We could not ask for more

This is one of the most amazing videos I've ever seen. The horses are so utterly calm, perhaps due to the skill of their riders. If one of them panicked, it might all be over.

It has been, incredibly, almost two months since I lost my best friend David. Right now it's a lonesome trail indeed, for I don't even know if he will have a memorial. I have to wait to hear, there's nothing I can do. Things were complicated with him in his small community, with his relationships, with his church. He may have been excommunicated for doing some sort of bizarre healing. (Imagine, trying to heal someone!). For a while he was involved with a druggie, and had a very hard time scraping her off. Yet he was a genius in his own way, and his calm acceptance of me in my time of hell was a balm when no one else seemed to understand or care.

I hope I offered him similar solace. But the trail remains teetering, narrow, requiring or demanding a faith I just don't have. David had it in spades, and I honestly don't know how he sustained it in a too-short, too-difficult, largely solitary life. 

Some people seem to come from nowhere, to have no one, no "people". Certainly he had no roots, or else they were vague. When someone I know on Facebook finally found David's great-aunt (or someone like that) and told her David had passed, the answer was, oh, thanks for telling me. I'll pass it along to his half-brother.

Families can be, as Sylvia Fraser once famously said, "killing fields". Friends are, as the saying goes, God's way of apologizing for them. I spent Saturday at a soccer game trying not to weep, while my granddaughter, glorious Caitlin, she who had been so close to me for so many years, literally turned her back on me and would not speak to me or even look at me or say hello. Raw from the loss of David, I felt my heart drop out.

What had I done? I must have done something. At half-time I couldn't stand it any more and switched chairs with Bill, sitting next to Jim, her other grandpa. He asked me what was wrong and I told him. "Well, maybe she's not so much turning away from you as turning toward her phone." It was a wry observation, but it gave me pause.

At one point I thought I heard my daughter whisper to her, "This is embarrassing!" But you can't physically turn a 15-year-old kid around and force her to speak a few words to her grandma. And adolescent girls - you can hear them ticking, you know? Just waiting for hissing pinwheels and Roman candles to explode.

It was awful, but my husband kept saying, don't take it personally, she's just being a kid. But how could I feel so wretchedly alone in my own family, my only refuge in the whole world?

Today, totally unexpectedly, she agreed to have lunch with us (maybe, just maybe, prompted by her mother?), and for a half-hour chattered away in her usual, delightful, wry, funny way. A totally different person? Or two sides of the same person? Maybe she was just honest enough with herself on Saturday to say: I don't want to talk to Grandma today, so I won't. Most of us don't have that luxury with people.

Or she was just being a hopeless brat, selfish and inconsiderate. There's that.

There's no point to this, at all, except to say that I had to wait it out, not fuss (for surely that would have made it worse, made her NEVER want to talk to me). I had to find an atom of faith in me somewhere. With my harrowing family history, estrangement seems to almost disembowel me. I know that it is generally irreversible, and to lose any more of my tiny band of kin might be fatal.

But it was just some mood, wasn't it? Why the change of heart? Or did Shannon really take her aside and say, look, you wouldn't talk to her at the soccer game and it was embarrassing, so TALK TO HER this time - ?

At this point, I don't even care. I'm just glad this wasn't a crying day, but tomorrow might be. I just hope I hear something. I hope I get to stand with people who loved David too. The trail is lonesome, and it is long. But please, just don't let it go cold.

Outward bound upon a ship that sails no ocean
Outward bound, it has no crew but me and you
All alone when just a minute ago the shore was filled with people
With people that we knew

Outward bound upon a journey without ending
Outward bound, uncharted waters beneath our bow
Far behind, the green familiar shore is fading into time
And time has left us now

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

Outward bound upon a ship with tattered sail
Outward bound upon a crooked lonesome trail
Things we learn, we'll just be satisfied in knowing
And we'll tell it to our kids as a fairy tale

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

So farewell, adieu, so long, vaya con Dios
May they find whatever they are looking for
Remember when the wine was better than ever again
We could not ask, we could not ask for more
We could not ask, we could not ask for more

Are we still friends?

The pitfall trap

Have I been feeding this beast (my blog) regularly? Depends on what you mean by regularly. I usually consider that to mean "every day", but to my shock, I now see I haven't posted anything much all week. And I think I know why that is.

Something will sneak up on you sometimes, something that snags some issue from the past. Ten months ago I had a serious falling-out with someone whom I considered to be a reasonably close friend for a very long time (he was maybe 6.5 on my friend-o-meter). Then, this past Easter Sunday, and without any warning whatsoever, he died. I only found out about his death because I was part of a mass mailout: somehow I had been left in his email address book, maybe because he didn't bother to remove it.

