DREAMS IN A BACKWATER

PART FIVE

III

(1)

A LIFE SO COMMON IT DISAPPEARS

I was lucky this summer:  we had only three weeks of really oppressive heat; and when these were done, summer was gone.  September has been cool and mild.

My nieces have gone back to school; I no longer go out to my parent's house quite so often, and so have time to resume my walks in the cemetery.  What a relief it is to be there!  What bliss, just to sit for an hour or two under a tree in the quiet shade.  The sunlight grows softer this time of year, as summer wanes and autumn draws near; the cicadas buzz and the crickets chirp; the freshening breezes play over my skin like a cool cloth applied to a fevered brow.  How I hate the thought of returning to my apartment at the center of town!  The stink of blacktop and auto exhaust; the smell of grease from the nearby fast-food restaurant hanging in the air; the blare of traffic and the grating blah-blah of neighbors shouting; the whine of sirens; the lack of all sense of peace, of privacy . . .  It may seem that I exaggerate too much the problems associated with living in town, contrast them too sharply with the peace and quiet to be found in the cemetery.  But why shouldn't I?  Worries and fears constantly fret me, and I've little enough in the way of ease and comfort to soften life's sharper edges.  However, the choices which led me to my present position were my own to make, and the responsibility for their outcome is mine to bear, no one else's.  I thought that I could find a way to avoid being implicated in all the self-induced problems that take place in this modern world of ours.  I was mistaken.

I grow very poor.  I tighten my belt to the breaking point.  In a sense, I have given up hope.  I simply sit and wait to see what will happen next.  Will I be able to pay my bills this month, or next?  Will some unexpected emergency arise to overtake and conquer me?  I do not know.  Almost I might say I do not care.  I have admitted defeat.  It is the death of my cat that has made me do so.  There are some in this world, I am sure, who would think my reaction to his death melodramatic; but I cannot really comprehend why this should be.  His life was as important to him as anyone else's is to them; and his life was wasted – wantonly, trivially.  I'm as guilty as anyone of causing that waste.  The choices I made prevented me from accomplishing something as simple as providing a cat with a safe home.  That is a truth I cannot deny.

I reach a point of quiet despair.  Everything would be different if I only had more money!  But I do not have more money, and can see no way to get more money.  Anger gives way to acceptance; despair to a curious sort of tranquility.  It's as if I have reached that point in meditational practice at which one observes one's own thoughts and emotions, and then . . . lets them go.  It's not that I don't continue to feel keenly my boredom at work, my worry over finances, my fears for the future, etc.  I feel all these things as acutely as ever:  and yet I do not.  I am egoless – or, perhaps, merely profoundly depressed.  If the latter, then I can only say that depression becomes, at a certain point, a rather peaceful state.  Perhaps it is by this means that I become one of the "silent brothers," the "patient sisters" of whom I have spoken so often, thought of so thrillingly.  I have not only turned my back on the world, but it has turned its back on me; thus it is that I begin truly to leave it behind.  Strange that this should happen in the end not by choice, but by lack of choice.  Strange that I should ever have thought it could happen in any other way.  Strange to think that I have thought that turning my back upon the world would somehow bring the world to me and lay it at my feet.  Yet that is precisely what I did think.  Such a fool I have been!