Thursday, Sept. 15This is my diary, my pathetic little conversation with myself. No doubt I will burn it halfway through. I’ve never been one to finish anything. Mother used to say this was because I was born during a full moon, but like everything she says, it doesn’t make a lick of sense.
It isn’t even the beginning
of the year. Or even the month. It’s not even my birthday. I’m starting,
typical of me, impulsively, in the middle of September. I’m starting with the
facts.
I’m thirty-eight years old.
I’ve slept with nineteen and a half men.
I live in Alaska, not the
wild parts but smack in the middle of Anchorage, with the Walmart and Home
Depot squatting over streets littered with moose poop.
I’m divorced. Last month my
ex-husband paid child support in ptarmigan carcasses, those tiny bones snapping
like fingers when I tried to eat them.
I have one son, age eight and
already in fourth grade. He is gifted, his teachers gush, remarking how unusual
it is for such a child to come out of such unique (meaning underprivileged,
meaning single parent, meaning they don’t think I’m very smart) circumstances.
I work as a waitress in a
Mexican restaurant. This is a step up: two years ago I was at Denny’s.
Yesterday, I was so worried
about money I stayed home from work and tried to drown myself in the bathtub. I
sank my head under the water and held my breath, but my face popped up in less
than a minute. I tried a second time, but by then my heart wasn’t really in it
so I got out, brushed the dog hair off the sofa and plopped down to watch Oprah on the cable channel.
What happened next was a
miracle, like Gramma used to say. No angels sang, of course, and there was none
of that ornery church music. Instead, a very tall woman (who might have been an
angel if heaven had high ceilings) waved her arms. There were sweat stains
under her sweater, and this impressed me so much that I leaned forward; I knew
something important was about to happen.
Most of what she said was New
Age mumbo-jumbo, but when she mentioned the diary, I pulled myself up and rewrapped
the towel around my waist. I knew she was speaking to me, almost as if this was
her purpose in life, to make sure these words got directed my way.
She said you didn’t need a
fancy one; it didn’t even need a lock, like those little-girl ones I kept as a
teenager. A notebook, she said, would work just fine. Or even a bunch of papers
stapled together. The important thing was doing it. Committing yourself to
paper every day, regardless of whether anything exciting or thought-provoking
actually happens.
“Your thoughts are gold,” the
giant woman said. “Hold them up to the light and they shine.”
I was crying by then, sobbing
into the dog’s neck. It was like a salvation, like those traveling preachers
who used to come to town. Mother would never let us go but I snuck out with
Julie, who was a Baptist. Those preachers believed, and while we were there in
that tent, we did too.
This is what I’m hoping for,
that my words will deliver me something. Not the truth, exactly. But solace.
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ReplyDeleteExcellent excerpt.