“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.’
— Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Even now, in the evening with the hot water running over my hands, I am half asleep. Given to daydream, I use the wand with soap in it to scrub away at the dirty cups and bowls, to push — I think to myself — my kid’s own DNA down the drain. Such metaphors running wild in my head, it’s no wonder I abuse them/ use them way too much. It’s not easy being disciplined. It’s tricky learning to write/ or imagine/ when everything seems both attractive and repulsive at the same exact time.
I look out the window above the sink and I can see the dogs laying there staring at the back door. They never want anything else but to come back in the house. That alone must indicate some kind of colossal failure on my part, don’t you think?
I mean, what kind of dog would rather stare at the door to the house than the woods in the other direction?
Even now as I try to reconcile with myself about who I am and what exactly I’m doing here in this life, I am forced into corners I didn’t ask to be forced into by creatures like dogs. Or other people. How much do I owe them all? What was I supposed to be acting like when you were staring at me like you were? I’m a mess about it all, I’ll tell you the truth. But I laugh it off, smile at myself. I make a strange twisted face, a horky sound. To revel in a moment/ any moment/ is all there is/ all there ever was/ and all there ever will be. In the sliding shadows of a new dusk coming down, I hear the cries of the dead mingling with the laughter of the living. I hear my name being sung slow and bluesy in the spigot water’s gush.
In my hands, last night’s wine glass.
And no one knows but me.
What happened to me once defined me for a while. But then it was gone, more or less, like now. Aging, it seems, is a struggle to persevere in a world that simply doesn’t need you anymore. Or at least, it doesn’t appear to need you anymore as it goes. It seems cold to put it like that, I know. But blunt truth is worth more if you try to let yourself believe it every now and then. The open window for fantasizing fueled by ambition and lust and creative hunger must close when a person comes to a certain point. It’s not a specific age, I guess, although maybe there ought to be a rule there as well.
As it goes, the young stand strongest on the top of the hill. But on the backside, there are billions, slowly making their way into the dark valley, their time to shine having waned and dimmed and all of that.
Your worth/ my worth/ our saturated image of ourselves, it was all so inflated for so long, you see. Against nature we moved with gusto, always pouring ourselves a fresh glass of what seemed like vitality when in reality, it was just plain water. And no one noticed all that much. Some of you got more noticed than others and that’s just the way things go, but overall most of us were born obscure and remain so even now despite what we tell ourselves.
In more or less anonymous lives of mundane existing, the masses are often subjected to this lemming-off-the-cliff style of identity loss. It seemed sudden to me, although it was anything but. My slipping back into the still dark I emerged from many moons ago was the most natural part of my life, I could argue. Yet it seems so sinister if I let it. So unfair and uncool.
The cliches abound. Glory days. Blah blah blah. Nostalgia is toxic but it is also everything. Seeing our lives as genuinely wonderful and fulfilling is almost gross to imagine. There was always so much more to accomplish, so many places to see, so many people to meet, so many little circles of social delight awaiting us just up ahead, weren’t there?
I honestly don’t know.
Some people, wise people too, they say that time is moving along a plane that is completely laid out in some super-cosmic way. Like, picture everything that ever was and is right now and everything that ever will be as a comic book. And the book is open to, say, page 60. And that 60 pages is all history up until this very instant. But we can only review the 60 pages behind us because that’s all that has been experienced in real time thus far. Still: we have many pages ahead of us, collectively speaking. And in those pages lie the truth about everything that will ever happen from right now onwards. It’s all there: you/ me/ our kids/ how we will live and how we will, in fact, die. Each of us, our fortunes told. Yet we can never peek at those pages because we are tied to time. We are moving at the speed of the hand that guides us, a hand not belonging to some kind of God or whatever (although one can imagine why the typical human intellect might need to see it that way), but rather a hand that acts as some old canal boat mule/ dragging us all up the towpath/ into the next scene/ into the next caption/ out of this moment/ and into the next moment of the story so that it seems so fluid. Time is so random in its unfolding, we believe.
And I have no clue if it is or it isn’t.
But if it isn’t, well… that’s pretty cool.
Obsessing over baseball cards. Playing Little League. Catching the school bus. Working little jobs as a teenager. Smoking a lot of weed. Smoking a lot of cigarettes. Hunting wild turkeys. Scanning the stream for rising trout. Eating burgers, pizza, fried fish, salads, cereal, ice cream, and hoagies and cheesesteaks. Playing in a band. Touring in van. Living in cities. Getting married. Having kids. Moving around the country. Working jobs. Getting divorced. Watching people die. Seeing people happy and seeing people sad. Trying hard to make money. Easily spending money. Driving in cars. Laying on beds. Doing the dishes. Looking out the window. Dogs. Birds. Bees. Sex. Desire. Hurt. Hunger. Empathy. Anger. Joy. Tragedy. Hope. Regret. Anticipation.
Polaroids of a younger me in someone’s basement. In someone’s attic.
My obituary just sitting there on the laptop screen. The steam rising from your morning coffee. The radio playing low. Maybe it’s already written! Maybe it’s right there for me to see but I just can’t find the way!
Arguments about nothing.
Once hidden words unsheathed and flung in the heat of battle.
Everything scripted.
We just said what they wrote.
Rolling over into middle age, I have barely any idea who I am as far as these things go. I am all of this stuff (dad, husband, etc. etc.) but so much has changed and what does it mean? My car is shit/ old and dirty/ still runs as of this morning though/ almost 190,000 miles. But what does that say about me, if it says anything at all? And whatever it might say, well, who gets to dictate what that really means, you know?
Am I being judged by my peers? Is my identity issue a matter of something larger than life or is it merely yet another example of a human construct that has been around so long that we brazenly accept it as natural and organic and true?
Meeting me out in the fields of the the average 50-something existential white American guy is no picnic. Trust me, I know. But why do we do it anyways? Why do I stumble out there with my garden wagon full of ideas and complaints, a heaving stack of things I wanted to point out to you that (I hope) stand to refute the theory that my life was a meaningless speck of nothingness, a random space fart going off in some far-flung corner of nowhere.
Why do I keep coming back around to this pressing notion that my life must be defined… and that I must be categorically identified… lest everything slip away without me ever knowing what any of this life was about? What compels me to keep searching for words that might help describe my life and times to the universe? What the hell is wrong with us, always desperate to prove that whatever went down was so worth it?
It’s just that I hear the wind at the windows. It’s just that I sense these dogs we spoil are deeply sad inside. Because we stole their wild away.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
