Christmas

Is there anything more prone to salvage than rememberances of events gone by? More symbolically salvageable than Christmas ornaments?

Once something is realized as "the last" so often the last is already gone. Had, done, passing without notice. And so, I think of this Christmas as the last, but really, it was the first, the last being the Christmas before--2009. And to silently commemorate the first-ness of this year the children cut down the tree in our woods. Usually we go to a tree farm and get one there. Strangely, last year, as Tom was tying the tree to the top of the car, the thought: "I will never see him do this again," flashed through my mind. At the time I simultaneously took a couple of pictures and shook my head as if to throw that thought off; toss it back into the snow and trees where it could be forgotten.

But forgotten that moment was not. It came, a haunt in the day and the night, sneaking into my thoughts like a wisp of mist between firs.

Scaffolding

Just short--There is something interesting about dealing with someone--on a daily basis--who is mentally ill. The convolutions are so inexplicit; where there appears to be reason none exists, and the pitfalls are many. When I consider this, stepping away from it, I find that what is faulty is what I refer to as the scaffolding, that inner or outer mental framework that allows the rest of the structure to be built. If that is off kilter, or placed on an unstable ground then what is built inside it or around it will be similarly skewed. But then, it all looks so stable until one takes a step...more on these thoughts later.

Wrung Out

So here it is: Whatever I say is returned as something  I didn't even think, much less say. A whole world is endlessly constructed around me like an intricate web, or scaffolding, any refutation rejected outright. And with each piece I try to tear down reconstruction begins all over again. The same conversations are played over and over and over and any alternate version denied, and I am denied because I am told what I did what I thought and what I said. No matter what I do say I am told I said something completely different. I have been told things about the past that are complete fabrications about what the experience was, effectively dismantling the past brick by brick by brick, and when the dismantling is done the past is rebuilt and recounted in a way I don't recognize. The future I expected not long ago has been taken from me, but so has the past. And so I find small, concrete things, like a child's favorite stuffed animal and try to imbue those things with a memory I can go back to and hold on to. Literally.

It is hard enough to be the sole repository of memories, but when the one person who could and once did also remember reconstructs those memories into an unrecognizable fiction the very basis of the past becomes slippery and hard, if not impossible, to hold onto. This is an exhausting process, living with someone who has literally lost their mind. He thinks he is fine, that his thoughts are intact, that it is me who needs to be helped. Through most of it he sounds rational and calm, but the pieces don't fit, and the logic is faulty. At the end of these endless conversations in which all words enter a black box and come out as something else, and are irrefutable, I feel as if I have been wrung out, rolled over, flattened and plastered to the floor.

Constancy

Ahhh, so if you look over there, right there on the floor--and be careful of the dust, it will shred your soles--under the scrap of green silk, under the scratches on the table where R and I drank Ouzo and danced in high heels, yes, just there, on the Calcutta marble, that is Baby Cousins.
Baby Cousins is my oldest and most faithful friend. I don't remember the day I got him, or the day I named him; he has always been there and he has always been mine, and I his. He was and is always the perfect size. In fact, he is perfect in every way. His tiny sock body was held close to my heart, and under my chin through heart wrenching childhood moves, parental slights and the meanness of brothers and girls. He went on all of my trips, I think, traveling with me across several continents, the softness and smoothness of his little self always in my pocket waiting for my clutch. A well educated fellow, he went to college and grad school.
Baby Cousins has been there for every death, his small self absorbing tears and sobs, and kisses. And he is with me now. He has always fit perfectly in my hand, although I have been told that as a very young child I carried him in my mouth.
He has suffered too, my beloved Baby Cousins. A dog chewed off one leg and both arms, and his nose is but a pit, much like the leper on Chowringhee Boulevard in Calcutta. Whenever we drove past that man my mother would say, "Oh, look at that over there," pointing out of the window opposite the noseless beggar. That was, of course, our signal to look at him, hoping to see what, just exactly what, was inside that dark hole where his nose had left a vacancy.

But Baby Cousins, like all things loved, is perfect. He still fits in my hand, and can be squeezed to my heart and under my chin, and he will, just as he always has, absorb endless quantities of tears and remind me that there are some things that really are always there, even if they look a little different. Maybe it is those treasured things that remind us, if we let them, that things will be okay again even as life lies in splinters. And that is what we hold on to, for knowing that fits just perfectly into a palm, can be pressed against a heart and perhaps even fill it.

Tile Floors

Here: it is, my life. In shards and pieces and scraps. Some the size of two cupped palms, others atomic dust, scattered all across the horizonless floor. Look. The floor will change as you survey the wreckage.  It is the grey and white marble veranda floor in Calcutta, the beige kitchen tile in Belmont, my red Mexican tiles in Vermont, high gloss granite in O'Hare, the clear glass of an elevator...all the hard floors I have ever walked. Hard floors where things that fall shatter and scatter and splinter and turn to dust. Always the dust. And then comes the wind, or the sometimes someone who scoops up some of the pieces, places them on a blanket, gives them a toss and leaves them to fall back down in different places. So then I have to check and check again to see what is where, if what was intact still is. And that is exhausting.

There is no direction in this vertigious, ruined landscape. And so I am lost in a tale of what has gone before, but even that is subject to the faults of lone memory; memory as untrustworthy as thin ice covered by snow. What looks smooth and inviting will take you down and trap you and you will suffocate. All in an unnoticed instant.