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Waiting for Home
Sep. 14th, 2006 01:25 amI have come up with a use for the outlet switch! My laptop was plugged in but turned off, and I didn't want to leave it drawing power. I was reaching out to unplug it, and I thought, hang on...
and that is when I flipped the switch.
First, learning to flush the toilet, now this. I'm really getting the hang of things here - here still meaning Emily and Gareth's flat rather than London as a whole. Baby steps, I say. In about a month, I think I'll have a solid grip on walking to the end of the street. Tomorrow, I feel confident about my plan to turn on the electric kettle.
Tonight, I ate the pecan candy that Val bought me after dinner on Friday, my last dinner in Texas. Ciro and I had already split a sopapilla, so I saved the candy.
It's hard. Not the candy; that was soft. It's hard to be this far away from him, so far away that five hundred fifty years ago, people here didn't know there existed. It's only four days since I last saw him, but what matters is the stretch of time until I see him next. I feel weak for taking it this hard, and guilty about being weak. I suspect the world is divided between people who will think it's reasonable - even laudable - for me to be this undone by his absence, and people who will think it's silly and childish. I'm not sure I like the people on either end. I'm not sure where I myself stand.
Long before I was born, my grandfather spent several years in a mental institution. When my grandmother died, we found the letters he'd sent her, which she'd kept. I didn't ever get to read them - no one offered them to me - and I think they may have burned in the fire. Uncle Rex read them, though, and told me they were full of yearning and pleas for my grandmother to come to him, or to let him come to her. Uncle Rex says the letters were heartbreaking, so desperately in love, and that he couldn't understand how his mother could be so cold as to resist them. We don't have her letters, so we don't know. Uncle Rex thinks she was, for some reason, in this instance, heartless - even though she was a warm and loving woman in all other respects. As for me, I think that she had young children to worry about, and not enough money for food, let alone grand gestures. I think that her coming wouldn't have changed the fact that my grandfather was in an asylum. I think there was nothing to do but wait until he could come home on his own.
Anymore, I feel like my grandfather, sending a thousand pleading letters that were perhaps never answered (although I believe they were). And I know why I'm here, and I know why Ciro isn't, and none of that stops me from searching through a thousand different ways to change it, stops me from sending crazy and inconvenient letters to someone who can't possibly answer my pleas.
It is crazy, and I am going to stop.
and that is when I flipped the switch.
First, learning to flush the toilet, now this. I'm really getting the hang of things here - here still meaning Emily and Gareth's flat rather than London as a whole. Baby steps, I say. In about a month, I think I'll have a solid grip on walking to the end of the street. Tomorrow, I feel confident about my plan to turn on the electric kettle.
Tonight, I ate the pecan candy that Val bought me after dinner on Friday, my last dinner in Texas. Ciro and I had already split a sopapilla, so I saved the candy.
It's hard. Not the candy; that was soft. It's hard to be this far away from him, so far away that five hundred fifty years ago, people here didn't know there existed. It's only four days since I last saw him, but what matters is the stretch of time until I see him next. I feel weak for taking it this hard, and guilty about being weak. I suspect the world is divided between people who will think it's reasonable - even laudable - for me to be this undone by his absence, and people who will think it's silly and childish. I'm not sure I like the people on either end. I'm not sure where I myself stand.
Long before I was born, my grandfather spent several years in a mental institution. When my grandmother died, we found the letters he'd sent her, which she'd kept. I didn't ever get to read them - no one offered them to me - and I think they may have burned in the fire. Uncle Rex read them, though, and told me they were full of yearning and pleas for my grandmother to come to him, or to let him come to her. Uncle Rex says the letters were heartbreaking, so desperately in love, and that he couldn't understand how his mother could be so cold as to resist them. We don't have her letters, so we don't know. Uncle Rex thinks she was, for some reason, in this instance, heartless - even though she was a warm and loving woman in all other respects. As for me, I think that she had young children to worry about, and not enough money for food, let alone grand gestures. I think that her coming wouldn't have changed the fact that my grandfather was in an asylum. I think there was nothing to do but wait until he could come home on his own.
Anymore, I feel like my grandfather, sending a thousand pleading letters that were perhaps never answered (although I believe they were). And I know why I'm here, and I know why Ciro isn't, and none of that stops me from searching through a thousand different ways to change it, stops me from sending crazy and inconvenient letters to someone who can't possibly answer my pleas.
It is crazy, and I am going to stop.
