He stares blankly at his coffee, wondering how long he’s been sitting, cup in hand. The last sip must have been hot. He can still feel the blister on the tip of his tongue.
A dark sadness hangs on his face like a Picasso. He hates the look.
“Definitely his blue period,” he muses, half smirking at his reflection in the dining room mirror.
He mostly avoids reflective surfaces. Feeling depressed is terrible enough; he doesn’t need to see it. He doesn’t need to be reminded of it.
His cat circles impatiently, rubbing against his calf. “Time to eat,” he purrs. . . . “Snap out of it!” he meows.
On days like today, he’s grateful for his cat. The cat’s well-timed reminders keep the man from the doorknob and belt and the dark thoughts that tie everything together.
He whispers, “My demise will have to wait; there’s a cat to feed and a litterbox to clean.”
His apartment is a shambles. It mirrors the cluttered chaos in his head. Based on experience, he knows a good house cleaning will lift his spirits.
He often wonders how feng shui works its magic on the mind. “I’ll have to google that,” he says toward his full-bellied cat, who bathes contently in a patch of sun on the kitchen floor.
The sink is full. There’s half-eaten food caked on dishes, the remnants of last week’s menu. Why not just clean up after each meal? Especially knowing that cleanliness and order help quell his anxiety.
“Why do I let things pile up?
What keeps me from staying on top of things?
Will I ever grow out of this?
That last question knocks around the inside of his skull like an unselected lottery ping-pong ball.
Will I ever grow out of this?
Of course, he didn’t know the answer to that question. He remembers a bright era of pre-affliction, which gives him hope. He thinks, “If I magically went from being happy to depressed, why can’t I miraculously go from depressed to happy?”
Unfortunately, there’s a history – a consistent footprint on the ladder of his family’s DNA. He’s been branded in a sense, and sometimes that feels so fatalistic he simply wants to give up.
“I know I could do this if things would just slow-the-fuck down,” he muttered. Head bowed, sitting at a dimly lit kitchen table, teetering on the edge of a midlife meltdown.
With more than 30 years in the industry, you think he’d be brimming with confidence. For most, that kind of experience leads naturally to calm assuredness. But with experience comes expectations, and those expectations smother him like a blanket of boulders.
He feels incapacitated by his experience, not buoyed by it.
He fixates momentarily on his wife’s furrowed brow and imagines himself tiny, wandering through those deep valleys of disappointment.
At work, he’s surrounded by the young and hungry. Buzzing with ambition, their bright voices float on currents of frenetic energy.
Was he ever that exuberant (about anything)? He struggles to remember his younger self, but it’s like painting with numbers without the numbers.
In his cubicle, yellow sticky notes pop off the edge of his monitor. A sleek uninviting techno-flower, daring him to delve in – begging him to fail. Tossed to the corner of the desk, a coffee-stained and panic-scrawled legal pad.
His “to-do list.”
After a full day’s work, that list somehow gets longer, not shorter.
Early in his career, he’d slide into a work groove and rip through his “to-dos” effortlessly, like a sickle slashing through wheat. But nowadays, he’s easily and willingly distracted. His ability to focus comes in short bursts only, and the mental elasticity of youth is frustratingly absent.
His focus is hampered further by a barrage of instant messages and multiple meetings a day. As a result, he always feels two steps behind in a mad dash to a deadline.
He wears his age like an ill-fitting suit, and he struggles to keep pace with his profession.
He lifts his head and speaks again.
“Honestly, I don’t think I can do it anymore. I’m sorry, because I know that puts us behind the eight-ball financially, but every day’s a struggle, and I’m barely keeping my head above water.”
He wasn’t being lazy. He was being honest.
He remembers how the quest for success propelled him early in his career. He remembers plowing through whatever work stress he encountered, because on the backside of that stress were people who depended on him. For 25-plus years, that was all the motivation needed to keep at a job he never truly enjoyed.
Now that his kids are grown and on their own, he faces an increasingly stark scenario. Deadlines approach, the work pace quickens, his ability to keep up wanes, and the desire and motivation needed to plow through it all has vanished.
He concludes that what’s required of him, and where he is philosophically (at sixty), have diverged irreconcilably. He feels this in his bones and in his gut every morning when he wakes.
And there’s a nagging sense of entitlement, that at this phase of life he’s earned the right to slow down — to take his foot off the gas — to smell the roses. He romanticizes about a job that doesn’t follow him home every night. A job that ends when the day ends and doesn’t occupy his mind ceaselessly.
At sixty, he has no interest in climbing the corporate ladder. Instead, he wants to set it ablaze, sit cross-legged on his cubicle floor, and watch it burn to ash.
At sixty, he has no illusions about discovering job satisfaction. That boat has sailed, and there’s no sense lamenting he never got on it. Instead, he’s looking for balance.
He’s looking for “just enough.”
Just enough to pay his bills and free up some time.
