Desultory

I cannot be happy. Life―my life―needs that certain tragedy, that tug-of-war between what is and what could be, for it to become the ritual of sacrifice that I think it is. If our original sin is life, and our final decree is death, then everything in between is but the mercy-killing of time. I cannot be happy.

I steal moments; I do it best. Like a petty thief, I crib from people and circumstance and memories. I nick and I swindle and I plunder―unmasked and disarming, my intentions subtle but unmysterious. I'm not here to be your wife, your daughter, your sister, your best friend. I'm a goddamned recorder, a slut and a scribe, looting your stories so I'd have more of mine.

And then in my quiet time I flag again in discontent. I question, I burn, I struggle―alone, because this self-drawn misery deserves no company. Because there is no real malady, there is no clear remedy. My pathosis is my own.

My pragmatism runs up against the blood-and-thunder nature of my fantasies. In the vein of my own thoughts―that space, my life-blood―I am tense and tragic, theatrical and thrilling, a bastard, a beauty, a beast. I am a hyperbol, I am overdone, I am a scrim of confusion and comedy.

So when this―this shell, trumpeting dead words―tumble out of a bed a heratic and stumble out the front door a polished, corporate thing, the tension grows. A sallow, sulphurous strain that broods, quietly malicious, like a tumour.

I am shouldered into a corner now. Father―unwell, sick at heart, Parkinson's, a frog-eyed demon waiting to gorge itself out of a life unlived. Mother―dim-sighted now, with thundering headaches, strength sapping from her spirit with the universal worries of a mother, a wife, a previous poet. Sisters―young, fragmented with their own stress, unseamed by their father's temper and their mother's unhappiness.

I dropped the corporate reins that had chained me firmly for the last three months―I ran, jobless, back into the embrace of my books and writing and my mother's gentle grace. I have nothing to offer now but me.

And I have nothing now but me.