
"I turned my head, only for a moment, and that moment became my life." ~Anon.
The last few nights I've been lying awake until the early hours with a racing heart and no real idea precisely what it is my body is panicking about. It started with watching the movie Easy Virtue, a supposed romantic comedy which had me sobbing most of the way through. Though I am not blonde, gorgeous, from Detroit, particularly witty, married to an English gentleman, nor a great fan of any kind of motorsport (and I have never, not even once, sat on anybody's Chihuahua), I was still ripped apart by the heroine's valiant attempts to stand up for her life in a situation where those she wanted to please the most cared the least, where all her good intents were met with hostility, and where being true to herself meant the destruction of a future she had thought was hers. That Noel Coward. Who knew?
I took another road to the lovely Larita. Laid low, kept the peace, harmony at all cost. I thought it was loving and honorable, but it wasn't, not truly, and least of all to myself. Wiped me out, in all senses of the word. When I was racing to hospital a couple of months ago after coughing up copious amounts of blood, I thought the chances were pretty high that I was dying. And I was too tired to care.
I quoted MacBeth to Nathan recently, the "I am in blood, stepped in so far" speech, and explained to him that MacBeth, given an opportunity to stop the killing and perhaps gain a measure of redemption, decided that returning across the river of blood he had created was just as 'tedious' as carrying on through it, so he might as well just keep on keeping on. It didn't matter to him anymore, he had long since fallen from hope. Too tired to care.
Nathan was perturbed by this attitude, as all 11 year olds should be (show me one who understands despair and I will show you angels weeping); he thought MacBeth should try at least.
I don't know about MacBeth, but I know that I am not ready to give up, tempting though it seems some days. It's not a matter of pulling my socks up and trudging through another day any longer, but of taking a tea break from life's relentless forward march and seeking out those parts of myself I left behind, back in the day. I'm sure they will still be waiting there, if I look hard enough. If I even did leave them behind.