This may sound lame, but...
How do you make up your mind, when there's no one there to make it up for you?
For the last year, I've been teaching in a relatively progressive Maryland public school with access to excellent resources and a fair share of academic rigor. There's no way to pretend that the experience has been other than heartbreaking for me, from the days my students deliberately destroy my possessions, to the days they pointedly berate me for smelling bad. I've become the Adult, which I am not, and lost touch with Becoming, which I am. I have nothing to say for the inordinate responsibility and emotional burden I carry, except to say that I do, and, if it hasn't changed me, it has given me something I didn't have before: Courage? Stupidity? A blind spot?
I want to talk myself out of teaching for another year; I do. I want to continue with the idea that the world will provide for me the fruition of the intentions I cultivate. I want to more forward and be strong, graceful, hopeful in that way. I want.
I had this idea that from the dust of another life, new hope would rise fresh and nourishing. I'm still angry that this hope I'd created did not, in fact, come to fruition; did, in fact, sour before becoming ripe; did, in fact, turn before falling and rot on the vine. But I knew all of this. None of this was a surprise, really, because the "fruit" was small, and the need was great. And yet I am still angry.
I suppose it is one of my less flattering habits that I dismiss those whose disappointment to my sense of propriety comes without regard for my feelings--worse, that I exact from this process some sense of righteousness I expect, somehow, to be edifying in the conduct of courtesy and good behavior. And yet I cannot help but see somewhere behind the backs of my most vehemently destructive students' eyes the departure and departure again of my former lover, whose rampant flight was punctuated in the pursuit of improved affections with reckless abandon-- its implied apathy and dismissal.
Why their thoughtless abuse should rouse memories of my dearly departed I do not know, except in the complete haplessness both situations gave rise to in me, their unlikely listener.
Wretch the bastard. I am smarter than he thinks I am and more, given time and quiet places. It's not the leaving that matters, not the time spent or the business of coming or going. The waste his ignorance has laid to the time our lives spent together destroys my ability to love him, for so much of what he told me was lies-- either then or now and in the wake of different choices. I know something about the changing moods of love, but not as well the willful carelessness that finds in a difficult situation the chance of elevating its right of painful, premeditated divorce to a noble act of so-called self-awareness.
What a miserable joke.
But unfortunately my anger does not end there, only finds a comfortable hiding place and tries to keep going. What's more daunting, I think, is that there isn't really that much to be angry about - for my part, that is. The self-inflicted, wasteful bastardliness of it all brought upon by my aforementioned ex bespeaks a certain carelessness I am not wont to admit freely.
And therein lies the rub. I knew what was coming but risked it anyway, and didn't care. Don't, even now, really care, because I know what I've gotten and what I missed. I would have liked to walk from the experience without the distinct notion that something dear was lost, if only time and attention.
But it will come back; it always does. That's the secret of knowing it will always go away again.
So, here I am, a little bit older and a little bit more careful for the wear. Closer to that venerated status of wise old hag in the forest to which I so dearly aspire. So mote it be. But I thought I could/should do more. Not be so easily won by shiny auras and the promise of a strong embrace. If I was so far above it, why did I miss it? Why did I cry when it ended like something dear to me was forever lost, and then forget about it? Was my mistake then, in creating something meaningful out of a wicker man, or now, in letting the smoke only float away?
My hands are empty and my belly does not rumble. My apologies for the long-winded rambliness of it all.