Vignettes
Several loosely related thoughts over the past week.
As the days melt into each other, I find it hard sometimes to tell them apart and remember things I did and in what order that I did them. The creature of habit that I am affords me reliable routines that hold me down. And I sense there’s a calcifying apprehension to straying away from the simple and predictable and risk falling in love again.
I used to despise reality TV. But it seems like the only thing I have been able to watch lately. Perhaps because on a daily, I sift through mounds of content – emails, posts, blogs, shorts, messages and stare at the computer screen for my work. At the end of the it all, I am left with little energy to think too deeply about what to put on and reality TV feels easier to tune into.
At the gym, as I am doing my stretches facing the mirror, I notice a slight difference in how wide each of my shoulders seem to be. My head spins. How? My mind returns to the fracture I sustained on my right leg in high school and for months had to use a crutch to support the right side of my body while the left carried the weight of me during those months. And I am relieved.
Over a cup of tea at my desk in the evening, my mind replays the time to when my father was dying of cancer, and I remember that I did not want to look at him. He had become a shell of himself in that hospital bed, and I did not have the instinct to hold his hand and ease his pain. I stood there, trying to find somewhere to rest my gaze and wanting to escape this agony that was stretching me. For a long while and even sometimes today, I have had the suspicion that because I couldn’t comfort him in his last moments, that therefore, I didn’t love him enough. In my mind I needed to conjure up this mysterious feeling of loving inside of myself for it to translate into action. I know now that I was scared of how someone who was always a permanent fixture could be overcome by an uncontrollable fate and fade into something so unrecognizable, as he neared his last breath.