As part of the #FromNowOn pledging that I am doing and in the interest of “practicing writing” as committed, I have taken the advice of my long ago teacher and have been sitting here all day writing, not just two hours. I hated everything and came to realize that maybe this isn’t my purpose. I ended up with two or three drafts that may end up in virtual trash and finally this, which is mostly in the style he had us do on our first day of class – just write whatever comes in our minds, that I shall publish…
It was just yesterday that I was a little girl. Suddenly I am old.
Who has time for sleeping? We will sleep for far too long as it is, but sleep now we must or we would die far sooner. I have a hard time getting to sleep and then a hard time getting up because I waited too long and think too much about dying.
Getting older it is hard not to think about the end that is coming and who knows when. I go to sleep thinking about it and wake up in a panic that I do get quickly over. I would like to think that I will live to be one hundred – one hundred and forty like a turtle would be even better. How lucky is the turtle to have been given that longevity by the creator. But the turtle is even more vulnerable to humans than even humans so, lucky is the one it seems that can live that long or longer. If we could keep from doing harm to ourselves we might not have to worry so much about what others may do.
It is hard to imagine living much longer, feeling as achy as I do. I keep trying to prevent it by eating righter and walking. I try to stay happy but I’m an introvert so I live mostly in my head and it is hard for others to live there with me and that makes me sad. Not depressed, but I wake each morning and wish I’d been built a different way…a way that would like another bothering me to cook or clean or who would get upset that I live in such a mess; either that or someone who could stand me as I am.
I want to do what I want and cleaning isn’t one of the things I want to do. I can clean with the best of them and my clients are always significantly pleased when I leave after having rushed through cleaning their homes from top to bottom so that I can get back to mine as quickly as possible to get back into my head or the garden where my head often goes and where those things can seem to live in my mind as well. At least they don’t object much if I leave them alone and don’t dust or shake them. They do seem to like to be washed and I do that for them with great ease and pleasure or wait for the rain to do it for me.
I miss my sister. I thought she would be with me to the end. She had so many problems. Her mind didn’t work even as good as mine does but she said right before she left that she felt like she had lived a wonderful life. That was hard for me to imagine knowing how much anguish she sustained – but she had been quite a celebrity of sorts, a big fish in a little pond so to speak and had lived as she pleased. She was a beauty and she had that pheromone thing going on where men couldn’t resist her. From the time of kindergarten, boys were tripping over themselves to get near her. If you saw her in the neighborhood as a child there would be a string of fellers with her or chasing after her. I, on the other hand, could scarcely find even a single girl to friend me. For the most part I seemed to like it that way. Later boys would find me, but only rarely and mostly because they happened to live in their brains too and could appreciate that thing about me.
We spend our whole lives and then suddenly we are old. As a child the future looks like forever. At this time it looks like any day could be the last and that scares me intensely. I guess if I had children, and I suppose that is why people think they want to have children, I might be better able to get out of myself and the end might not seem so near because I wouldn’t be thinking about it constantly.
One of my favorite movies and one I go to sleep with often is Grumpy Old Men. I like it because they are close to my age and good things are still happening to them and they still have reason to go on. It’s about friends who live their whole lives together, mad or not. It’s about Christmas and children and their children’s children and history and love and holidays. There are cats and dogs and flowers. There are meals shared and drinking together. There are Slippery’s Bar and Grill and Chuck’s Bait Shop for drinks, coffee or a chat. They talk about the best way of dying and agree that Chuck was a “lucky bastard” to “die in his sleep” and I agree too but I’m not ready.
“We’re having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave…”
What’s the point of living so long if you are worried about it ending all the time?
I think the secret is in having a partner so I shall make it a ‘from now on’ pledge to figure out how to have a partner.
“…The temperature’s rising, it isn’t surprising,
She certainly can can-can
She started a heatwave by letting her seat wave,
In such a way that the customers say
That she certainly can can-can..”
Maybe it is really about finding your purpose and I just haven’t really found my purpose yet. I guess when my aches have gone away I will know that I have found my purpose. Until then, cheers to turtles for having figured it all out.
Ain’t it funny how time slips away.
Writing Spool 