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For a long time, I never really understood what people meant when they told me they were afraid of life. It was like saying they were afraid of something they were totally in charge of, and that also happened to be delicious, like soup.
I mean, sure, sometimes it does something totally unexpected, but you fix the problem, and it just makes a good story later. You never hear anyone say, Augh, I am so overwhelmed by this soup. They would shake and I would laugh and laugh. Life was my boyfriend. He had great hair. I trusted him absolutely.
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And yesterday we broke up. I woke up, my face buried in my pillow, and realized for the first time that I have no reason to think that everything is going to be okay. None whatsoever. I thought, Things don't have any reason at all to turn out the way I want them to, and it felt like the time I was eight and fell out of the treehouse in the backyard and shocked the very life out of my body.
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Look around, said that grating voice in my head, the one that tries to guilt-trip me when I take naps. Lots of people end up alone. Why shouldn't you be one of them? Lots of people are angry and isolated and go on eating frozen dinners for all eternity, grateful that no one is around to leave shoes under the coffee table. What makes you different? You think they were never twenty-two and wanted to dance?
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So many women never find their purpose, or can't have kids, or lose their jobs and go into debt, or never fall in love, or get those premature eye wrinkles all the way around their eyes, or never start rock climbing even though they always wanted to.
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Lots of women marry men because they crave their safety and their touch, but they don't love him and never will because he is too small, and they begin to hate each other, and they didn't mean it to turn out that way but that wasn't good enough. I could become the kind of woman I can't stand to see at the video rental store. After all, she didn't want to turn into her either.
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I laid in bed, because really, what else are you going to do? I laid in bed and tried to tell myself that life was like soup, and we were dating, except I had to close my eyes, because my God.
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Things stayed bad for a while, even with my eyes closed. But I realized, in stages, that I had to do it anyway, you know, get out of bed and go on being a woman in this world, even though things might happen to me that are too scary for me to even imagine now. And this didn't really make me feel much better, but I felt a little calmer when I realized that I had to do it. I mean, I'm here. There's really nothing else to do but try. It doesn't make sense to be scared when the alternative is not existing at all.
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But I'm wondering about things, like God and hell and the people who stream around me in the grocery store. How did they get here? What have they done? Why did things play out that way, and are they sorry? Where are the people who are asking the right questions? Who is choosing to live beautifully and courageously? What does that look like?
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I eventually got out of bed. I only did this because I figured there is probably about one big difference between the people who laugh in the street, and the people who eat frozen dinners all the time. Some of us wake up to a world we were never supposed to be in, and stay in bed.
And the rest of us get up.