What does it mean when someone dies, and there was unfinished business? Maybe it WAS finished, and that was the whole trouble. I ask myself sometimes: Glass Character, why is it that you seem to be cutting certain people out of your life? And I always come to the same conclusion. They're people who, for one reason or another, appear to have seriously lost their way. In particular, this applies to their personal integrity.

It happens. It happens that people begin to live in a way that is not only deceptive, but deceitful. It happens that a person who has been refreshingly tart turns irreversibly sour. It happens that people begin to use you as a dumping ground for resentments that they're too afraid to meet at the source. Or maybe it's just more convenient that way.

So what happened? It's not as if I have lost all my friends, but I will no longer give quarter to anyone who sucks my energy away, or demeans me in any way, or hauls their support out from under me and still expects ME to support THEM (i. e. act as a bottomless receptacle for their toxic waste).

This most recent shock - and shock it was - has had yet more shocks attached to it. When he suddenly died of a massive stroke, my former friend left his longtime partner completely in the lurch financially - not merely penniless, but in an abyss of debt that he cannot possibly cope with. This is so extreme that it's quite possible he will end up homeless and/or have to declare bankruptcy, not exactly a desirable legacy from a 25-year relationship. The community has set up a GoFundMe account for him which so far has only taken in a few hundred dollars.

How could he not have known they were in such dire straits? I don't believe he did. I think he just trusted his partner to take care of him. In some ways, he was like an old-fashioned wife who has no idea of the state of her husband's finances until he dies. Then comes the nasty surprise, and the crushing burden that accompanies it. 

An important aspect of love is financial responsibility, though many people would be incredulous to hear me say that. Or even appalled: dirty, crass money, attached to something as sublime and ideal as Love? Well, think of it. One must live - isn't that so? To live, one needs financial support of some kind. Unless you think you're going to live forever, you must make provisions for your partner, especially if that partner is more than twenty years younger than you (meaning he may have another 30 to 40 years left to live, with no significant means of support except a disability pension). If you don't make these provisions, if you don't think about it or bother about it, it's not only arrogant but thoughtless, ignorant, and - I think - cruel.

Ten months ago when we had our falling-out, I was reacting to something that I now see reflected this arrogance and thoughtlessness, well-concealed by his "sweet" public persona. I felt the ground being cut away under my feet, destroying what I thought was his support. But then, being truly supportive was something he did not seem to know how to do, or even have any interest in.

Suddenly I knew nothing, I shouldn't even be taking one step towards the issue at hand because I had not had the years and years of training he had, and blah blah blah blah blah. He had to be right, always, and his righteousness had to be acknowledged. That's the way it went, those were the rules, and I wouldn't play by them.

My reaction and throwing the friendship into reverse is only a particle, not even that, compared to what his partner is going through now. He has less than nothing: he's in the red, the minuses, though to what extent I don't know. How could this happen? How could two ageing men living quietly in one of Canada's favorite retirement communities get themselves into such a godawful mess? I have a bad feeling about it, and it seems to confirm some suspicions that there was a lot going on in this case that is deeply disturbing to contemplate.

But I can't write about it now.

When people die, they are often elevated to sainthood. I'm sure this will happen tomorrow afternoon at his memorial service. It's just something we do, a social custom, or else a superstition (don't ever speak ill of the dead or they will rise up out of their grave and fly around your house making pictures jump off the wall and going "Wooooooo!"). Suddenly we can't say enough about them, though it's not really about the person who died at all. It's to make US feel better about harbouring all those resentments and negative feelings, to pretend they don't exist at all. 

But sometimes they exist for a reason.

It's Friday now, and it hasn't been a good week for blogging because I just feel kind of flat. It depresses me when someone I respected turns out to be this irresponsible. Or should I say: this big an asshole. For that's what he was, or he wouldn't have held his partner hostage to a crushing, stigmatizing financial burden he can never repay.  At its worst, debt is dishonest. Even at its best, it's like living on top of a gigantic hole with a fragile floor over it (and there is a name for that, by the way: it's called a "pitfall trap") that will barely hold your weight. Sooner or later disaster strikes, and it all caves in. Then the person you supposedly love the most must fall into the abyss.

To quote Bob Dylan, whom I've been thinking a lot about lately: "But oh, what kind of love is this/Which goes from bad to worse?"

We carried you in our arms

On Independence Day

And now you’d throw us all aside

And put us on our way

Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun

Would treat a father so

To wait upon him hand and foot

And always tell him, “No?”

