Morning light burns the lingering mist from the trees as my
white Toyota
I’m headed to a client’s apartment. In her 50’s, she has
curly grey hair, twinkling childlike eyes, and no one. Her family abandoned her
to an institution decades ago and there is a staggering story of her mother
throwing her down the stairs when she was six, resulting in the brain damage
that altered the course of her everything.
Years on the street, raped, transient, she has lived through a hurricane
life I shudder to think about. But
now? Now she has a small one bedroom
apartment in a building that used to be an elementary school. Wide hardwood doors and long hallways still
seem to echo with the voices of children when I’m there. She loves Elvis, he’s all over her walls. Every Monday I come; she waits for the
electric buzz of my finger on the button marked 104. I watch while she methodically fills her pillbox
and I double check, counting the pastel colored marbles that equal stability to
her.
As I drive, I can see her smile in my mind and my lips curve
in response. We’ll make a list of fresh
veges and fruit and I will run her to the corner market and help carry her
cherished mushrooms and sweet tea inside.
I will wish her a lovely afternoon and she’ll thank me and hold the door
open heartbeats longer than necessary to watch me leave. I will wave and promise to come back
Wednesday. Then more pavement and
another buzzer and another pill box.
All of this quite seriously changes the fabric, the weave of
another life. It is good. Right and strong and…good.
As I drive my eyes trace the telephone poles connected by
waves of black wire, a strange aerial sea that swoops and dips up over the
hill. There is a sense of wrong so thick
within my car I nearly choke. My throat
closes, muscles spasm and my hands clench the wheel, white knuckles rigid knobs
of bone and flesh.
In a world that spills out entirely too many movies that
have themes of “she felt out of place, like she was missing her calling, until….” Am I caught up in such a delusion, such
selfishness? That while in the very
midst of doing so much right – it feels
so wrong? I feel out of place, like I’ve
crammed a literal square peg into a round hole, shaving off the corners; a pulp
of sinew and mangled skin left behind.
My co-workers are wonderful, my boss is funny and
compassionate. And I am writing nothing.
I have oceans inside…instead I drive and smile and help and hug and
drive and count and smile and drive…
I am doing such good.
But sometimes the weight, the palpable taste of what I am not doing is
thick and heavy inside my mouth. It
coats my hair and drips into my dreams at night, reeking like tar and
sadness. This wrongness…how can it
be so dense in the midst of such right?
