I walk through the dark to find my slippers, slide my robe from the closet. In the living room, I sit, feet up, huddled in a rocking chair. Lately I have been thinking of taking up cigarettes again. I feel no cravings, but it would give me something to do in these abject hours in the dead of night when I am now so often awake.
------------------------------------
I should make my mind work over the meaning of this nighttime visitation. But I cannot. I have the sensation, as determined as the longing of only moments before, that it is all past. I sit in the rocking chair in my living room. For some strange reason, I feel better with my briefcase, and I place it in my lap.
But its protection is incomplete. The wake of its intrusion leaves the currents of my emotions roily and disturbed. In the dark I sit, and I can feel the force of the large personages of my life circling about me like the multiple moons of some far planet, each one exerting its own deep tidal impulses upon me. Barbara. Nat. Both my parents. Oh, this cataclysm of love and attachment. And shame. I feel the rocking sway of all of it, and a moving sickness of regret. Desperately, desperately I promise everyone - all of them; myself; the God in whom I do not believe - that if I survive this I will do better. Better than I have. An urgent compact, as sincere and grave as any deathbed wish.
I drink my drink. I sit here in the dark and wait for peace.
닫기
