May 14 2010

She finds she is.. happy.

The solitude she so feared is pleasant. Comfortable. There are people, places and things. She can choose them, or not. A profound freedom for the first time.

Her children are really self-sufficient. She finds she is less inclined to give motherly advice – instead to merely enjoy their company.. their youth and quick intelligence. She envies, not their youth – but their cohorts. She loves them more simply and freely than she ever did. She feels proud.

There are men. Their company is welcome, optional. Comfortable. It is nice to see them, to share things with them. To say goodbye, good night, and go back to her own beloved space.

There is work. Sometimes she resents it, but she knows it's good for her. It is her own work, after all. Not somebody else's. She is not angry anymore. She gets frustrated, mostly at the stubbornness of physical objects which will not obey her wishes. It passes.

There was the dark time, the deep depressing lonely wordless time. Widow. The word of death – not only (!) of the “other” but of a life. The word always dressed in the black of a poisonous spider, carnivorous, eating away at her past. Even then she knew it would pass – a bloody red hourglass marking the time it takes – no other cure but time. Though she could not know what the other side of it would be like. A huge and terrifying unknown, perhaps never happy, but not so painful. She is pleasantly surprised.

She is curious. She is realistic. Death, disease, disability will come to her, perhaps any minute. This is sure.

Probably not today.

No expectations but her own, which are now being constantly reassessed – modified to suit her needs. She looks 10 years younger than she did a year ago.

Freedom. To do – to think – to become herself. This self. Familiar, strange, interesting, complicated. The person she only glimpsed before, unable to see herself the way one can't smell their own smell. She could only know others, herself reflected in them.. the blankness in their smell, the space of not them. She is no longer simply space, simply what they told her by their looks and their words she was. She is a sometimes fluid. She is sometimes solid.