Oh my god my heart just broke in half, just broke in half like that, out there underneath the mango tree. Was it the change in humidity? The rolling hormones that are peaking or troughing this week? Was it just the first taste of hot coffee the morning after drinking a bit of gin after weeks of sobriety? Was it the simple fact that I had just emptied my bladder and so there was a space below and my heart, mistaking its role, stepping in to fill the absence, just sank?
It broke in half. Talking to Marieta, who is the one I thought of as a friend, unreasonably and automatically, across the boundaries of her asking for a job and me there representing jobs, that evening these several weeks past. And this time I just thought, but what are you doing here? Here in this small village? And is this the life that will make you happy? And who among us could say one way or the other? And what does it have to do with me? Is my heart breaking for the lack, or for the fullness of your life? Or mine, comparatively? I could not say.
Or merely because I do not want between us these usual differences and separations, these economies of scale, these default differences in fate, I do not want them. I want her to have everything that I have. I want to see her children, too, having more than they need, having abundance and excess. I am tired of the injustice, even of the scale of difference, and here it seems to speak so loudly. A woman smart and ready, and where is she going? And yet not depressed, and not depressive, and what, what, what would make her happy and do I perhaps have absolutely nothing to do with it, regardless of the power of economy?
This is not a hand-out. That is the difference. You find those for whom it is some form of charity, and though I do not think I think that way, with her the fact of it not being charity is so raw. Charity. Ha. A woman far smarter than me, this privileged one. And plus, and more, how it gets so old these days, that we stand on soap boxes and name them Separate: Foreigner: National. How you are thinking but this, this is ridiculous, it is absurdity. Thinking that in general. And then you meet someone like this person whom you feel immediately is a friend, the natural kind, not forced. A true Friend. Girls together. So you think, you I so want to see expand, and grow, and be happy. Not less or more than others, only there it is. The way we know each other and hearts sing.
And to hear her news. Of the next step in career, of the relationship gossip, of the way your children only eat mashed bananas and sweet potatoes from the jar, of how the eldest came home crying from a hard day at school and was soothed in between your work at the table and the sound of your husband cooking spaghetti sauce in the kitchen and how you are considering a weekend in the mountains and just tried a recipe that you found in a box your mother left you and how you never thought you had any artistic talent but the instructor says she has never seen a tree drawn like that and have you ever considered pursuing a career, perhaps, as someone who draws trees?
And also the latest funny story from your day at work and the way you've been trying to learn to grow vegetables in your garden, and how you are worried about what it means that your father's hands have started to shake sometimes and how when you woke up this morning you thought you were on a ship, still dreaming, and going somewhere good and then even though the morning light coming through the window, and the hand of your husband on your stomach should have been disappointments, somehow, compared to that mythical ship, still how when the baby moved inside you felt that it was going to be ok, even though your father's hands were worse this time - did you mention? - and how somehow wherever you were going it would be good, and maybe true, whatever truths there were, and you were fine with this. This morning light. This way your life is. And here I would love you even more, the way our grandmother's do, to see that particular miracle of watching a young woman grow beautiful; a beautiful person grow wise.
And how I wish to see this, that between us could be this, so normal, and all these conversations. And the expansion and inclusion of one beautiful life into another. And watching us grow old together, women friends, and celebrating what is harmful, beautiful and sad, and knowing that we were together and would be kind no matter what. And that in innocence we would find love and in pain the edge of grace, and everything, everything, everything else. That we may live.
"That we may be serious. Deeply serious. Face to face. The closest we may come to innocence."
-Michael Leunig
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