interlude

I’ve begun pulling books off my bookshelf and re-reading them. Searching the pages for something lost. Unearthing old scraps that I once carried with me like treasures. Pages folded down, little reminders to remember, saying someday, read me again, remember this…

In Douglas Coupland I found my calling, briefly, though I’ve since lost it. Generation X, perversely – a book given to me by a friend who had just read it for an English class and thought it pretty cool – before “Generation X” was the official title of our generation – lying in my bottom bunk one spring afternoon, something in one of the passages caught me – perhaps this one:

“…looks with strangers became the unspoken question: ‘Are you the stranger who will rescue me?’ Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes”

– and I thought, I could write stories like this, and I thought, I should write stories like this…to touch one person as Douglas Coupland and countless other writers have touched me would be a life worth living. And I changed my major from Psyc to English Lit.

But I sometimes regret that decision, because I don’t write stories anymore. And now I’m just lost, wondering what it is that I’m supposed to be doing with my life. That part of me that once wanted nothing more than connection with another human being has since given up. Or grown up. The connection seems false, the desire self-indulgent, misguided…a need simply to connect with oneself and an irrational fear of looking in the mirror.

And so I returned to Life After God for solace, written by an older Coupland for the jaded souls of thirty-somethings. When I read it in my early twenties I guess I didn’t really get it all. I get it now, though I also find myself critiquing his grammar, wondering where his editor was…I wish I wasn’t so pedantic…

And in Life After God, I found another one of those passages that I tucked away and forgot about, unwittingly living out these last few years:

“When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t yet begun – that ‘life’ is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays – whenever. But then suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life didn’t arrive. You find yourself asking, ‘Well then, exactly what was it I was having – that interlude – the scrambly madness – all that time I had before?’”

This morning I got a note from Mr. Haggarty, reminding me of one of the early blogs I wrote a long time ago. From parental heights he wrote to me of the importance of living in the present. He told me that the experience of 52 years of life lived reveals that the moment is the only truth.

I think he’s right. Though I haven’t been cherishing my moments much lately. I’ve been trapped in the waiting game. It’s almost here, it’ll be here any moment now, just around the corner: my life.

Waiting is a waste of time and I know it, but waiting is what’s occupying my living room. And when I look beneath the couch, under the cushions, behind the curtains, all I find are dust bunnies, frustration and lonliness. Life becomes tarnished the longer I spend staring at the empty bus I expect to take me to it.

So the paradox. What I want to know is how does one cherish the moment when most of their moments are spent in a beige cube? Is there something quintessentially beige or cube-like that I should be appreciating? If I were to turn and walk away to pursue moments that I could cherish, where would I go?

And right now I’m sick as a dog. Which always makes me wonder, why do they say that? Dogs never get sick… And with a wadded tissue stuck up my nose just wishing for the moment when I’ll be able to breath again, this isn’t a moment I can find much beauty in. Though I do remember a moment when I was sick that I did – at fourteen with my wisdom teeth impacted, I was home from school for two weeks while my mother came in each hour to try to feed me another teaspoon of applesauce, and it hurt so much to swallow that I had to be knocked out on painkillers…but I remember waking from time to time and feeling the oscillating fan blow cool air against my forehead, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, before drifting off into sleep again…

Comments

[Alan]

I felt inspired to look at my own copy of Life after God... and spookily enough, it flipped open at exactly the passage you quoted...

[bananie]

oh heather, i do hope you're feeling better now. and i am so excited for your nashville trip. i will write soon.

[laurie]

Just wanted you to know I felt comforted reading this. I've been doing a lot of questioning, wondering what my life is, means, what it's for and whether it's going in the right direction. And what that direction is. Sometimes I think I just have to make peace with the "scrambly madness." And appreciate the preciousness of the present moment.