Friday 11/15/24
These are dark days getting darker, which seems impossible, but it's true. Harder to go on. Harder to see a reason to. I must fight harder than ever.
I spoke to a certain four-year-old big girl buddy of mine yesterday on FaceTime when I was finishing up in the Monument--I really had to force myself to go--and then on the walk back over the Charlestown bridge--which I think is now the Bill Russell Bridge--and into the North End with the sun going down. She showed me her room and then pretended to have ballet class. (Which required several costume changes.) There's a lot of watching her do whatever she's on my part and asking questions.
When I asked her if she was left-handed, she consented to saying yes. (Admittedly, I asked just to hear her say no, but she's apparently changed her stance.) I also asked her if she was afraid of the dark, and she said no, with complete confidence. I told her I was scared of the dark when I was her age--this is true--and she thought that was funny but also embarrassing for me, I think.
She said she has a play date today over the house of her friends Charlotte and Winnie, who are twins. Amelia knows a lot of twins. Three sets at least, I believe. She loves these two girls. They are her best friends. Always super excited to see them and calls herself the third twin.
I like seeing my mom with Amelia. It reminds me of when I was little with my mom. You know what one of my nicest memories with my mom is? I was in fourth grade, and we had a science project. It had to do with trees. My mom went with me into the woods behind our house. These woods were very important to me and became a part of who I was.
Anyway, we got all of these pine cones--that was the project--and we glued them to the inside of a box cover. A cardboard box, with the inside part being white. Under each pine cone, I wrote the name of the type of tree. Then we put plastic wrap--like it was glass--stretching across the edges of the box to make this display. The teacher thought this was great. Kind of like going above and beyond the pine cone call of duty. You didn't have to do this but I wanted to. My mom encouraged me and helped me. It was a lot of fun. And I loved nature so much. That's just something my mom would do. When I watch her with Amelia, she's still that way. She was the best mom when I was little, and she's the best grandmother.
It's also sad for me--though I don't say this--to watch and hear the laughter and see the smiles at this point of my life. I'm so far removed from that laughter. It's a memory from a long, long time ago that I'm now haunted by because of how everything is. I'm terrified. It only gets worse. I worry about money constantly. I don't have any solutions to what amounts to thousands of factors and forces to overcome. I think you can have the most amazing anything ever in this world, and it won't matter, that there's no place for it.
And with this thing I do, I think it's something you could do better than any human has ever come close to doing anything else...and not a single person might care at all, and even if someone did, what's that? What's that going to do? It'd have to be so many people, and caring substantially. I feel like I'm going down with a death ship and it's going to get even worse until...what? Today I feel like it would have been better for me to have been born as nearly anyone else but myself.
"Today." I don't just mean today. I'm feeling it more acutely this morning, which isn't to say it's just some emotion. Because I think it as well. I think I think it very rationally and with much reason. I was born as one thing, and that made it possible for me to become this other thing, based on what was there to work with, and I went as hard as possible in becoming that, and it made me the last person you'd want to be in this world. I can rally and I can fight, I can see if I can dig deeper, but what will it do at all? What good will it do?
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