jmgoyder

Despair came to visit today even though I had already told it to go way so many times and thought it had finally given up. It knocks on the door a lot and I ignore it and feel safe because the door is locked. But today, it picked the lock and broke in and, whammo, smashed me just as I was putting the kettle on. And when I fell down, it kicked me and kicked me until I begged it to stop, to please go away. It stopped kicking me but it didn’t go away.

So that was a few hours ago and I have since gotten up, washed the tears off my face and am now developing a plan of how to get rid of it because it’s sitting in the living room, waiting. Do I play the waiting game too and hope, in time, it will give up and go away? Or do I go into the living room and confront it. Despair has the advantage of course because it stopped me from doing all of the things I wanted to do today by snaking its way into my conversations with my son and non-conversations with my husband. It burned the kettle dry and whipped the wind up to blow all of the clean clothes off the line and into the dust of the driveway.

It’s pretty clever, this despair, because it has positioned itself in the middle of the house and created a sort of dividing line between my son’s room and my office, so every time he and I have tried to have a chat, it whips into the conversation and, with incredible skill, turns all the good words into corpses, turns our blue eyes black and laughs derisively when we both slam our doors and give up.

The trouble with banishing despair is that it might simply go somewhere else and inflict itself on someone else, so I have to figure out how to kill it. It has never been so presumptuous before, never made itself so at home before and, when I last sneaked a peek, it was dozing comfortably in the living room, waiting. Waiting for what though? Is it waiting for another mother/son argument, for another wife/husband disappointment, for another bird to be killed by the fox, for another glass of my tears?

How will I kill it before it kills me? I know it hates me laughing because once I saw it shrivel when I laughed. And I know it hates me loving because once I saw it vomit when I hugged Ming and Ants at the same time so maybe I can kill it with more laughter, with more love. But somehow I don’t think that will be enough. After all, this despair has already been able to permeate all of our laughter and love with little drops of dead fly poison.

I wish I had the solution to this predicament.