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| "The Scream" by Edvard Munch |
It's true that I'd read it beforehand, but just because we learn something doesn't mean we know. My paperback copy of the book is with the others, sealed in plastic in my basement. Life has done a lot in the years between then and now for me, and in any case, even that which touches me, I often forget.
That scream, though -- maybe I recognized it; perhaps not. It was familiar. Some memories come from elsewhere.
I watched alone as the winter sun faded, and when the time for the scream came, I found that I was sobbing; I don't know for sure whether my reaction elsewhere might have been different.
There are no deferrals. We think, we hope: love will slow things down, will let us take our time. It doesn't. We bargain, we barter our days; we delay the joining in on the insanity of work, of the frantic perpetuating of ourselves. Call it graduate school. Take your thoughts out to play. Create something; call it art. Postpone, for a few years, exactly whatever it is you were intended to become. And when putting it off is over, there's nothing left to do but to stop the car -- it's going too fast -- and to stand in the middle of the road. The scream is a sound from the throat; it's a noise from within the only body we've ever had.
How much time any of us have left, we don't know. But now I want to live. Who's to say how I may have poisoned myself this time last year, out of desperation, out of wanting to make things better but not knowing quite how, unable to keep on living that way.
There is no deferral, however brief, for any of us. We move forward, onward toward being eviscerated. We are born, and we are put to use.
