this sunset

friday 17 december 2010
turners trogs

this afternoon I went again to one of my old haunts, one of the places I used to go to in my own life. deliberately I went there at the time for watching sunset over the water, a thing I used to do frequently, but now, since the ravaging of what was my life, most often find too painful to do. it was a december sunset I was after, in memory of the many sunsets in december that I saw when we lived right there, when we, my animals and I, were a daily part of the life of that water and that piece of sky.

I sat there on a railroad tie, wondering for at least the thousandth time, exactly why my body hasn't simply shut down all systems and died in the nearly three years since the most devastating loss of my life, and the most unscrupulous cruelty. when carrying so very much pain of the heart, why don't the cells themselves become totally infected by the brain chemicals of sorrow and rage, and just erode the functioning of every system and organ? why does my body, or anyone's, keep functioning under such an onslaught of damaging chemicals? why am I still alive in the absence of every single thing that mattered to me in life?

and also I wondered for the umpteenth time, why I couldn't bring on that ending myself, and make december 17, 2010 my LAST sunset? why in the nearly three years since the end of what was my world, have I not been able to say: This is enough and I'm not doing anymore. why can I not kill the only person I have a moral right to kill -- myself? There I was in my full-length wool and cashmere coat, my velour clothes that can soak up a lot of water, rocks all around me with which to fill the pockets; my inability to swim. it would have been so easy, so do-able, to emulate Virginia Wolfe, fill the pockets with the rocks, step into the water and let the fabrics drink it in, weigh me down, and make an end of misery. so easy, if I were made differently. if I didn't have this maddeningly tenacious inability to kill.

seeing that once again I couldn't do it, I got up and went gathering solstice berry plants. if they were living in a woods, they would have their bright red berries now, but the condtions on the banks of the canal are not optimal for these little shade plants. I gathered them and wrapped them in pine needles, to bring them back to the ponystall and try again to raise them indoors. yet again I have made my own name for nature, not having any idea what these lovely plants are really called.

I watched the sun get lower, and then gone. watched the speaking geese fly over, watched the speaking ducks swim towards me, watched clouds turn orange and coral and pink, and watched to see these colors repeated on the face of the water.
then the time for me to go; reluctantly, with a heavy heart, wanting to stay into dusk and into the blue point, to the richest indigo of that blue phase of dusk, listening to the bedtime chatters of the ducks and geese gathered together on the water. but there were things to do, and I couldn't emulate Virginia, and so I had to go.

maybe I won't see even one more canal sunset in december this year, or ever again. it's rare that conditions in my body and conditions in the weather dovetail benevolently enough for me to accomplish such an outing. whether I see another one or not, I came away, as always from a memory walk, with that taunting, constant wish that I could end the thing.

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read... Being toward death... Lifelines...

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