Tears of rage, tears of grief

Why must I always be the thief?

Come to me now, you know

We’re so alone

And life is brief

We pointed out the way to go

And scratched your name in sand

Though you just thought it was nothing more

Than a place for you to stand

Now, I want you to know that while we watched

You discover there was no one true

Most ev’rybody really thought

It was a childish thing to do

Tears of rage, tears of grief

Why must I always be the thief?

Come to me now, you know

We’re so alone

And life is brief

It was all very painless

When you went out to receive

All that false instruction

Which we never could believe

And now the heart is filled with gold

As if it was a purse

But, oh, what kind of love is this

Which goes from bad to worse?

Tears of rage, tears of grief

Why must I always be the thief?

Come to me now, you know

We’re so alone

And life is brief

TAG-ON: Obsessed with Dylan again, and re-reading one of the bios, I had a bizarre experience last night. Didn't sleep worth a shit, didn't even think I WAS asleep all night, because I kept seeing or experiencing a long series of short films about Dylan. These were all from different times in his life/career and not in any order. They looked sort of like they were on panels or things like piano keys and I went from one to the other, and I didn't want to see them but couldn't stop. Sometimes I felt like I was IN the movies, but probably not. I wanted to get out of them and felt like the movies went on all night and I got no sleep at all. I was full of anxiety because I don't do well when I don't sleep, and serious sleep deprivation has been known to make me go completely crazy. But when I woke up, I said, Jesus, Margaret, don't you know those were dreams, and if they were dreams you must've been asleep?

TAG-ON TWO: While Dylaning around on the internet last night, I found a crazy and incredible speech he made at the Grammys in 2015, after receiving some sort of award. It just went on and on. Normally if he gets an award, he nods tersely, takes the award and goes home. In this case, God knows how long the speech took, but this is the part I want to share with you because it moved me so, and somehow ties in with the video I used to illustrate this post.

Oh, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Joan Baez. She was the queen of folk music then and now. She took a liking to my songs and brought me with her to play concerts, where she had crowds of thousands of people enthralled with her beauty and voice.

People would say, "What are you doing with that ragtag scrubby little waif?" And she'd tell everybody in no uncertain terms, "Now you better be quiet and listen to the songs." We even played a few of them together. Joan Baez is as tough-minded as they come. Love. And she's a free, independent spirit. Nobody can tell her what to do if she doesn't want to do it. I learned a lot of things from her. A woman with devastating honesty. And for her kind of love and devotion, I could never pay that back.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Stop the clock (short fiction)

“Marcie! Hey it’s good to see you!”

“Hi, Julie.”

Julie looked her up and down. Up and down, then smiled brightly, her eyes glistening like wet caramels. Then came the single syllable.

“Wow.”

It wasn’t a “wow” like “wow, is that your new car?”. It was a “wow” like, “What happened to your new car?” It had a tiny backlilt, an inflection that was just a little bit “off”.

Marcie knew it wasn’t a good “wow”. It was almost a disappointed “wow”, but strained through a sort of Facebook screen so she could never be pinned down or held responsible.

“Wow yourself.”

“Yeah.!” The “yeah” started off as a high squeal, then sailed down to a whisper.

Julie looked away for just a second with a sort of reflexive hair-flip, like something you’d do in junior high. Marcie half-expected her to start chewing on the end of her braid. Then she brighted herself again.

“So what are you, y’knowwww – “

“Oh, same old thing.”

“Did you ever get – “

“No.”

“So are you self-publishing now? Whatever happened to that novel? You know, the one about the cruise ship and the - ”

“That was quite a while ago.”

“I can see that.” (See what? “That”.)

She hair-flipped again. “So what do you do now exactly, you know? I mean.”

“The same thing you do, Julie.”

“Oh, of course!” She kept looking Marcie up and down, her eyes flipping from head to mid-thigh, though pretending she wasn’t doing it.

“You know, it’s been an awfully long time since we’ve seen each other, Julie.”

“Tell me about it!”, with a well-practiced “oh, yeah!” eye-roll.

It was then that she noticed something funny about Julie. Or at least, she thought it was funny. She had a sort of glaze over her, like something you’d pour over cinnamon buns, or maybe a shell of amber. Glossy. Her smile was glossy too.

Had she done something to herself?

Marcie believed that, as you aged, your face decided to go one way or the other. It either went Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy looked almost the same in the ‘60s, well, at least both of them had normal faces, and now Shatner was round as a pumpkin and Nimoy looked like a burnt-out old matchstick.

