(i'm gonna level with you. i wish i brought my camera with me everywhere. i wish i always had lovely and beautiful and fun pictures to post. i wish i was better at documenting the day to day--more consistent and streamlined in my style. but if i think back to why i began this blog it was to remember. so that five, ten, twenty years from now i might remember the day to day, as well as what was inspiring me at any given point. so today there are no pictures. only the words of a man much wiser than myself that i have returned to again and again since reading them a month ago. if this is no interest to you, then i beg your indulgence, or invite you to skip it all together. because for me...well, i need to post it for myself.)
A Prayer for Pete
Brian Doyle
The phone rings, it's an old friend, he tells me of another old friend who is dying. Our friend is in his forties, just married, with a little boy, and there's no hope, he'll be dead within a couple of years, and dying too in a most cruel fashion, piece by piece, as his body slowly fails around the bright light of his mind, leaving him trapped in the husk of what had been a wonderfully lithe body.
I try to imagine my friend inside himself, immobile in a dark crumbled castle, his mind racing--and I have to get up and get outside and go for a walk.
So what prayer do I make for Pete? What do I say for his little boy, who will lose his father before he knows him well? What do I say for his wife, who will watch her new husband die a little every day and then be left alone with their son, who has the same thick red hair as his father?
I don't know.
Do I really think that my prayers will save Pete, or cut his pain, or dilute his fear as he sees the darkness descending? Do I really think my prayers will make his wife's agony any less, or reduce the confused sadness of his little boy?
No.
But I mutter prayers anyway, form them in the cave of my mouth and speak them awkwardly into the gray wind, watch as they are instantly shattered and splintered and whipped through the old oak trees and sent headlong into the dark river below, where they seem lost and vanished, empty gestures in a cold land.
Did they have any weight as they flew?
I don't know?
But I believe with all my heart that they mattered because I was moved to make them. I believe that the mysterious sudden impulse to pray is the prayer, and that the words we use for prayer are only envelopes in which to mail pain and joy, and that arguing about where prayers go, and who sorts the mail, and what unimaginable senses hear us is foolish.
It's the urge that matters--the sudden Save us that rises against horror, the silent Thank you for joy. The children are safe, and we sit stunned and grateful by the side of the road; the children are murdered, every boy and girl in the whole village, and we sit stunned and desperate, and bow our heads, and whisper for their souls and our sins.
So a prayer for my friend Pete, in gathering darkness, and a prayer for us all, that we be brave enough to pray, for it is an act of love, and love is why we are here.
it wasn't the symmetry of the number that appealed to her, or the aesthetics of the even.
six years.
that was the time she associated with being unwell. six years. a time when life was somehow not her own. when she was less than. six years. that was all. and yet it felt like it was all there ever was and all there had ever been and all there would ever be: a lifetime. the whole of her lifetime.
seven years.
the amount of time she had known him and... well...
he knows. he must know. surely, he must know.
she expected it to pass. the feeling. she expected it to pass. everyone told her it would. and she had been so young when they first met and there was so much life to unfold and so surely this, this...thing would pass.
but it lived there. in the deepest part, in the braided ligaments of her core, and so she came to accept that it might never. it would shift and change, but remain.
that moment moment there, on the couch, him commenting on the black tights, it was a marker of time, for her. that he didn't know. he couldn't possibly have known that that, more than the lines now ringing his eyes or the new gray hairs (both things she found endlessly appealing), more than her fuller hips and forehead creases, that comment, was a marker of time.
because he wasn't there for those six years. and thank god for that. she wasn't either.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
god, words fail. they just aren't enough.
if i could find them, if i could find the right ones, i'd ask you to place you hand there again, between curve of knee and hem and let it live there for as long as we both could bear. i'd tell you that of course i see you. and the image is so clear, despite present circumstances or recent history. i don't know the whole of the story but i see you and i...well, you must know, surely you must.
i'm a girl that's only ever seen the pieces. the bits and the pieces. but with you it came all at once in a startling clarity. and so i'm mostly unafraid. i, who fear all, is mostly unafraid where you are concerned. unafraid of all that's come before or of all the time and land and life yet to traverse.
and i don't know what's to come. or of how much we'll traverse alone. or if we'll take any of it together.
but perhaps it doesn't have to be so hard.
there are those words. and they are so comforting. so full of... but i don't know if they are yours. and the strange, strangling doubt takes hold.
because you know that these are mine. i give them freely. well, mostly. but, without a doubt, you know they are mine. the question must then be, are they for you?
yes, yes, of course, yes. you must know that.
and so i want nothing so much as to ask, who? who wrote them? because there is the suspicion and the hope and the endless, endless doubt.
but somehow that questions seems unfair. or too soon. or simply past the point.
and i am at a loss...
i think i want to name our first child phinneus. (given it's a boy, of course).
i re-read a separate peace last spring and now the notion is not to be dislodged.
think of it: we'll call him finny when he's little, finn as he grows older and self-conscious of youth.
and the name'll serve as a compass of sorts. a benchmark, a weight tying him to fealty and courage and the pursuit of joy.
i don't know why it's been on my mind as of late. but now it's written down so i can stop worrying about trying to remember or the encroaching curtain of forgetfulness.
take this for what you will.
love, love,
yours. ever yours.
