I’m reading Her Fearful Symmetry by the woman who wrote The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Niffenberger, and it’s sort of a love story but there are quite a few deaths and I get to an exciting part near the end where I can’t put the book down. I read a few more pages while I make coffee before work and I’m wondering about my own death as I stand at the kettle. I ponder what it would be like to be a ghost and watch my boyfriend fall in love with another woman after I’m gone. In my head I compose a letter I should leave for him and suddenly I have tears running down my face.
If anyone could see me, they would think I’m a crazy woman! I’m standing here stirring my coffee and crying as I think about death. Oh boy, I’d like to think I am crazy beautiful and not just crazy crazy. My mind just happens to enjoy running off in tangents, I have a vivid imagination. Hey, it beats being one of those people I read about in Agony Aunt columns who make up shopping lists while they have sex. Instead of thinking about the mundane while doing the extraordinary, my mind turns to the extraordinary while I’m doing the mundane. I just sometimes wish it wasn’t so noisy in there.
There’s so much living I want to do before I die. We try not to think about death as if it is only a remote possibility. Actually it’s the only certainty in all existence. I want to live consciously. I want to die consciously. (if I get any say in the matter...)
I manage to put the book down (unfinished!) and get showered and dressed and drive to work, thinking about how I am frequently swept away by the currents of my own emotions. The Buddhists don’t think this is a good thing they talk of the middle path which is basically like “get a grip”. It’s useful to be able to control one’s emotions or else they can rule us. But a part of me LIKES being this way! It seems to be I wouldn’t quite be me if I didn’t start talking so fast people can barely understand me when I’m explaining something I’m passionate about. I like the fact that a beautiful story reduces me to tears, as does a beautiful poem, and gentle hug, and a bravely borne illness, and a newborn baby and and and…OK, I cry a lot. But so what?
I drive listening to the CD this man I share my life with, and that I love so deeply, made me to celebrate our one year anniversary and on comes a song called Breathe. I think about how he told me why he chose each song and this one has a chorus that goes “breathe, just breathe” and he looked at me and said only “this one’s for you, because you forget to breathe”.
I start singing along to Breathe and suddenly I’m crying again because I have found someone to love me. Someone who gets me. Someone who will remind me to breathe. I’m a crazy crying woman. But at least today I am crying for the right reasons – because I am immersed in the sweetness and fragility of life. In my world it is ALWAYS OK to cry, but especially in moments when you realise life is so sweet and so fragile. This is my life in which I be thoroughly me.
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