Life in Capital Letters

Flared nostril, buzzing blood, thick blood causing heart to beat palpitatingly. Here comes the exposition. Nerves light up like lights on a switchboard - all because i’m going home.

It’s not just going home. It’s the drive through southern fields, punctuated by bovine smell and rotting shacks-turned-greenhouses for kudzu. What am I saying, the south is one big greenhouse it seems, on summer nights especially when the sound of cicadas floats magically on air so humid its like being in a terrarium. The Great Southern Terrarium.

It’s the wondering what things have changed in my absence, though secretly knowing nothing has changed. It’s the anxiety of the questions that will come, the inquiries about life away from here, about a golden future that supposedly lies ahead of me, all because I’ve already taken the first step and gotten the hell out. Perhaps they’re right.

It’s knowing that the family is still here, entrenched forever with the weight of generations, like gravity pushing down the huge stone monument, lower and lower into the ground. It’s a sick grandmother, a lonely mother. It’s old “friends” who will want to help me drink my sorrow away and make themselves feel better in the process. It’s one particular old friend, the one that got away.

I pull onto the exit ramp and feel an ambush of joy bubbling in my stomach and chest, I admit I’m taken by surprise at the happiness of being back in the brooding southern city.
I drive familiar veins flowing to the black and weak heart of the city, now an Innercity like the ones on the news, but it’s where I grew up and perhaps it was an innercity then too. Some part of me is ecstatic that the putrefied places are still putrefied, and even that the gangrene has spread.

I arrive at the mill house my grandmother has resided in for 25 years, step out of the car to smell the earthy, leaf-rot smell of the overgrown yard, mixed with the smell of exhaust from the Calhoun Expressway and a certain garbageysewercatlitter smell that permeates parts of the city, parts like this. Even the house is starting to smell of decay, but somehow it smells good to me - preferable and more real than the vomit and stale beer smell of Collegetown.

I never thought I’d be happy to be here.

Here I am, I think. Old hymns come to mind, and floods of memories about being a child in church, crawling up the red carpeted center aisle once, calling the priest “Jesus”. And so, standing outside the house I grew up in, I feel all these pangs of loss, of innocence and family and the fleeting sense of home I had, once.
Nervous, lonely, tinglingly alive -
This is the homecoming, but I know that I will always be prodigal.

Dine on family tradition, dine cannibalistically, opportunistically like wolves on each others’ news and various misfortunes. I’m sure now that this is how it always was, but now it all feels reversed.
I, the once ignored and silent child, am now the star, the go-getter of legend, well we all knew one of us would make it (though we’re surprised its you).

I try to make my new life sound interesting. Important. It’s not of course, any more than any of this is -
And they seem momentarily proud, as proud as these worn down people are capable of anymore. Pride that’s like autumn leaves - ardently colored giving the impression of fire and life but really just ready for giving up and decay.

I guess we’re all just fertilizer for future generations, I know now that I will be too. But somewhere I feel that I must believe in or coerce myself into doing grand things that perhaps only I will consider grand (because mom and you all and the world are long past patting me on the back) and only later will I look back like we all do and realize how foolish I was for thinking that my one momentary action in the billions of permutative others would change Anything, or me, you and so on. But I must do it anyway.
I must because I do. I will, because I am.

So grandmother, that one single person who understands, silently and patiently.. is frail. Ill is too detached for this, ill is for other people like world leaders and friends of friends. “Taken ill” “Fallen ill” “Bedridden” or how about “in pain, but actually the emotional pain is worse like she’s smothered in crushed pride, and the frailty of her situation is heightened by everyone acting like they’re walking on eggshells instead of treating her like a person anymore and they’re beginning to wrench control from her like she can’t make any decisions for herself anymore, but goddamnit she’s sick not senile”. Yeah, kind of like that, actually.
Except that’s really just a rough sketch.

I can smell a sweet insulin smell clinging to her skin. It mixes with the medicinal smell that always seems to hang over people in the few years before they die, like a little black rain cloud of doom letting you know, hey this person is on their way out.
The woman who was always so thick skinned and prideful is now wrapped in skin like tissue, her veins bulge out of it, bones are yellowy white underneath, scratches and bruises appear at every movement it seems. Strange, though, that her face is still young looking somehow, girlish almost and I try to imagine all the things her now defeated body has felt, the things her pained eyes have seen.

It’s so hard for me. We try to include her in the dinner, she has trouble eating now though, pukes up her food sometimes before her slow body with its dulled reactions can process. She always wants so badly to make it to the bathroom, to have any and all of this happen to her in private. The cruelest thing about Death is having it happen to you while everyone watches.
I know sometimes pride is all we have.

I’m torn between acting as though this is happening, acting like she’s dying, and pretending as though it’s not. I’m scared - of offending her, of letting this precious time, like so much time before now, slip away, of her dying with feelings of loneliness - which I know is in many ways inevitable, because we all die alone.

I’ve written her a million letters that never made it to her, that stayed clutched in a trembling hand, letters that sounded too contrived and depressing. This woman raised me and I can’t even find the words to say I love her, and I add this to my pile of failures, to my record of stunted growth.

Soon it will be too late and this makes me even more bitter, frustrated with myself and with my family for the things we do and don’t do. I struggle to maintain a horribly fake, bubbly demeanor. I tiredly try to prove that I’m stronger than you all, that I’m determined to keep my head above.
But I know I’ll just go home and cry, sink further into the loneliness that I inherited, that capitalizes on my rapidly dulling and dying dreams like kudzu on a rotting shack..

23-Oct-2006