Write Something

“Write something.” He says. “I so wish you’d write again like you used to when I first met you. I really believe it will do you good.”

“He” is The Scholarly Renegade, a fellow writer and dreamer, on whose farm I have sought solace and healing for the past six months and who has endured more than his due of my conflicted persona for having made the invitation.  I suppose that for his heroic endurance alone, I should not deny him.

‘At the advanced age of fifty-eight I ran away from home.  After thirty-two years as a back-burner participant in a lopsided marriage, coerced into consonance and disavowed of respect, I left the building.  Had I waited another six months, I might have left like Elvis. What a waste.  

It was a sudden, hastily executed leave-taking, and whether I believed I was running away from the grave dysfunction that coated my days or towards an existence more authentic and kind, I am only now, six months later, able to partially discern.

Well, that is a start but honestly, although you may characterize this writing exercise as cathartic, it is still a dangerous precipice from which to emote. The thin crevice between holding firm to the present moment and being emotionally incinerated as I revive the deed word by word is a gap still not wide enough to accommodate a dime.  It could thrust me guilt first back to that stony patch of self recrimination at any moment because even after all these months, I’ve yet to completely sharpen my defensive resolve or give myself a full pardon.

Giving oneself permission to find happiness and forgiving oneself for the steps necessary to do so is not something one can do just for the wanting, you know.  Not if one has been steeped in the Catholic mindset that it is more noble to suffer in silence than to disrupt the sacred constancy of marriage and renege on one’s vows whether justified or not. Right now, One is feeling screwed and slightly tormented by images of Hades. 

“Just write a short personal essay.  Write what is on your mind, what you’ve experienced.” He says.

‘It was late evening last November when we pulled off the gravel road onto the drive of the farm two miles from the main thoroughfare.  Of the five and a half hour drive I spent trading terror for tears from the door of my urban home in Kansas City to the grassy threshold of the Iowa farm that was to be my fortress, those final miles shrouded in dust were the most surreal. 

The gritty hail of road against the truck chassis battered my senses awake to what I had just accomplished and with that realization came panic. My husband would now be discovering my absence. He will find the note I left on the dining room table. What will he do?  What have I done? I just know I’m going to hell when I die.’

I don’t really know how deeply I want to delve here.  I mean, that night and the preceding two days between when I decided to leave my crushing life behind and the afternoon when I ultimately did still remain raw and incite a spasmodic and painful tangle in my brain so blinding that I’m not certain I can accurately recall the details nor am I certain I am ready to. 

“Don’t talk yourself out of it.”  He says. “Just write.”

‘I had not planned this action long in advance. Had I done so, I am certain I would have allowed the ghosts of every sin I’d ever committed to convince me that my penance mandated whatever suffering and discontent I was presently enduring nigh unto my death, which I routinely wished would come prematurely.  The tension was ever present, the strife, even more so, and the fine line between pretending that all was survivable and the cresting awareness that my life as it was, amounted to little more than a slow death steeped in practical denial had long since been eroded away by repeated injustices. 

The time had arrived for me to face down every excuse that bound me to that stifling redundancy and take a leap from the small window of ‘otherness’ just recently opened. My children were grown, my once loaded charge of maternal imperatives had long since downgraded to ‘standby only’ and the routine misgivings that fettered my days for three decades were now simply a choice.  It was time to jump into the arms of my best potential or die trying. 

For two days and nights I made my anguished apologies to my husband salted in tears, said my quaking goodbyes buffered by the leaden truth that unbeknownst to him, my exodus was imminent; marshaled the only thin crust of resolve still clinging to the walls of my uncertainty and on the third day at noon, I walked out the door.  

No one believed that after all this time I would ever leave and until the moment I followed my feet from the familiar landscape of my tiled front foyer and into the alien confines of The Renegade’s truck parked like winged Pegasus in my driveway, neither did I.

Of course, no matter what I do now or how deeply I rationalize this radical act there still remains the risk that I will go belly up from the delusion and that even without the shackles of sadness strapping me to the nail bed of self denial, I might stand to become little more than a different kind of stranger to myself.

Unfortunately, this time my estrangement will come sans the honorable and noble martyrdom of self-sacrifice and long-suffering, those valiant characteristics that cause angel’s to sing and would also guarantee me a spot On High reserved for those saintly souls who stayed the ragged course resigned to their suffering, drudgery and pain with other worldly courage.

