tempus edax rerum

I think this metaphor was part of a feminism course, but its wider resonance has never left me. Its relevance to life often applies. Here and now, in the eyes of the doctor, I am just neurotic and self-obsessed. The more I do to be listened to as a human being, the more I strengthen my role as neurotic and self-obsessed. The less she listens to me the more I tell or show her that I'm suffering. The more I tell or show her I’m suffering the more she thinks I am neurotic and self-obsessed. Each time, my role is reinforced and my role overrides my humanity. I become less human in her eyes. I am a type. I annoy her and waste her time […].

No part of me wants to go to the doctor. I’ve come to dread it, to feel in it an absolute humiliation. I see her about insomnia as seldom as I can and when I go it is always for something specific; a prescription or, as before, a blood test. […] I wondered if it would be possible to have another blood test, I say. Everything I read about insomnia says you should rule out any underlying medical cause, and that hasn’t been done. I know it’s a long shot, but it would help me. Just to eliminate other causes would help me.

She turns to her computer and is silent. Finally, without any eye contact, she says, This is not a shop. […]

Rage and exhaustion are much the same sensation, I discover, a flame struggling out of the same dead fire. Anger is alive, energetic, object-oriented, but rage is what’s left, eating itself alive. Rage and exhaustion eat me alive. […] A lifetime of courting favours and having manners and asking nicely and never minding, never minding if the answer is no. »

Absolutely insane lines to just drop in the middle of an academic text btw. Feeling so normal about this.

I botanized obsessively during that difficult time. Every day I learned new plants by their Latin names. I wandered about the woods that winter, good for little else, examining the bark of leafless trees. As wildflowers began to bloom in the spring, I carried my guidebooks with me, and filled a fat notebook as I identified the plants, their habitats, habits and dates of blooming. I had to write them down, for my brain, unaccustomed to exercise, was now on overload.

One spring afternoon, I was walking back down my lane after getting the mail. I had two fine new flowers to look up when I got back to the cabin. [...] The sun was slanting through new leaves, and the air was fragrant with wild cherry (Prunus serotina: Prunus —plum, serotina —late blooming) blossoms, which my bees were working eagerly. I stopped to watch them, standing in the sunbeam. The world appeared to have been running along quite nicely without my even noticing it. Quietly, gratefully, I discovered that a part of me that had been off somewhere nursing grief and pain had returned. [...]

Once back, I set about doing all the things that one does when one returns from lunch. I cleared the desk and tended to the messages that others had left. I had been gone for a long time, so there was quite a pile to clear away before I could settle down to the work of the afternoon of my life, the work of building a new kind of order, a structure on which a fifty-year-old woman can live her life alone, at peace with herself and the world around her. »

There would be more time. I pictured myself moving through the quiet house. I saw myself in the garden – my face, my back, my hands changed by not saying anything to anyone day after day. I saw the sheets I would wash and hang out to dry and fold and put away. The short showers I would take. The short hair I would have. I would put on the same clothes every morning and hang them on a hook every night. I was an old woman who looked like an old man.

When I would leave the house, I would take my solitariness with me. I would roll down the grocery store aisles neither fast nor slow and put only a few items in my cart, not worrying about the cost of the cheese and sometimes buying eight of the same frozen meal. I would make no chitchat with clerks or retired neighbors. Sometimes I might accept a dinner invitation, and I would bring a gift for the host (sometimes a young couple new to the block, sometimes an old friend who had known me with you), but it would be a relief to everyone when I left without fail at exactly eight-thirty making no excuses.

I realise now that when I was playing these silent movies of life after our life, you were still there. You were sitting with me, the two of us alone in the theatre, still together. This sadness is not an empty church and not an empty house. It is the whole empty world and I am in it and it is in me. 

[…]

I wanted to grieve while I still had the solace of you. »

I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed.

MY OWN THOUGHTS by Helena Minginowicz (Polish, b. 1984)