Recompense

O, that this dark cloud would release me! With the gloom of financial woes in conjunction with Vacaville idleness, throw in the sadness of a mother’s heart, a woman’s loneliness, and a human’s solitude, and you have me. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick,” says the Proverb that all too well describes me at this moment. Yet I remember my own response to someone else who had been low enough to claim this: “For a dream comes through much activity.” Hmm… for some reason this doesn’t sound too promising anymore. The ingredient of activity is null in my life.

I’m going to read some works by William Blake today when I get home. How ignorant I feel that I, too, like Blake, thought that Nobody was spouting seemingly empty Native proverbs. How naive I am that I even studied him in my literature class and only faintly recognized the name, disowning that he was actually a writer.

I want to know why all of my friends leave. I want to know why everyone I care about and love either moves physically or is moved from me emotionally. I want to know why this happens. No one seems to have an answer for this. It just happens. It’s inevitable, like the great gushing geyser; you know it’s spring-loaded; it’s going to come back up. I want to be one of those people-magnet people. You know, those dark, brooding got-it-togethers who are strangely irresistible to a crowd. “I want to be a good person,” chimes an angel-face Gilbert after asked the question, “And you? What do you want?” I want to be a different person. It seems impossible. I don’t even know what the problem is in the first place.

This place is crawling under my skin today. I want to walk out the back door and leave this place in distant memory. I’m so tired of my “life” here; it’s not really living. Through it all, I wonder if he is waiting for me--the one. If I die, would it ripple into his life? If I were to choose that way, would he ever know? Would it matter? If I were his true half, now withered and dead, would his half do so as well? Or realign itself with another? I only feel verified in this life when I write. It is my only pulse. When I am wordless—story-less—I am nothing but in despair. “Some are born to endless night…”

I’m lonely. Debbie’s absence has doused the fire of others’ company. Ken is far from me for his own reasons. Ce la vi, let him go. Tyler is distant for his own reasons. La amour, adieu. Helen is moving far, far from me in more ways than one. Nämaríe mellyanna.

I went for a walk at break time around the slums that is the Vallejo residency. Some houses made me lightheaded; these are generally the ones that are poverty-kissed or decayed with time. Still, there really isn’t a code to crack, it hits when it wants. I walked through the run-down neighborhood, calling in mind Blake’s passage through Machine.

An overweight child mother bends down to get her sweaty infant from the dusty Buick. She is still in her waitress uniform. Down the street from them is old pain-chipped white house with a little white cabinet on the carport. The cabinet has Goodwill toys on the shelves. Three little girls emerge from the screen door into the hot sun. Their clothes are faded and their hair is matted. Down the street from the white house is a two-story house with a square porch at the head of the staircase. A gaggle of Mexicans sat aimlessly, drinking beer and whistling for my attention. On the street, some tall teen asks me if I have a DVD player and offers to sell a copy of Miyasaki’s Spirited Away that he just happens to have with him. I turn the corner and there is a two-story house that seems entirely misplaced on the corner of Alabama. There is a patio with nice hunter green furniture and a plethora of wind chimes dancing over the rosebushes. Across the street, in the small quarter house, a woman screams in profane Ebonics; a man answers her in equal response. There are cute two story duplexes with inward facing doors that I immediately think cozy until a woman screams harshly at a ten year old kid who is sliding out from the door.

Copyright © 2003 by Melanie Faith