Losing True

Hello darkness

I am depressed again. I have tried to put a spin on that sentence that would cheer it up, give it some kind of jaunty ironic twist, make it less depressed sounding, but nothing's coming to me. This time I guess I could say I have the tools to get better faster, that I understand what's wrong and what it means. I promised myself when I started feeling better this summer: You'll do X or you'll do Y if you start to feel that way again. Yet I didn't count on—apparently didn't remember—how numbing the effect is. You see the tools from across the room and realize that there is no way you have the energy to get up and get them. And it's hard to trust those tools, because here I am back down.

One thing that helps is that this summer I went as far down as anyone can go without ending up the hospital. I know that. I suppose another person might have landed in the hospital, might not have been able to fight hard enough to avoid it.

Friends of mine helped me celebrate my birthday in September, and as we sat at a picnic table outside I found myself suddenly talking about quitting alcohol. They say in AA that when you get up to tell your story, you never know what's going to come out. I just started to talk and I noticed everyone around the table getting quiet, just listening, so I kept talking. It didn't seem hard to say.

Afterward one of my friends came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder. "Do you realize how strong you are?" she asked me. It surprised me. Is that what I am? 

I'm holding on to that now, that even though the wrecking ball has swung back into the picture, I can dodge it, or catch it somehow and push it clear of my life. Man, I hate the weight of that thing. It's heavier than the world. And turning to see it pulling back as it picks up momentum to swing toward me, having to position my feet to brace myself for it, that is where the exhaustion is. 

Get out of the way, I want to yell to everyone around me. This thing has my name on it.

The fox

As I’ve been feeling better and the dust settles and (your favorite cliche here) so on, unconnected imagery that popped up all summer is morphing into symbol, then meaning. 

In mid-July, I discovered a new dirt road had been cut so that construction vehicles could make their way from a main road in town through a big and beautiful townhouse development.  The houses are pleasant to look at, and they wind gracefully along a pond, and it’s all very scenic. So one night I drove past the No Trespassing signs to see what was what, and I parked in front of a just-framed building. It was almost dusk, and it had been a gorgeous summer day. No one was around, and I wanted to walk through the new house to see how it was laid out. There was no sound but my flip-flops on the dusty floors. I went upstairs and looked out across the pond through the window holes. I thought how nice it would be to live there, and how much I enjoyed building my house, the one I had to leave when X-man got fired. Then I walked down the framed stairs and stood in the open front doorway. I startled a fox that must have been right at the front steps. It ran off a bit, and then stopped and looked at me. It stood there for quite a while, then trotted off.

A fox has so much literary muscle behind it as an image, and then, they’re beautiful and strange: not dog, not cat, but something in between.

A few days later as I was driving in my neighborhood (which is a mile or so from the new development) a fox was running through a yard and stopped to watch me drive by. (I of course romanticized that it was the same fox.) The next night, as I walked a block from my house, I had that weird sensation of being watched, and I turned around and saw a fox sitting on the edge of a yard. Just sitting, with its white-tipped tail curled demurely around its front feet, and looking at me. (I am not making this up.) Since then, I see the fox ambling around the neighborhood all the time. (Again, I’ve decided it knows me, and now when it sees me, it can go about its business of hunting or partying or whatever foxes do; it knows I won’t interfere.)

Last night as I was about to let the dog out, I held his collar and paused to check the yard first; he was going wild about something and, well, the skunking he had in the spring is still fresh in my memory. That’s when I saw the fox in my yard. It was right in the garden on the corner of my property, having turned at the sound of the door opening to look in our direction. I pushed the dog back into the house and stepped outside. The fox kept looking at me. It was big, but it was so dark out I couldn’t see its color and so I’m not sure if it was possibly a coyote. It was much taller than I would have thought, and its stare was pure curiosity with no fear. It sniffed the rocks at the edge of my garden and then trotted across the street.

I’m tempted to feed it, to tame it. I fantasize that if I opened the door of my car as I drove by, it would jump in.

I imagine it’s trying to tell me something, that it’s asking: well? Are you coming?