Skinny faces got fat, fat faces got skinny. Gaunt-looking people rounded out and softened, as if their inner selves were working their way out. The healthy-looking ones housing gaunt souls ultimately lost the battle of looking like someone else.

But there was a third possibility, and that was to stop. Stop time, stop the clock ticking. Marcie always thought there was another word for that: “death”, but apparently not, because everywhere she looked these days, she saw people who had decided to stop the clock

Except that there was a cost.

As Julie pretended not to look at Marcie’s burgeoning weight, the little dewlappy thing that hung below her rounded chin, the lizard skin on her arms, Marcie pretended not to look at Julie’s House of Wax immobility, the shellacked quality which was now considered highly desirable, even as she heard the creepy murmur of Vincent Price in the background.

Some even turned the clock back. Ageing backwards, which was really some trick. If they kept on going, they’d be fetal in a few years, or disappearing altogether, their molecules just coming apart: poof!

“So, I guess you have a pretty big one coming up pretty soon.”

“A pretty big one?” For some insane reason Marcie thought “bowel movement”.

“Birthday!” She almost sang it, lilting high on the first syllable.

“Oh, Julie, how did you ever remember that?”

“I did your horoscope, silly, don’t you remember? Look at that.” She plucked a hair off the shoulder of Marcie’s blouse and looked at it.

“It’s a hair.”

“Yes, I know, but it’s - “

“Didn’t your hair used to be -  wait, now what color was it, I mean before?”

“Before what?” Julie was starting to sound defensive. She could dish it out, but she definitely couldn’t take it.

“Before the Jurassic Period,” Marcie wanted to say, but she didn’t. All the nasty things she left unsaid were going to kill her, one of these days, like a great landslide falling down on her.

“You’re still slim,” she said instead. “How do you do it?”

“Oh! I cleanse. Every month. High colonics, they’re awesome! You just purge away all that gunk in your system. All those toxins.”

“I thought you were vegan.”

“Oh, but vegetables have chemicals on them no matter what, because of the water supply.”

“I still eat cows.” She was becoming extremely depressed. How to get rid of her?

“You’re going to kill yourself, Marcie,” Julie murmured, pulling out and using the appropriate facial expression before tucking it away again.

(“Yes, if this conversation goes on any longer.” Another rock in the landslide.)

“My grandmother ate cows.”

“But they were different cows.”

Marcie burst out laughing.  She couldn’t keep the laugh to herself.

“I should say they were.”

“No, you don’t understand, they weren’t GMO cows.” Marcie thought this was something about General Motors or something. Her lack of interest finally must have registered on Julie.

“Listen, sweetie, I have to go now, but I want to give you something" (rummaging in her voluminous shoulder-bag) “- or actually, a few things, they’re freebies from the gym, you know? And the salon and stuff. Take them.” She thrust a wad of things in Marcie’s hands with a tight smile, turned around abruptly and gave a little Liza Minnelli backwards wave over her shoulder before flouncing away.

Marcie stood in the street shuffling through her treasures. A coupon for Turbo-Charge Fat Blaster Weight Loss Supplement, $2.00 off the first 60 capsules. An ad for a 60-ounce mega-capacity twenty-speed macerating Power-Juicer, 90-day trial free of charge! “Look 20 years younger in 20 minutes with Botuline, available NOW from your dentist!” A little packet of shampoo from a trendy salon, something called Blow your Head Off!, to mask “the grey” (grey sounding as ominous as some creepy space alien, and as undesirable). An ad for dental veneers with a woman smiling like a piano, showing every blinding-white tooth in her head.

God, she must think I’m a disgusting mess.

Just plaster things on the outside, and run-run-run. It’ll catch up with you one day. Sooner or later all your molecules will come apart, never to be replaced. When your molecules do come apart, there will literally be nothing left. Is that why you draw back so hard, by trying to minus-out the years you’ve slogged on this earth? Keep hitting the reset button. But what about your mind? Can you erase that too? I suppose you can. It’s done in a slightly different way.

They were friends then, quite good friends, had many excited conversations about this and that, though they often had a barbed quality to them, a putting-down-with-eyeroll. It was necessarily for them to have a mutual enemy or threat in order to really get along. Julie seemed like a super-coper, always on top of every situation, so Marcie was stunned when she suddenly, floridly fell apart. She had always been a little frantic, but this was something else, as if the tiny dancing ballerina on top of the music box had gradually accelerated until it was spinning a million miles an hour. This wasn’t any penny-ante breakdown, it was wholesale craziness, hallucinations, delusions, the works.

That sounds awful, Marcie thought, just heartless! It was pain and suffering, for sure, but it was funny how everyone around Julie seemed to suffer more than she did. And it was her family who decided she needed “shock”, something her sardonic old great-uncle called “Edison’s medicine”.

