There, rest. No more suffering for you.

I sit in a room, my office, typing at my desk. In front of me, at eye level, is a plant ( just the right amount of sunlight) that I will very likely kill, and my thoughts go from here to my mother. I think thoughts (inchoate) about rootlessness and the impossibility of living beyond her. 


I think about this house, hers, and what is left of her. I think: I want to write about it, I want to write about it all, but my eyes are fixed on this plant, this thing, this reminder of what I will never again have: a mother to tend to it (to me) to make it, the plant (this life) better than it is. 


 Recompense for the six others that I inherited--and killed--after my mother's death, this plant, despite living past its projected expiry, and despite my watchful eye (eye level) is wilting. Yet rather than transplant it, rather than do the very thing (fertile ground) that will keep it alive, I do nothing. I commit to no plan of action, but continue to obsess and observe it but myself too, in the face of it.  Contemplative, I cannot but think after nine months of staring that I must want the plant to die, that it the plant, my mother's green thumb, lost on me doesn't matter much.  I recognize and rise as music fills the room that I have tried but failed to render it, this plant, analogous to one of those things dripping with sentiment that have come to serve as proof of life, like "the silver" for families of greater wealth, or the wedding veil bag the dress, how could she wear it, so primitive? for those with mothers who had weddings. 


My mother, of course, had neither, but she left me nonetheless, and with the perfect knowledge that "fair" and "deserving" are adjectives to be reserved for the qualification of a supreme fiction she never complained, she lived her pain, she worked her whole life and saw death and was stunningly beautiful.  she lost what little money she had and then her hair and use of her legs and then her life to cancer and used sparingly, if ever, and only as the faintest praise.  

That which is the basis of intense communication

Too late in the day to realize my plan, I read a few lines from Baraka, Bataille's Literature and Evil, and, for good measure, I ended my evening with Kristeva. The plan was to read Franz Kafka's Amerika throughout the day; to escape, stealthily, to my room or some other convenient corner where I could sit, undetected, and ingest a few paragraphs with my guests---one of whom did not show, and thankfully!---none the wiser. I would thus return to the party with new material. With Karl Rossman, with throngs of porters, and balconies from which to better observe the life of the street; with the American girl, just as beautiful as he had pictured in his mind's eye. I would return with Kafka's Amerika, no citation required, sensorium lifted from non-sequential pages.

No matter that the material was not agreed upon, none would know. The familiar process of dulling my thoughts to a single, blunt point--they call it "takeaway"--in a (shameful) attempt to appeal to a conversant solicitous of positivity and / or "reality" in the form of lachrymose sentiment, is an unduly painful process of conversion. I do not court such conversations, I assure you. Yet because "books" have become a euphemism for "the reason that she is a late-28 and without marital prospects," they remain a popular topic for discussion, a charitable speech act that serves as an entre into the questions too delicate to be asked "directly."

I should not complain, and I do not mean to, because I am fortunate enough to be a cheerful depressive who prefers repartee (which is, if nothing else, about LANGUAGE) to the usual thing, rendering my interaction with others, even potentially hostile others, much more pleasant than it would be otherwise. I know many, many people who cannot or refuse to weather such events for fear of a too-slow recovery. Those, too, who know the impossibility of ever recovering.