Time Trusts No One
We had been home for four days and I found myself boiling full yet as dry as ashes. I was fuming about how Jim kept asking me to be me, while it was me who said the words he didn't want to hear. The "me" he wanted me to be was the one he was trying to create so I was left sitting in exile while his cold, steely stare judged me. Do I cave under the pressure or fight for myself? I wondered, as his declaration that my love for him was too conditional reverberated through my aching head and vexed heart.
Knowing my stubbornness, we were in for a lengthy campaign as he said he could admit when he'd made a mistake. The meaning, of course, was that I was the mistake! On the night we celebrated his birthday, we dined across from each other staring at different points across the room with feigned interest in nothing, eating in complete silence. This was likely to go on until I began to be the "me" he wanted me to be, accepting that the work for the church would continue to be a part of my life for the foreseeable future. It wasn't just the mission field that was ravaging me; my hectic "other" life left me no time to make sense of anything and I was beginning to doubt my sanity. I truly wanted to "get it all together" as he was asking me to do, but what did that even mean? And why did I become more ineffective the harder I tried? It was as if everything I did, including therapy, only left me more befuddled.
It struck me that night at dinner that I had practiced this scene all my life; that learning the quiet game when I was a child had come in so handy in my relationship. The barrier of silence that took over felt as deafening as angry screams but somehow more sinister. At least a scream was something, a tear was something, but silence killed every chance of making things right. It was my fault, of course—that's what I'd been taught and that's what I was being told. I wasn't measuring up as a wife; I was making too many mistakes. Though I'd barely been reading and writing, I had managed to submit a poem to Byline, hoping to be able to break the barrier that had prevented me from being a published writer. Eyeing the calendar each morning as I journaled, I counted down the days until we returned to Limon—eight, seven, six, five…
I had found a book by the poet Yvonne Sapia entitled Valentino's Hair. My goal was to read a poem every time I had a few minutes to spare. My favorite was about her father, who had been a New York barber and had once cut Rudolph Valentino's hair—a story he loved to repeat anytime anyone would listen. I thought it was terrific that she'd chosen to commemorate one of his proudest moments in a soulfully crafted poem. The epigraph reads "1960—my father cannot help but tell," and the first stanza sets the scene:
It's been almost thirty-five years.
I can scarcely believe it, niña.
Time trusts no one and so it disappears
before us like the smoke from my cigarette.
In 1925 I was young. I was a part
of a world eating at its own edges
without being satisfied.
The Roaring Twenties didn't roar.
They swelled with passions.
They danced, and I danced with them.
My world was eating at its own edges without bringing itself or me the least bit of satisfaction and I was trying to behave, trying to acquiesce so that I could manage what was being asked of me. In order to do so I picked up the habit of figuratively wiring my jaws shut but the binding simply wouldn't hold. When would I learn to go with the flow? I wondered. Was it even in me to do so? Would I ever dance again and feel the abandon of the act rather than always feeling guilt or remorse?
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