The shock re-set her for sure, but things weren’t the same after that. It was as if some mute but powerful presence deep in her psyche said: not this way; THAT way, and gave her a huge shove in the direction of artificiality. This was the way to make it. This was survival, solace, and something she could be really good at. As the years passed, her new strategy dovetailed beautifully with what the culture expected of her: the new Julie was popular at last, and because of that, Marcie just faded into the background. Not that Marcie went backwards: Julie just turned and walked away.

Now, it was: Wow. Look at you. All right. I’ve made decisions, more compromises than I ever thought I would have to. I am no prize. For this reason, I have one less friend in the world, though I suspect I lost her a long time ago. Life is inherently lonely, isn’t it? Aren’t the sweet fleeting times the very worst, because of how they always go away?

And why is it that when things are good, I mean, really good – as sweet as they can possibly be - we are always the last ones to know? Better not to recognize such beauty, even in ourselves, lest we cry out to a heedless universe in last-ditch desperation and despair: "Freeze!"

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

When all the joy within you dies

It's not often I find something this good on Facebook. In fact, it's not often I find anything at all. I have learned to "unfriend" boring, draining and/or toxic people, but you can't see their ugly insides, at least not until much later, when they post something so casually offensive it makes your hair stand on end.

There's a special circle in hell for people with toxic relatives. These are practiced happiness-suckers who siphon the life out of you, then ask you why you look so drawn and tired.

These are the twisters - the emotional corkscrews who have a phenomenal way of turning their abusiveness around and insisting that you abused them. How dare you accuse me of being abusive!  Obviously you're vindictive, heartless, and a liar to boot (they inform you, while you slowly bleed to death from the corkscrew stuck in your heart). 

Oh. The happiness-suckers. Schoolteachers: you couldn't get away from THEM, could you? Their shaming tactics, their favoritism (merely a weapon to make the marginalized, persecuted kids feel even worse) their petty dictatorship to make up for the complete lack of satisfaction in their lives. 

Spouses. This can be exquisite torture that goes on for decades. I've known more than one widow who could barely disguise her glee at her husband's memorial service, then immediately booked the cruise she was never allowed to take while she was oppressed by a sour old tyrant.

But the worst is. . . this.

When it's your friend. A close friend. A friend you used to share so much with, it seemed you could almost read each other's thoughts. It can't go on that way forever, can it? It can't. Worlds go by, days and nights, and at some point, one of the two begins to fade.

Something is happening, a growing joylessness, a caving-in. The desperately hoping friend (thinking, surely if I just try harder I can re-set this) just amps up her attempts to connect, scouring the internet for links to things her friend used to be interested in. But there is never a response to any of it. If they connect at all it's on the phone, and those calls are nothing like the soul-deep, stimulating discussions they used to have. They're perfunctory, and the passive friend asks all the same questions over and over again, ostensibly to display her interest but in actuality so that she never has to talk at all.

But then there are the longer emails. What are these about? People she does not know and does not care to know, the small-town small minds. Her friend frankly hates them, rants and seethes and spews bile, yet insists that she is always friendly with them and never says anything critical to them at all. Then signs off with, Thanks for listening, I feel so much better now!, the perfect hit-and-run.

The choked-off conversations become chronic, her acid criticism of everything and everyone acting like so much weed killer, destroyer of all enthusiasm.
Does she even realize what is going on? It might be like the proverbial frog in warm water, who does not notice the gradual increase in temperature until it is cooked.

Why does someone give up? Why does someone just accept their discontent and not fight against it, or not even acknowledge it or believe it's real? More to the point: why is this so draining to be around? Why is there a sense of a dusty drawer with nothing in it? 

Dead dreams are awfully inert, and posing is hollow. You can't hitch a Clydesdale to a race horse. But why does the race horse feel so bad? There is nothing more pathetic than a one-sided conversation, with one person running frantically back and forth hitting the ball from both sides of the net. It is humiliating; desperate. While the other person says nothing: not so much not caring as not even even noticing what is going on.

When you have been raised with silence and rejection as the norm (and by the way: the opposite of love isn't hate, as most people think, but indifference, just not caring one way or another), returning to it is agony. They say (and just who are "they" after all, a bunch of executioners?) that you invariably recreate the dynamics of your childhood in your adult relationships.

