The Old Modus
There’s not a lot (that’s positive,) that I remember, outside of that which was captured by film. Little girls standing so eagerly next to each other on bikes or with hair-sprayed bangs or resentfully basking in her beauty. I don’t know what happened, maybe mostly because I don’t remember anything aside from this. When it was bad it was bad and when it was good you waited with teeth gritted wondering when you’d wake up to a little girl screaming because her mom was gone, or desperately trying to signal to you in her way at eleven years old that all was not ok. But first,
She called me and said she wanted to visit and I was already all alone down there -- not lonely; alone -- and I thought,
Like a lamb,
How wonderful, and how wonderful. Maybe it’s an opportunity, finally, to bond.
And she arrived and it was wonderful, for awhile. We went to my favorite bar for the live music and laughed and danced and made grand gestures toward the musicians and she told me she had to meet up with a friend and that friend was Jack Cooper and that was the last time that I saw her that entire weekend. And all at once the whole thing was clear, laid bare.
You just grow stronger, at the broken places. You decide about the things that you have control over and the things that you don’t and you make a plan for your life and you move forward. What else is there? Maybe we could stack our disappointments up against each other, like cord wood. Maybe we’d see similarity and feel some moribund kinship; maybe the stacks would be irrevocably different and highlight whatever fissure started back before Jack Cooper thought to creep through a first floor window. Whatever the result, there’s a choice that I made, that you didn’t, that makes all the difference. A choice that makes moot any further need to operate like an overgrown and misunderstood teenager.
He cried in the backseat two weeks before the start of third grade and it took every fiber of strength within me to not cry right along with him. I couldn’t understand what was wrong but that red face slick with tears and terror told a story of malaise; a distrust of change. You give up the right, when you have children, to continue to be a selfish person. To continue to be wrapped up in and controlled by your mental illness, if that’s what it is. If it harms you, it doesn’t just harm you. Imagine. Imagine mom on the floor, skull cracked open, almost dead. Imagine! The doctor said, “she is very very very very very lucky to be alive.”
My innocence would make me weep. My wish for them: to have been born the sons of a female shark. For you: gnosis.
She called me and said she wanted to visit and I was already all alone down there -- not lonely; alone -- and I thought,
Like a lamb,
How wonderful, and how wonderful. Maybe it’s an opportunity, finally, to bond.
And she arrived and it was wonderful, for awhile. We went to my favorite bar for the live music and laughed and danced and made grand gestures toward the musicians and she told me she had to meet up with a friend and that friend was Jack Cooper and that was the last time that I saw her that entire weekend. And all at once the whole thing was clear, laid bare.
You just grow stronger, at the broken places. You decide about the things that you have control over and the things that you don’t and you make a plan for your life and you move forward. What else is there? Maybe we could stack our disappointments up against each other, like cord wood. Maybe we’d see similarity and feel some moribund kinship; maybe the stacks would be irrevocably different and highlight whatever fissure started back before Jack Cooper thought to creep through a first floor window. Whatever the result, there’s a choice that I made, that you didn’t, that makes all the difference. A choice that makes moot any further need to operate like an overgrown and misunderstood teenager.
He cried in the backseat two weeks before the start of third grade and it took every fiber of strength within me to not cry right along with him. I couldn’t understand what was wrong but that red face slick with tears and terror told a story of malaise; a distrust of change. You give up the right, when you have children, to continue to be a selfish person. To continue to be wrapped up in and controlled by your mental illness, if that’s what it is. If it harms you, it doesn’t just harm you. Imagine. Imagine mom on the floor, skull cracked open, almost dead. Imagine! The doctor said, “she is very very very very very lucky to be alive.”
My innocence would make me weep. My wish for them: to have been born the sons of a female shark. For you: gnosis.
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