Here are some of the thoughts I had this morning, just between us, just for fun:
- You are a fool to think you're a writer; you kind of suck. You have barely broken the surface of this book and it's been six months. You should be done by now! Mozart, if he were you, and if he were a writer, would have been done by now. You space-out too much, just write the thing, goddammit, and stop being so precious.
- Why so mean? Can't you be nice, always, constantly, like a saint would be? Can't you be like one of those rosy winged angels in a painting, even when it's 9pm and the kids are still awake and calling for you and the apartment is a mess and there's a mouse in the kitchen and you just want to read The New Yorker? Why can't you be a rosy, winged angel, hovering over your children with infinite patience and joy, even then?
- If you had any discipline at all, you would go to the 6:30am yoga practice.
- You should run a marathon, by the way.
- You wasted yesterday.
- Why don't you wear make-up? And you should buy some perfume because you smell a little like wet wool. Your kids are going to remember you as as coffee breath and bad hair and the smell of wet wool, is that how you want to be remembered?
It's noon. I am at the library. It's the perfect day because the room isn't full and the people here aren't rustle-y. There is a pink folder next to me with some UN work, and a purple folder with writing. "All morning, I did the work I love." I just exchanged emails with my brother. I can't believe I have two brothers who are so capable and tall and funny and cool. I can't believe they still love me after all the crap I've done and said in this life. I can't believe that this morning, Liv, about to trot off to school with her father, came upstairs instead and into the bathroom where I was in the shower and said: "Mom? I want another kiss goodbye." I can't believe how pretty she looked in her pink tights and new dress, and I can't believe how loving and generous her father is to us all, despite all the crap I have done and said.
There is a grey sky out the window. The wild gorgeous exhilarating snow storm of Monday seems a long time ago. It's warmish today, almost tropical warm, like Bermuda feels before a storm. When I was 16 or so, I spent a week in Bermuda with my older cousin who was studying oceanography there. I haven't been to Bermuda since, but certain weather always reminds me of it. My cousin was a complicated inspiration to her younger cousins---she lived a very warm and colorful life, ambitious, alternative, even sultry. A sultry life. She pushed boundaries, she blew down any restricting walls. She never heard when someone said, "You can't do that." She was not afraid. The world was her familiar; the oceans were just paths to cross. She died of cancer five years ago, and left her husband and three beautiful daughters, and we miss her every day.
Why is it so hard to forgive yourself? I know there are a million layers to peel back on the subject of forgiveness, and that the more one thinks about it the more complicated and convoluted and scary and serious and stony it becomes. saying that, I know---well, I think I know---that I forgive others, but until I wrote that list just now, I hadn't realized how little I forgive myself.
To forgive loosens constrictions. Forgiveness is really flying. Forgiveness is not all squinched up, drinking poison in a room without windows. There is no fear after forgiveness and no people to hate, and there are no walls and there is just oceans to cross when you live with forgiveness. Live with it.
Helen Frankenthaler, Southern Exposure (2005)
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