For years you play along, because for years you really did have a wonderful connection, but it dwindles and dwindles, and you feel a certain expectation to dwindle along with it. And you won't, because you can't. And then, when you finally do say something because you can't keep it to yourself any longer, you are subjected to disbelief (what are you talking about?), guilt, a sense of betrayal, a wounded (though perhaps never uttered) "how could you?" Or, even worse, an awful, artificial attempt to get the thing going again, inventing a sense of interest, asking after your dentist or the guy who fixes the roof. 

Life seems to kill some people, to steamroll them, but then again, some people's courage just collapses, and from then on they do life by rote. Risk nothing, gain nothing. And you realize you can't do it any more, especially not after you find out that your friend's husband casually hacked your emails and has been reading what you've been sending her. 

Friendship can be thrown into reverse, and it's an awful thing. It just hurts like hell, and of course YOU are seen as mean and selfish for claiming things are no longer satisfying. Bob Dylan said a couple of things - how is it Bob Dylan always knows how to hit it brilliantly on the head?: "He not busy being born is busy dying." And another one: "Her sin is her lifelessness."

After being destroyed in the fire of religion, I have no God left except life. But I know now that if you sin against life, there will be a cost.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

I wish I had a friend like me

In middle life, I've come to see
I wish I had a friend like me.
To gather flowers constantly,
I wish I had a friend like me.

The game of life is rough and long
My self-worth fails, I'm not too strong
But when a friend seems right and true
I'll give my all, compassion too.

I don't know why it twists around
These so-called friends are blaming-bound
They muss and mangle with my head -
Abandonment's my daily bread.

I've been assured, you didn't make
These people sour, it's their mistake
But friends are chosen, after all
You did this, see, you took the fall.

But when I watch while souls implode
I think I've hit the mother lode:
Like nomads in the desert sun
I'll pack my things, and wave, and run.

Blogger's note. It's hard to go through things like this and not write about them, but the person involved either won't look at it or, if she does, won't recognize herself. Funny how the hurt party suffers even more by feeling like a fool for trying to make the whole thing work. Twenty years is twenty years. But all this "God has a purpose for all things" and "everything happens for a reason" and Hallmarky sayings about people growing in different directions and it's no one's fault are BULLSHIT because real damage was done over a long period of time, not only unacknowledged but unrecognized. Martyrs can do no wrong; they inflict suffocation and guilt on others, and get their jollies from it because no one can reply in kind. My part in all this is that I fell for it.  I wish I had a friend like me.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Five deadly words you never want to hear

“I love you."

"Thank you!”

I heard this deadly five-word conversation on The Big Bang Theory not long ago, as part of Leonard and Penny’s six-year-long dance around each other. They sleep together; they don’t sleep together. They date; they don’t date. They see other people for a while, sometimes quite a while, and then. . .

And then poor, vulnerable Leonard drops the l-bomb.

Penny, completely disconcerted, reacts with a stunned silence, almost as if she's been slapped. Then blurts out the response that makes Leonard's heart sink into the floor.

"Thank you."

To lay oneself open in what may be the most vulnerable statement that exists, only to have it politely dismissed, indicates that the person you had all those tender, passionate feelings for dwells on a separate planet, and probably always will.

People assume this disastrous emotional misfire only happens in "relationships", which has somehow come to mean "boy-girl with sex". But it used to apply more broadly. I know about the l-bomb because it happened to me a few years ago, and though it wasn't BGWS, the script was almost exactly the same. The other person, someone I knew as a close friend through a 12-step program, probably believed they were responding appropriately and even kindly. Fairly. Isn’t that the right thing to say when you receive a compliment?

Of course. "Thank you" is a perfectly good response. 

Is "love" always seen as "romantic love" now and nothing else? I am beginning to wonder. Or do those three little words just cause certain people to turn tail and run?

In my case, it seems to me I’ve lived my life on the dark side of the moon, meaning I give much more than I receive. Oddly enough, I am often seen as selfish because what I give isn’t understood, or else isn’t the “right” thing and does not exactly fit the slot of what is required. What I have to give is suspect or too different, even if it represents an avalanche of love.

In fact, I think that’s the whole problem.

When love is doled out with an eyedropper, it does not exactly match an avalanche of love. When do things match in life? Never. But being on another planet, a very lonely one, is a whole different thing.

When, after years and years of dissatisfaction and pain, you finally break and begin to explain to the other person what you think is really going on, they are completely confused. Not only do they expect you to stick to the script (i. e. accept them exactly the way they are, even if they have had multiple drug slips and are going down for the third time), they are shocked and baffled and even offended when you deviate from it and don’t seem to care if you are finally expressing what you really feel.

But that’s not the purpose of the relationship. Not any more. It has become a chess game: your move; my move. If anyone deviates, it’s wrong and spoils the rhythm, requiring an immediate correction.

