Living Into the Answers

Sometimes you spend ten years hiding. No one ever tells you this when you’re young. The adults are busy carrying out lives and reenacting age-old patterns and sometimes hiding themselves. Or they’re doing the heavy lifting of confronting who they never became and who they are becoming. You don’t  yet know, age 9, hair tangling in the wind behind you, bike speeding downhill, bathed in sunshine and ignorance, that you will be a collector. You will collect their silences, the ill coping, their strange sense of humor that will later make you you. You will be a repository of all their best efforts and disfunction and heartaches patched over. You will love what they love, you will hear their music one day and ache in your bones to go back, to go back to not hiding, because then life was wide open and all of your best dreams were yet to be realized.

And then one Tuesday you’re forty something and the girl on the bike, hair tangling in the wind, is someone you wistfully recall as you trace the scar on your knee and gaze out the window unseeing. My god was she stunning, brown limbed and sandy blonde and she sang and she danced and she was a mermaid who wrote poetry and highlighted dictionary words. And everything was possible, no, probable. That a shimmering story would unfold for her and because of her was inevitable.

She’s still there, waiting on me. She’s in the stairwell closet with the cat and her Sony Walkman, wearing her pink Jellies, listening to REO Speedwagon. She wonders if she will be a singer. Will she write? Of course she’ll always be a mermaid, some things are just that way. She doesn’t know that she will feel hard to love or that she will exhaust herself trying to make her home in other people. She doesn’t know that she will travel the world or that she will be a mother of five and a nurse. Or that one January she will become a cancer mom, and one October night every cell in her body will be altered as she holds her lifeless daughter in her arms. And then the hiding. She does not know that one can hide for ten years, or that this is something she will do. She is so young, so before all beginning.

I walk down the hall and lightly tap the stairwell closet door. Slowly it cracks open and her gray eyes peek up at me as she pulls the headphones off her ears letting them come to rest around her neck. I hold out my hand and she slips her little palm into mine.

“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke