She’s leaving

 

Aug. 8, 1983

 

Exhaustion. Over eating. I sit here like a petty little European king, growing fatter and fatter and feeling the pain of being unimportant and forgotten.

It is something of an illusion fostered by lack of money and constricted space – lack of mobility forcing me to accept where I am, even when I hate it.

Perhaps it is the need of escape – mental and physical – that leads me to self-destruction.

Fran constantly self-destructs. She has built her life on a wobbly platform that teeters with every gust of wind.

Her life is built on extremes. So are the lives of those people she calls friends.

Each of them is dying of everything from lupus to drugs.

Even she shows the scars of their diseases, although she tells me how lucky she is, and how grateful she feels to her father for leaving her alone as a kid.

Her mother split when she was three – the first of many scars, but perhaps the most serious. She can’t hide it under cosmetics, and constantly feels wounded and craves love as a cure.

She is as addicted to love as she is to cocaine.

Me, I feel scattered and hopeless, with no real place in this world.

Dr. Thomas (my professor turn analyst) tells me love is the most important element in a young child’s life and lack of it screws you up permanently.

I struggle to find love in my past, some shadow of it hidden admit the confusion, contradictions and family warfare.

While no one threw a fist at each other, uncles and aunts savagely attacked each other with words. Perhaps to shield myself, memory of those conflicts remains dim, mere shadows of existence that haunts me with vagueness and shame.

I try to understand Fran’s past through my experiences, wondering if she feels the same vague sense of shame, judged by a merciless society in whose eyes we seem unworthy.

At school, Fran was a social outcast, victimized by teachers and classmates – as was her elder brother, each carrying around the burden of those years like a hunch back.

I survived the same scene – the same school even – and the same social stigma by avoiding the place. I tried hard to stay at home, hiding under my bed (so to speak) long enough to miss the school bus, forcing me to walk the whole way. Sometimes my feet wandered from the path and I never arrived. Most days I got there just late enough to miss math class and the football star tackle who wanted my head.

But life IS different for girls, even at that age. Staying home only meant she had to confront her mother’s absence. Wandering around eventually led her to an affair at 14 with a married man named Bill, who brutally introduced her to what it means to be an adult.

So Fran comes to me tonight to get her fix of love, and then tells me good bye. Not a permanent good-bye. Nobody really leaves me forever. My ex-loves haunt me better than Scrooge’s ever did.

I remember seeing the headline in a woman’s magazine once about how to get rid of a weak man and wonder if all of my ex-lovers read up on it before confronting me. But Fran seems to like her men weak, even if at times she has to leave them. This may be because her father was weak, a man always in the shadows of her life, a figure she still blames for chasing her mother away. Perhaps all of us weak men drive all of our women away in such a manner.

Weak men also tend to be angry men – and I am so full of rage is boils out my ears.

Yet Fran tends to cling to us so long we get use to the extra weight so when she releases us, we feel light headed, even giggly.

She tries to explain why she has to go away, but botches it, unable to explain what she doesn’t fully understand – which perhaps I understand better than she does, since women have been leaving me in one fashion or another since my mother’s mental illness drove her to the hospital.

We are all alienated by this world, and we struggle day by day to find a place, to feel important, to find love.

Some of us are lucky in that we get just enough in the nick of time to keep us from despair. But for some like Fran, life is a living despair – and no matter how many men she has and no matter how many times she leaves, it never gets better.