This has happened to me too many times, and not just in the perilous waters of 12-step groups where, in spite of a lot of smoke-blowing, emotional dishonesty and manipulation is practically the norm. I don’t know why I am always at the bottom end of the seesaw. I suppose the self-help gurus would say that I engineer it that way, that I make it happen myself (neatly letting all those abusive jerks off the hook: how they must love this theory!) in order to shortchange myself. And when you have grown up with alcoholism and sexual abuse as daily fare (completely denied by the family as nasty lies), perhaps it’s not hard to see why.

Any love I have seems to hang  by a spider’s thread. I’m an emotional sharecropper: “yes, massuh!” What’s the matter with me? I should be more grateful. Or so it seems. When your best intentions to help are met with an offended silence, when you risk being gutted by opening your soul ONE MORE TIME, when you make the ultimate statement and receive a handshake in return, it devastates in a way I cannot really describe.

I love you. Thanks! I’m dying inside. That's too bad!  I’m going to commit suicide now. Here, I’ll show you to the bridge!

It’s not quite like that, but when the other person is completely puzzled and thinks you’re being unreasonable and even mean when you somehow hope for more, you get that ice floe feeling. A nice pan of ice; a good hard shove.

I love you. Nice knowing you.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The Resurrection of Peter

It wasn’t much of a day. She wasn’t even sure it was a day at all, since they had really cancelled days quite a long time ago and made everything One. Or was it that they had cancelled Night?

 Which means, you walk around in a half-state, sometimes jokingly known as Twilight. Twilight was the stuff of owls and demons and things that didn’t even really exist any more. But, she thought to herself, do any of us really exist any more?

 They all made it seem as if it were “just her”, and that everyone else was normal. This was all part of the scheme, the huge heartwrenching scheme to take her life away. It was illustrated nearly every day now when she ran into the people she knew.

 They looked dissimilar, but all the same, with a strange hazy quality. Yet they laughed and were jolly in a way they never seemed to be before, as if they had discovered an amazing new Secret.

  

“Emma. Hi, Emma! Haven’t seen you in a long time!” Gretel was wearing the strangest outfit, bright paisley like she’d never worn, a sort of muumuu, with a straw tote bag.

“Hi, Gretel. I think.”

“Oh, it’s me all right. This is just my New Look.”

It’s hardly a look at all, thought Emma, wondering whatever happened to the Old Look, and what made her change it.

“You look the same,” Gretel said in a flat tone. Looking the same wasn’t quite “it”, she supposed.

“Haven’t gotten my instructions in the mail yet,” Emma said, trying to be ironic.

“Oh, that’s so funny! You’re such a funny person! Well, goodbye then!”

“Wait, Gretel. I need to ask you something.”

 “What is it now?” She was getting testy already.

“You know, Peter. . . “

“Yes, Peter.” They had both known Peter. His sudden death had been a wrench, for both of them she thought, but now she wasn’t so sure.

 “What about Peter?”

“Ever since he passed, you know. . . “

“Passed?” She began to titter. “Was he in school or something?”

“No! Don’t you remember? When he. . .”

 “What, when he went on vacation?”

The ultimate vacation, Emma thought.

“Look, I mean when he died.”

“Died?”

“Died.”

“Died?”

“For God’s sake, Gretel! You know what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, that.” She fumbled around in her straw bag for a minute. “I thought you’d heard about it.”

“Heard what?”

“He’s back alive again.”

Stunned silence. A sick feeling gathered in her stomach.

“Back alive again?”

“Of course. Haven’t you seen him? He’s walking around.”

“How, by remote control?” Her sarcasm seemed to be flying over Greta’s pointed little head.

“Sort of, but it’s better than that. He can go under his own steam by now.”

“But he’s dead!”

“Sort of. But not really. You can get renewed now, sort of like a library book. You must know that by now."

She stood there stunned, things whirling around, as Gretel just walked away without even saying goodbye.

She started to comprehend then why everything was different, why she was sort of seeing through some people, mostly really old people, but some of them children. They had a strange sort of translucent quality, but they were still walking around.

And they always seemed happy. Emma thought about Bible study a million years ago, before the Bible was universally banned, and how Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead. She had always wondered if Lazarus really wanted to be raised, his body half-rotted. Would he have a new body, somehow, or walk around  like that forever?

 

But then that meant she could find Peter!

Peter wasn’t her lover, never had been, but he had been there during the blackest, the most despairing time in her life. He would just show up at Starbucks with his baseball cap and his smile, cheerful as Bugs Bunny. He was in worse shape than she was, but they joked about it, guffawed about how awful life was.

