Running Out of Time
Posted on 22 June 2011
I’m forty fucking years old, and where does the ‘u’ go from four to forty, a friend asked, and I didn’t know what to tell him. There’s no ‘I’ in there, either, no ‘we’ nothing of any use or to offer love or pass a cigarette while sitting hopelessly on the front stoop watching cars go by and tallying colors until one of you wins.
I see a writer say, “Hell, some don’t publish until they’re fifty years old!” And it’s so close, too close, really, and at fifty I’ll still have kids here who need me and hammer at me until I can’t think, and all I want is to run away, which I almost did, though that’s not what the obituary would read.
I had a lover who walked into the bedroom to see me lying on his bed on my stomach, one leg bent, head resting on my hands, and he said, “God that is so sexy.”
One walked behind me as I swayed up steps and told me I walked like a dancer, so beautifully (and damn well I should, after thirteen years of lessons, performances, blisters and hammering pointe shoes into perfection).
Gone are the days when I could hock my body as art, gone are magic spells cast by slender limb and singing lilting Cowboy Junkies songs in bed with a lover beside me, now all I have to woo is typeface on white screen, with little reach and even less influence.
I am hungry, have always been hungry, and though I’m faulted for it, cursed for it, even, it’s in my cells. My mitochondria make of sweet talk and infatuation what my neurons never could of serotonin and dopamine. And now, with no time for building the fires that draw in prey, what will I do? I’ll never string enough words together to make my trap, now.
I waver between throwing it away, and telling everyone to fuckoff (and sacrificing my family’s wellbeing) and saying, “I have to do this now.” I live with the equivalent of hundreds of pages sitting crumpled in the trashcan. I’m afraid to throw them away, but no one’s pulling them out for me, straightening them and brushing off the crumbs, either.
And what difference does it make, in the end? Who cares? I won’t, if I can just get out of here soon enough.
3 responses to Running Out of Time
What can I say? I know how you feel but let me just say that it does get better. My grandfather just had his 90th birthday. My grandmother is having hers next year. I have several people in my family tree who lived to almost 100 and one who lived to be 114!!! I’m not saying that the Lord will give me that long, but I do know that it’s possible. Anything is possible!
The experiences you are sharing with your children now will give you more to write about later! One day when your children are grown you will look back and wonder where that time went — not from a perspective that you didn’t accomplish what you wanted to but from a perspective of love for your kids and treasuring that.
Personally I am proud of you for keeping up with the writing. I just started again after years and years away from it. I mean from an artistic perspective, and not a “work” perspective. I’ll be praying for energy and time to do what makes you happy, but remember you don’t have to do it all today.
I’m 42. But I don’t have kids. I complain about not having time to do all I want to do and to sit quietly with an empty screen upon which I put words. I am agog at people who have children and live. How do you do it? Colour me impressed.
I’m not sure this is “living.” Some days I wonder. And I imagine that even if I didn’t have children, I would find other things to suck my time away, but I do wish I could grab just an hour (or even half of one!) of uninterrupted time every day, without feeling guilty for asking for it.