 This is becoming too intense.  I need to shift my focus.

“Write about your impressions of the rural life.” He says.

‘Pretense is nonexistent in a world where one can eviscerate livestock and diaper a newborn infant with identical dispatch and where the hard-earth stoicism such a lifestyle demands restricts empathy to a level no deeper than civic responsibility and logic naturally demand.

Appearance, intellectual curiosity, style, culture, wealth, hygiene are all of little consequence in the lives of men and women whose preordained axis rotates the farm and the hunt exclusively and who, I believe, would slaughter anything that has never eaten at a MacDonald’s or cannot qualify for a Ducks Unlimited membership card.  

For most, tobacco reigns as the preferred pacifier and alcohol, the anodyne of choice.  It remedies boredom, despair, sore bones and anger as well as its converse function: a lynchpin in all celebrations.’

 Rather than be affronted by these coarse realities, I try earnestly to hold them forth as another of the liberating aspects of living in an area of the country where no one notices just how dirty your fingernails are until the fourth or fifth meeting and even then they don’t care. 

Having lived the entirety of my years either in or no more than a twenty-minute drive from the heavily populated and bustling metropolis’ of New York City, Scottsdale or Kansas City; I find it difficult to imagine that I could confine the many startling and massive differences between urban life and the stark, unpopulated expanse of this Iowan landscape to five-hundred words or less.  It is the antithesis of anywhere I’ve known, a state hosting more cows than people, more corn than cars, silence over sirens, pollen over pollution, hunters over shoppers, feed stores over restaurants and barns over bars. 

“Pick a small detail or two and elaborate.” He says.

There are those of us gentrified, city folks who do not so much ‘write’ as we do ‘bleed’ and a blank page may as well be a tourniquet.  Living among all these country stoics, tourniquets are not as readily available as say, a blunt needle and cat gut; neither of which I want anywhere near my Bloomingdales’ heart. In that respect writing has now become somewhat of a risky business.  It remains as solitary a pursuit as ever, only executed sans the comforting white buzz of traffic to remind me that I am not truly alone. 

Perhaps I should just chronicle those early weeks after my stunned arrival when simply eyeing the corn-stubbled expanse around me sent me into spasms of concern that I would never again see a Yellow Cab or a street vendor or a car wreck? 

‘In spite of the ample herd of cattle on the adjacent farm, the quiet here can be suffocating. The first morning I woke I swore I was dead. No sound came from any direction apart from a light ‘whooshing’ as the wind spun it’s way through the brittle grass on the ridge along the gravel road that passes in front of the property. 

Gravel is everywhere.  It nests in the dark tread of the requisite thick-soled boots (mandatory footwear if one is to remain upright walking the furrowed fields and uneven roads) and by consequence, finds its way inside every house where it becomes a necessary ritual to brush small piles of pebbles and grit from the bedsheets before retiring each night.       

I have come to learn that gravel is the preferred surface for rural American byways where speed limits are generally arbitrary and kicking up a cloud of dust with your four-wheeler, flat-bed or full-sized Ford is an inspired compulsion - if  for no other reason than as partial justification for having turned your back on civilization in the first place.

Of course, the dust that is churned by every passing vehicle blows like a sandy mist through any cracked window or screened door and is so excessive it should be instituted as a dietary staple, a condiment adding texture to all food groups and will, as a bonus, inculcate your tastebuds against desiring anything more refined than newly slaughtered cattle or root vegetables.  Sushi, be damned.’ 

There is no place for the squeamish in this outpost.

Yet in spite of my ongoing struggle to reconcile my decision to walk away from my former existence and my loss as to just where I fit into this one, I hope to inherit the grit it will take to thrive here without losing the grace needed to forgive it.  To accept the endless quiet as a balm, not a bane and to allow the fallow nature of time to transform my stale and wasted suffering into acres of ripe language and inspired images. To learn to love outside the constraints of the world and perhaps even outside of myself.

Out here in the wide open where endings collide with beginnings and no one is ever without something worthwhile to do, seeking purpose should not be that difficult.’

I will show this to the Scholarly Renegade and he will say, “Great job!  Now, don’t you feel better?” 

 Of course, he will be right and mustering all of my urban humility I will reply, “Yes. I think I do.”