“I heard about a woman who committed suicide. But before she committed suicide she got out the vacuum cleaner and cleaned her whole house top to bottom so it was absolutely spotless. Then she hung herself.” They had both howled with laughter.

Then they just lost touch. Like a sick cat, he had crawled under the house somewhere. She had known he was deteriorating; one conversation they had wasn’t a conversation at all, but a monologue on her part. He’d start to say something, then dry up after a couple of words and look at her in bafflement.

What bothered her was the fact that it didn’t bother him.

She kept sending him emails long after she suspected he had passed (and NOT “in school”!). She couldn’t help it. She’d think she saw him in a crowd. But it wasn’t him. Because the emails didn’t bounce back to her, she assumed they were hitting the target and he was just too busy to reply (knowing full well he had kicked the bucket long ago).

Back alive again. Strange things had been happening lately. She had mentioned her grandfather to a friend of hers, how difficult it had been for him to let go.

“Is he still dead?” the friend asked.

 h, maybe they meant in her mind, in her memory! But somehow she didn’t think so. Death was the only thing more sure than birth. Wasn’t it?

Would she see Peter again? A wild stab of hope made her heart beat faster.

She became aware of how the light went right through people, and began to count them. It was an awful lot. She wondered just what had happened to everyone. Back alive again? Is he still dead? Did you will this, wish it, or did someone impose it on you like poor Lazarus wrapped in his rotten gravecloths?

It was too much to hope for, but in her next turn of mind, when she did not pass Go but began in the middle again, she saw him. She saw a ball cap bouncing up and down the street first, then a smile.

Then they were sitting in Starbucks, but she noticed he was sitting two inches above the chair. He didn’t seem to really drink the coffee, but the eyes were the same.

 They could always be blunt and honest with each other, so Emma waded right into it.

“So, Peter. I hear you’re back alive again.”

“It would seem to be so.”

“How does that happen?”

“I don’t know that, any more than cells know how to multiply or the earth knows how to turn.”

“But is it. . . beyond your will or something?”

"This is a place beyond will."

"Her head was whirling. She hated the idea of not being able to die. Death was one of the things she looked forward to the most.

“Peter, I’m sorry, but it sounds as if you’re a fucking zombie or something. The Undead.”

“Hey, I like that! Undead, but not really alive.”

“Look, Peter, there are only TWO states: dead and alive! Which one are you?”

“No. There is the dream state. There is the hypnotic state. There is the hypnogogic state. There is the catatonic state. There is the trance state. There is the transcendent state. There is the resurrected state. I could go on and on.”

“But those are only in your mind, Peter.”

“Tell me this.” He leaned forward and looked at her with his old intensity, and for one moment she really believed this was Peter. “If I were just a body, I mean lying over there with my heart beating but no consciousness, would that be ‘me’?”

“I don’t. . . “

“So what is it that makes me me?”

“I don’t know, your brain?”

“The brain is just half a pound of juice with some wires running through it. Dissect it, and you see some curls and buds and bulges like normal internal organs. There’s nothing there.”

“So where. . . “

“Ah. You’re about to ask me where Consciousness resides.”

“I guess so. Peter, why aren’t you drinking your coffee?”

"I've evolved beyond coffee, I guess." He chuckled to himself.

“You’re not alive. Get away from me! You’re not really Peter. Are you a ghost?”

"Beyond ghost. We've been refined. We don't have to go around haunting old buildings and Civil War battle sites any more."

“But who DOES this? It has to come from somewhere!”

“Haven’t you noticed you don’t have any privacy any more?”

“Oh, Jesus, Peter.”

 “Haven’t you noticed all the electronic jims and jams that everyone seems to carry now?”

“Oh, so you’re saying your Smart Phone turned you into a ghost.”

“Everything is changed, changed utterly.”

“So what if it all just shuts down, the power grid and that?”

“Yes! Smart girl. THAT is what it is all about.”

“What?” 

"Bodies that need no sustenance when the Time comes. That time when the whole ecosystem collapses, gives way in a great Biblical flood and rips apart the rest of the world with an all-consuming fire."

“You’re scaring me.”

 “Haven’t you ever worried about it?"

“Of course. But I never knew that. . . “

“Now we can live under any conditions.”

“BUT YOU AREN’T REALLY ALIVE! You died of AIDS two years ago!”

 “But I’m not really dead.” He grinned, looking as cheerful as when he told me the suicide joke.

“You must be dead, Peter. You MUST be.”

 “No, my good friend.” He lifted his mug and pretended to drink from it. “I’m back alive again.”