The surest sign of trouble with me is when people ask me how I am — which they do often these days and with good reason, and I’m honestly more than a little grateful to be asked at all — and I find that I can’t respond, that words literally fail me. When even the standard, stock “fine” rings so false I can’t force myself to utter it — because I’m many things to be sure, but I’m not a liar — oh yes, then I know for certain that I’m in for it.
But still, I don’t know how I’m doing, how I am. Not really. Not so I could tell you. I can’t even tell myself.
I have been gathering reinforcements, constructing barricades between myself and the outside world, trying to protect what’s left of me. I don’t really even know what that is anymore, what remains. All I know is that every day the only reason I get out of bed is because my daughter’s life — her going-on moving-forward child’s life of experience and activity and learning — requires that I do. And I write the words I must write, and say the things I must say to the people I must say them to, and do what I must do, operating smoothly like an engine that propels life into forward motion as it should and must be, and I stand in the way of nothing. This is what I do. Every day.
And then, every day, after my daughter is asleep, I slump onto the couch downstairs, and it’s as if the ramshackle scaffolding I’d pieced together to support myself that day suddenly collapses. Have you ever seen the movie Broadcast News? You know Holly Hunter’s character, the tightly-wound reporter who schedules mini-breakdowns in-between interviews and chasing stories, whenever they’re most convenient? It’s a little like that. But not anywhere near as funny.
I don’t even know what I’m crying about, exactly. It’s not like I think about one thing, turning it over and over in my mind, meditating on the weight and texture and feel of it. No, it’s just loss. A broad, enveloping sense of absence, of something gone. It’s a complex feeling, with so many layers of conflicting emotion I’d be hard pressed to explicate all of it, even to myself. Now I don’t even try.
I’m living in the mechanics of pure survival, being driven only by necessity, the musts and the have-tos. It’s all I can muster the energy for right now. But if I’m an engine, there has to be a spark inside me somewhere still, even if I can’t feel it right now. Some unseen combustion and heat, a hidden light still glowing deep within. A fiery ghost trapped in this machine.
Engine - Neutral Milk Hotel
