I don’t know when I’ve felt so empty. As I count my days, I see many I’ve spent alone—more than most, but I can’t remember emptiness. I was always filled up with friends from my books, with their pain and ecstasy; in fact, maybe that was a curse. I attached only to a few close friends right in front of me. The friends I knew intimately were homeless or aristocratic, wandering, or frantically engaged, peaceful or catastrophic and always bigger than life itself. I walked around with Anna Karenina’s silent wail, Gatsby’s unshakable dream, My Antonia’s yellow wheat fields, Tess’s lost eyes looking down such dark roads. (Scattered roses weren't enough. How did Hardy know that?) I never waited for a doctor’s appointment without traveling to an Italian loggia or London garden from Howard’s End or Room with a View. Numb? I ran to the moors with Heathcliff.The emptiness is huge, chrome-like, all in shades of silver, gray, and black. It’s standing in a carved out circle with ten hallways extending off of it, without ceilings. And they wind away from the circle with nothing in them but air. I feel like a tiny piece of gravel, because the empty is bigger than standing in front of the sea, bigger than the universe. It’s vast.
And I’m surprised. I never anticipated its constant insistence on making itself known. This quiet encircles people, crowds, the earth and goes on forever. I feel people moving around me, hear them talking, but it’s jargon. I could grab the words out of the air and shape them into steel spears to drive into the moon or carve them into willows to roast marshmallows.
I drive through Idaho fields toward home, and there’s just the steering wheel. I can feel the highway rolling under the tires, but even the sounds are all low like far away thunder. I don’t look up anymore to search for the hawks. It feels like drifting away from chatter and chaos, from endless busy-ness—just drifting—floating, sort of evaporating.
Still, I have been blessed. There are traces of opera left—I can hear it like I hear echoes in a canyon. Narrow Italian streets with crumbling tangerine plaster. Pigeons in Venice too thick to walk through. Winding staircases and cicadas. The horror of the coliseum. The hot walk up through the bored shopkeepers to the Parthenon. We could barely make our way through the ghosts and barely sense their grandeur.(What did they want? Why did they build this pillared massive stone monument? In hopes that the gods would smile on them? And who was I next to these lost people?)
And the bright, sharp, Van Gogh light in Southern France with strangers sitting at tables eating strawberry crepes. We said we’d make love in every town across Europe to make it our own, though we fought once in Florence—my most favorite pile of stones in the entire world. I don’t know. I thought it was his fault because he wanted to shop for leather, but maybe he couldn't live up to my expectations of a Medici moon. Maybe everything else paled beside the harps floating up from the restaurant beneath the sculpture garden.
I have loved some good men; my heart is full of great children, but knowing them has made the quiet bigger and wider.
I always believed in the sweet surrender of a someday-death, but there is no death. The real tragedy of suicides is that we live on forever. No one will ever die; we go on and on whether we like it or not, though we move into phases in life that we don’t anticipate. New landscapes that someone at sometime somewhere must have whispered about, but I was too blind and deaf to understand them. Now, I hear the empty spaces even in the books and their depths spin my head, along with the courage of the authors, who attempt to uncover them. There must be a way to become comfortable with changes, to live with the empty quiet gracefully and “first do no harm.”
I want to stop the car at the railroad-crossing, drift along the tracks to the Snake River, ease through the wild wheat to slip into wet, smooth coldness and swim clear to China where red and yellow flags hang in streets smelling of fish and poppy flowers. I want to crush through a mass of people, watch children flying kites, or chase rabbits through the sagebrush. And I see Streisand turning in circles in The Way We Were saying, “I want, I want, I want.” What I really want is to be past this phase or at least walk through it with grace and clarity.