Just enough to sip coffee in solitude, and not worry about work.
At sixty, he sits at a dimly lit kitchen table, looking for a way out.
She can feel the weight of her son’s head on her chest and remembers how she cupped the back of his head and ran her fingers through his dark curls.
She still feels him squeezing her rib cage. She remembers him loosening his embrace, his arms slipping from around her, before letting go and walking through the front doors of his elementary school.
She remembers the carefree smile as he looked over his shoulder toward her before disappearing forever.
She can’t bear waking up one day and not feeling the remnants of that final hug.
She hasn’t slept through the night since the incident and can’t forgive herself for letting her boy walk through those doors.
She wants to close her eyes, stop feeling, and succumb to the eternal blackness.
Knowing that other mothers suffered before her and still more will suffer after her, with no substantial changes to gun laws, hollows her out.
Her son was murdered by an 18-year-old boy with an AR-15. His gun purchase was protected by an antiquated and misused 233-year-old constitutional amendment and a gun-loving governor.
Her son’s right to live and grow up was not protected.
Over the last several days, she’s listened to pointless academic debates about that amendment and its meaning. It doesn’t mean anything to her.
It’s all just words and platitudes.
After everything is said and done, her boy is dead.
She enters her bathroom, places two framed pictures of her son on the sink, and runs a hot bath. She removes her clothes and sits on the tub’s edge, staring at his smiling face.
She remembers the day these pictures were taken.
In one, her son is wearing his Houston Astros baseball cap and clutching his glove to his chest. His first baseball game with his father. His smile bursts through the glass picture frame, and she feels a sudden pang in her heart.
Her husband took the other photo and gave it to her last Mother’s Day in a frame with brightly painted flowers. In it, her son is seen squatting in the flower bed on the side of the house, joyously pointing at a snail that he discovered. The sights and sounds of that day are still fresh in her memory. She can still see the mud from the freshly watered garden seeping from the holes in his Spiderman crocks — and she still hears all of the questions about this newly discovered creature.
“Mama, does he live in that shell…. is that his home?”
“What happens if he gets too big for his shell? – where does he go then?”
She remembers telling him that the shell protects the snail from harm. And that memory triggers a flood of emotions. She can’t stop thinking about how vulnerable and scared he must have been in those final minutes and how no one could protect him from harm.
She opens the medicine cabinet and takes out a razor blade. She picks up the framed pictures and kisses each one, tears running down her cheeks. Then she turns the pictures away from the tub to face the wall at the back of the sink.
She shuts off the water, slides into the tub, and carefully cuts open the veins running from her wrist to her forearm. She does this on each arm. Then she drops the razor in the tub and feels it slide along the side of her hip before resting underneath her left buttock.
We often turn to prayer to help us heal from emotional or physical trauma. Prayers can help us achieve inner peace or resolution. Prayers can help us get to a place that allows us to get on with life. In that sense, prayer can be a valuable tool.
But prayer is never a solution to a problem. Prayer is never an agent of change. For example, do you know who was praying the most fervently during the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas? The teachers and the parents of the students trapped in the classroom – and the children themselves. They were desperately praying for God to intervene and save them.
By now, we’ve established a precedent: praying to enact change does not fucking work.
Republican senators and congressmen desperately want their constituents to believe that prayer is a solution. Because they know if people rely on prayer alone, nothing changes. And if nothing changes, these senators and congressmen will continue to fill their coffers with money from the gun lobby.
The only way to enact change is through action. By demanding those who represent us support meaningful and impactful gun legislation. And if they don’t, we must organize, march, campaign, and pressure both candidates and corporations in communities and states where representatives refuse to act.
Rose on tombstone. Red rose on grave. Love – loss. Flower on memorial stone close up. Tragedy and sorrow for the loss of a loved one. Memory. Gravestone with withered rose
I don’t know what to say anymore. I feel empty inside – bereft of hope – drowning in sorrow – swallowed in darkness.
My expectations of humanity obliterated – smashed into the ground under the butt of an AR-15 in the hands of apathetic, craven, and power-hungry lawmakers.
What does it say about our country that slaughtered elementary school children huddled in corners of classrooms, their bodies ripped open, their fragile bones splintered and shattered, their blood smeared on the floor and splattered on the walls, the final minutes of their lives filled with overwhelming fear and terror, and still US representatives refuse to even talk about gun legislation?
This happens over and over and over again. The next school shooting is right around the corner and yet we remain stuck, unable to do anything because the people we send to congress care more about their job than the safety of your children.
The river of apathy that runs through the halls of congress intensifies the futility and hopelessness we all feel for days after a school shooting.
Now we’ll go through the scripted responses from spineless and heartless Republican legislators – the lies about the threat to the second amendment, the outrageous claim that we need more guns to combat this violence, the blame it on mental illness argument.
We’ve heard these responses so many times that we can recite them almost word-for-word.
bendingtheneedle 