Читать книгу Don't Go Crazy Without Me - Deborah A. Lott - Страница 15

I’m sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, watching the birds at my backyard feeder, when anxiety rushes over me. Is it the product of too much caffeine too rapidly ingested, or of too much rumination? I can never tell what’s physiological and what’s induced by what I’m thinking. For me the feedback loops are endless.

I attempt mindfulness meditation; focus on the breath coming in, the breath going out, stare at one neutral spot on the wall, slow down my breathing, follow my breath. As I do so, everything calms down, and I find stillness. Then my anxiety is replaced by a wave of sorrow. Longing, longing for all that is lost, longing for what I never got, retrograde longing. I call my brother Paul.

“I had a dream I was back in the house again,” I say.

“Whenever I dream about Ira, he’s tormenting me,” Paul says.

“Whenever I dream about Eva, she’s starving me.”

The old alliances remain entrenched. To Paul my father was a villain, a maniac, a sadist, my mother a hapless martyr. To me, it remains much more complicated. Despite everything, I still love my father. But I do not miss him the way I miss my mother. Every day, the longing. My unabated mother-hunger remains insatiable.

Paul and I reminisce. About the house, the neighbors, minor events that we may well be the last people alive to remember.

“How can we be nostalgic for our childhood when so much of it was terrible?” I ask Paul. “We’ve fetishized our childhood, even the terrible parts,” I say.

“It wasn’t all terrible,” Paul says. “Besides it’s the only childhood we’ll ever get.”