrained by the societal and physical reality in which we are embedded and without which we could not exist. None of us controls very much in this life. We have agency, but it operates in a context that limits us. As a limerick or a sonnet is limited. We don't choose the rhyme scheme; we choose the rhymes, and the subject, and create meaning in the midst of what, without our agency, would be a meaningless universe.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, of course, Peni - we are all constrained in one way or another. It's what we do within those constraints that matters.
DeleteSome time ago, I thought back to the times I was happiest and wrote down what they all had in common. I fined it down to-
1.freedom of movement - I could choose where to go without needing to explain or justify it to others, even if it meant choosing not to go anywhere.
2.freedom of choice - I could choose what to do with myself, without having to having to answer to others or satisfy their demands.
3.Some financial security.
lack of these things has caused a lot of stress, I think.
It really does. I used to think happiness was having control of your own time. Now I know that's only true when your body's cooperating. Having something to look forward to is good, too. But here's to finding enough freedom to make happiness in.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, Peni. Looking for that half-inch of breathing space. :)
Delete