this bewailing cry

The phone rings; somebody on the other end wants to know when I will visit them.

I’m so distracted I mutter, “Haven’t been myself lately.”

“Hmm?  What did you say?”

“Nothing,” I say, wiping sweat from my brow.

The caller waits for me to say something else, but I don’t, which makes the caller very uncomfortable, and they finally break the silence by saying, “Still working through some things, are you?”

“Always,” I say.

Another pause and another numb feeling.

“Sounds like I got you at a bad time,” the caller says, and I confirm this by intoning, 

“Mmmm…”

“Well, let me let you go. I’ll talk to you later.”

The caller hangs up, but I keep the receiver to my ear until the busy signal stops, and I’m transferred to a recorded message that says, “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and then dial your operator.”

I need help, but not from you.

Then I remembered something a friend had whispered to me the previous week.

“You’re starting to like your solitude a little too much.”

“What do you mean,” I say.

“Time to venture out,” says my friend, pointing to my head. “And become a living, moving thing again.”

A fleeting moment passes, and that phrase, “living, moving thing,” is swiftly distributed across both hemispheres of my brain. Although it sounds a bit naive and corny on the surface, it gets at the truth of something and goes directly to the core of my psyche, profoundly affecting me.

She’s absolutely right.

My life has become a quick-moving river, and I’m just trying to stay afloat and not hit sharp rocks or uneven river beds.  I’m a bit angry with my life, myself. Always verging on feeling sorry for myself. Doing things for all the wrong reasons. I needed to restore something significant to me when I was a kid. Something I’ve lost. Or lost sight of or the grasp of.

I need to find a form for my experience, but I know what to write about.

For years, I’ve bisected the psyche of the man with the fierce moral sensibility who can’t make any peace with the world and covered my canvases with the long, emotional colors of all those lost people who find themselves by recognizing their love for one another. Still, I’ve never seen the precise rising line of conflict and resolution to those themes.

Maybe it’s because I’ve compromised my form and am no longer capable of weighty introspection.

I’ve become another 21st-century working-class antihero trying to come to grips with the reality of my life,  too exhausted to develop anything more than the callouses on my fingertips from all that wild and uncontrolled typing.

“Getting stuck makes us not move,” says my friend. “You’ve got to move into a different place and find what you want to write about.”

I pause. Then, somewhat self-mocking, say, “I used to want to write about how we all must work to find the best in ourselves and others. There should be less suffering, more humanity, liberty, equality, and peaceful coexistence. But that’s just an enjoyable fiction. There’s no way to follow that tale to its end. You can never solve the moment when you write about things like that.”

Sighing with sentiment, my friend says, “Your fantasies have lapsed into frustration.”

That’s when I wonder just how far down this brown-eyed troubadour can go.