Tea with mara

What I really want to do is just get in my Jeep at this very moment and start driving. If I could just be in motion, it would all go away. I would forever be suspended between one place and the next. Everything that’s ever happened would just stay here, in boxes in a concrete room somewhere. Anything that lies ahead would always be around the next corner. None of the pain of the past would ever hurt me again, and none of the pain in my future would ever occur. I would just drive and drive and drive until my soul took flight from my form.

Then I would park.

It doesn’t feel right to be in this room, editing stories about television, when I just want to fly out of my own existence. It’s ridiculous; impossible to sit here, with my heart in my chest pitching a full-fledged overthrow. I don’t want to die and I don’t want to live. I just want the next breath I take to make me float up into the clouds and remember heaven. This earthly chaos sloughed off like dead skin.

I’ve been here before, flooded with catecholamine, ready to fight and flee. But those times, there was always something to fight and someplace to go. Now there’s nothing. No need to find a place to live, a job. Nothing to rail against. Just mara and myself, here in this little space in Northern Virginia where the sky is slate gray from February to June.

Everything I’ve ever done in my life has brought me to this moment. I have slashed and burned through safety and convention to be alone with my fear that I will die if I’m alone. That I will be thrust back into that isolation that was once so oppressive it nearly did kill me. The thing that I have scrambled and clawed so desperately to evade; that I’ve wandered from one ocean to the another to leave behind. I thought it was a tiny farm in the middle of a desolate, wind-battered plain, but that’s only where I came to know it so well. Where it bled and broke me and left me barely able to speak, then pushed me out into the world with nothing except for that which insists upon my survival. And that which insists upon my survival is the architect of this moment. If I run away or fight or build an intricate web of drama between myself and my fear, I will only be brought to another such moment.

I am then left with two choices. I can spend the rest of my life in this cycle of evasion and confrontation, or I can just stop. I can stay under this bodhi tree until my fear kills me or I befriend it. That is my choice.

My Jeep is outside. It has music and motion and the promise of places where the sky is bright blue. Where there are new faces; who don’t know my pain, my shame, my humility, my heartbreak, and most of all, my fear. It’s right outside, parked on the street. Maybe California is my lucky place.

In here, there are pictures and plants and memories and waves of anguish, dread and uncertainty. There is also absolute insistence to live as completely, fully and deeply aware as humanly possible, but I don’t know if that’s enough.

I can’t say what I’ll do tomorrow, so I will not stretch beyond this moment. I will have a cup of tea with mara and leave the Jeep parked on the street.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.