the scavenger - anne

Mary Shelley wrote (paraphrased) that there is nothing more painful than a great and sudden change. Change is not all we make it out to be. A new year begins, and people are constantly talking about how this year, they’re going to change, they’re going to change for the better.

Those who seek, thanks to a New Year’s resolution, to change do not always think this decision through. Perhaps this is why such resolutions seldom last. They think about the end of change, which is often (though not always) a beautiful thing; they do not think of the process of change or the crushing weight of it and the fact that one has to either die instantly or continually cry out, “More weight!” as did Giles Corey.

Of course, I speak of this as if I am not guilty of all of this myself, all of this self-deceit about what change is. I still do it sometimes. I lie and say I’ll change and tell myself it will be easy. How can it be easy when I know it is not?

Many of us do not change because we want to, but rather because we must. Rather than resolution, I might argue that this is the most common reason for change, because, while I agree with Shelley that a great and sudden change is horrible, slow change, too, can induce a great amount of dread. I know it well.

I was forced to change. It was a change, or fall silent like everyone else on the dying Tree. I was the worm split in two, wriggling away from the shovel. I became something like both Victor Frankenstein and his Monster. I was the Creator and the Created. I was an architect using the free will with which I’m told I’ve been endowed. I had no choice but to become these things through the force of my own will.

I am a new sprout, perhaps. Maybe I’ll wither or maybe I won’t. I will watch, sadly, as those on the sick tree grapple onto it desperately (even as branches crack) and placate themselves with the idea that the tree was always this way.

When I was young, when your mother’s mind started to go

When she smoked in nursing homes and got kicked

From one to the other, as you were driving me to visit her

An hour away (no one near would take her anymore)

I would look out the windows at all that sprawling, monotonous,

Midwest farmland, you used to tell me, and you told me more than once,

“I’d rather commit a crime, and get locked up for it,

Than go to a nursing home.”

Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t have the power to do anything

And they lied to me, to you, they said it was temporary.

And then your car was sold, your pets rehomed,

And then your beautiful, antique white house was hollowed out

Just like your mother’s was, that house out in the boonies,

That decaying farm house where you grew up.

All she wanted to do, all she ever talked about

As her mind went, as she went from facility to facility,

Was home, going home.

You did the same.

First published in The Solitude Diaries, Ab Incunabulis