An Impasse

Ian MacClayn

W hen the radiance of an epiphany looks into every culpable flaw of your heart, it will not feel heroic or divine. Things long dormant within us grope for growth and all struggle to breathe. Even in winter, when the freezing interior plains are relieved by warm chinook winds, an unbroken wall of clouds still obscures and darkens the region. Only a thin strip of blue sky remains visible near the mountain ranges, as if a curtain were falling on the Western world. In this wind’s passing warmth, plants are stirred from their dormancy prematurely, a false hope that renders them vulnerable to the inevitable return of the cold. Even the great ancient trees have long grown stunted from such inconclusive agitation. When will the buried dust be raised to greet our lungs in spring? In the meantime, perhaps even the creatures of the forest cease hunting each other in order to enjoy this brief warmth. Perhaps even that poor, wretched old woman and I can keep from haunting each other for a day, for an hour.

Many years have passed without further provocations or conversations between us; it appears settled that our lives will continue on without one another, yet neither of us can seem to really exist or come to respect the terms of our parting. We live in different houses in distant regions, and I know that each night comes to her earlier than mine, that she will be asleep long before me. One of our qualities, common to both of us, must be an arduously hidden fear: never mentioned in the light, it exhausts us in night sweats, swallowed by the dark, which we try to ignore. We rest as if sweating side by side in an old marriage bed, and the square weight of the gloom lies upon us, clasps us, presses us together. We lie with our bodies completing each other, like two conspirators exchanging signs.

After the last provocation came, it was decided after much discussion that I, still a youth in terms of my confidence and outlook, overwhelmed and knowing no other option, must cease all contact with her. Indefinitely, I proposed. She decided on silence towards me as well, though not without mentioning that the silence was her decision and not mine, that this idea of hers had bloomed and been offered up earlier in the discussion, of which I could not recall. No matter these trifles, our objective in the end was the same: to banish for good all clarity as to who wanted most to murder me. And so she, the poor, wretched old woman, parted that day from her suicidal, useless son.

Before the provocation, we had both become increasingly indifferent to death, that much is certain. For her, I believe it was the accidental pregnancies and rushed abortions before me and my sister arrived. For her, I believe it was the wavering marriage in which she came to understand that she loved women and the coldness with which she had to extricate herself from my father, even when he threatened suicide. For me, I think it was a slow disengagement from an unnurturing family towards no known alternative, then a slow disengagement from an adult world that demanded guilt and poverty from sorrow and instability. Clinging sorrow. How absurd that I felt so despondent that those gray weeks in bed as the money whiled away could only end with dreams of my annihilation, dreams which I thankfully cowered from in the end. I sought rest. I was not overtly wicked.

Does any temptation remain?

Whoever dies first will be considered innocent in regards to the separation, for the relict can be said to have always had the gift of time to make amends. For they can be said to have tried their whole life to make peace with the other before the strain finally consumed them. If the old woman goes first, I will sleep even more fitfully, shrouded in a guilt that lengthens with the shadows, and even before I fall into a nightmare, the last of her emphatic wish for contact will enter my consciousness. For a moment, I seem to listen.

But in reality, neither of us tried to figure out, or could even comprehend, the true course of events, for we both prefer to think ourselves the victim. Both of us doubt the reality of the other, with little effort given to the search for objectivity. It’s a difficult emotion, that of casting aside a veil, and I’m not sure if either of us has the strength for it. Even the thought, the gesture of it, saps me of my strength and will, then I am right back to my bedridden ways, compelled towards tobacco and alcohol, allowing myself to grow weaker as day after day the evolving viruses of the world shift into a frenzy, the weaknesses in my flaggy asthmatic lungs signaling a welcome.

In short nights and long, her groaning pain is sure to increase, clogged valves of her heart from which an angel will not save her a third time. Despite all charges and arraignments, will I see her, regardless, in heaven?

The old woman in her distant home in her early night cannot hear these thoughts, yet she is my collaborator all the same; she bore me and then sought to rid me of this life. She rests now on my behalf, peaceful and ignorant of our world’s virus. Peaceful in the fact that she did not mean what she said, that I took things the wrong way; I have always been extreme, unforgiving. It is the madness that attends true clarity of vision that I fear. That somehow we need to exist within delusion in order to live. But that is another type of madness. A dual insanity that we must learn to outgrow. By these hands, there must somehow be nurture. Or else betray the very mother of the world.