When I had Time and Hope

I used to be the kind of person who got excited about things—secretly, so as not to play the fool out loud—the kind of person who had ideas, who thought, “this time, it’s all going to turn out right!”

I had exclamation points in my thoughts, roses of hope blooming in my chest, a vision of how happiness was possible if you only just glittered, gestured, hummed in exactly the right way so as to alter the universe’s nasty tendency toward imprisonment.

Was it the universe that was so dead set against I or anyone, really, ever having a moment’s rest from worry?

If things were all right, how long could it last? If things were bad, was there any hope? Would hope’s emissary slip past without my noticing? Could I keep my eyes peeled and all my senses alert for the magic animal, the force to be harnessed?

Even awash in gloom, I clung to the dim glimmer of time’s expanse. “Not now,” I mumbled, in a barely audible voice, grey with exhaustion, “but someday. There’s still time.”

I wonder whether or how much any of this has to do with my beginnings, the stories that first formed when I tried to explain to myself why things were as they were. I came up with reasons, and then, to make myself feel a little more secure, I gave myself the power to alter the facts to make them fit better.

I was of a temperament to want to fix things. Maybe it was just the discomfort of being there when someone was in pain.

Bipolar disorder, aka manic depression, runs in my mother’s family. My Auntie Sandra was the first I knew of to stand on the corner in her pajamas cursing passers by.

My Uncle Nate had an eye tattooed on the back of his left elbow. It was supposed to keep him safe from harm by scaring off any bad luck that might try to sneak up on him. He’d gotten it in the Navy, possibly from one of his mates, since the eye was the sort a child of a certain age draws, with a perfectly round pupil resting in a perfectly symmetrical pair of arcs, and fringed all around with evenly spaced eyelashes. “I kept seein’ Uncle Nate’s elbow comin’ at me,” Auntie Sandra said, with a mild, medicated smile. Her once brilliant blue eyes were washed out from thorazine to an almost colorless yellow-grey.

Auntie Sandra took me to the store in downtown Calumet, using a shortcut. “We used to go this way when we skipped school, smoking cigarettes and wearing red lipstick,” she said. She gave me some makeup she wasn’t using any more.

I knew, or at least suspected, that she was trying to make me feel like a human being, part of the world. But it was impossible for me to feel like a part of the world. As far as I knew, that had always been the case. It wasn’t that I wanted to be apart, it was that I could see everything from the outside. How I longed to swim in experience, riding emotions from wave to wave, graceful and nearly effortless. I imagined other people weren’t in such a state of exile as I was, though you’d think the opposite would be true, that I’d assume everyone was in the same boat as I. But I observed that nearly everyone I came across inhabited themselves with ease.