Please excuse my angst

Musings on suffering from a spiritual toddler (It's me. I'm the toddler.)

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite. (Romeo and Juliet II.ii.)

“Suffering is a part of life.” 

This is something I was told as a child. I used to imagine suffering as an unpleasant medicine or a distasteful meal. I used to imagine suffering had the color and texture of darkness, the sort of darkness that coats your childhood bedroom when you wake suddenly in the middle of the night, feeling alone and disconcerted and petrified, as though the darkness could crush you like an avalanche or swallow you like an ocean wave.

I imagined that, if it was true, and suffering was indeed a part of life, every person could choose how and when to ingest this medicine or eat this meal. I imagined some people took their suffering, their personal darkness, at a pristine dinner table set with gleaming china. Others took their darkness on the sofa, rifling through the bowl and picking out the most tolerable bits to eat first. Still others took their darkness in bed, gulping it down and then staring up at the ceiling, tears creeping from the corners of eyes to cheeks to pillowcase. 

I’ve had my fill of this darkness. Who hasn’t? I’ve eaten so much, traces undoubtedly still linger in my system. It’s unlikely I’ll ever be fully rid of it. It’s like a medication; my body is now so accustomed to the chemical, should it abruptly disappear, my organs would no doubt panic, not knowing how to function without it.

(Side note: Whenever the phlebotomist takes my blood, I always stare at the vials as though I can cut through the superficial and see past whatever they’ll search for later in the lab, eyes pressed to the microscope, studying the stunning, vivid, ordinary parts of me. I never see anything, no veins of black, no glimpse of gold. The body keeps the score, but never displays it with the whimsy or fantasy I long for. The doctors don’t see anything either; they send me a threatening email several weeks later telling me I have barely any ferritin left in my body and that does not make me special, it only makes me severely anemic. The phlebotomist confirms this, dismissing my mild fascination with the vials: “Your blood is just blood. It looks just like everyone else’s.”) 

Lately, my prescribed daily dose of darkness has increased. Some days, it can fill a shot glass. Other days, I have to portion it out throughout the day. Now, each day there seems to be more waiting for me. I eat it from a soup spoon, alone at the kitchen table my roommates have recently acquired from Facebook Marketplace. The wood is solid and kind and I keep pressing the pads of my fingers against it because I believe the kitchen table should be a household object committed to memory; if I went blind, I should still be able to navigate the warm wood by touch. I should know the individual sounds that mark the union of the table and glass, porcelain, plastic, paper, fabric, even darkness. 

This particular darkness I eat right from the carton, sliding the spoon into the thick pool before me, half languid and dormant, half confused and beastly. I haven’t the energy to cut it up, to set it on a nice plate, to use a napkin or a placemat. It’s a bit past sunset and the lingering light outside is all pink smoke and dulled gold. The foothills near my childhood home are burning. There’s a gasp from the swamp cooler in the next room, the errant call of an over-loved dog. I understand: the city is trying to find rhythm before light fades, ceding to the urban pseudo-stillness we’ve all become accustomed to. 

This kind of darkness is new. It’s one I’ve both feared and desired my whole life, but never tasted before. Now I have, I’m having trouble keeping it down. The spoon clatters against the table as I clench my fists, fighting my gag reflex. I can hardly get my lips to close around the reality of it, the flickering promise of pain, the crippling uncertainty of the texture. It makes my throat tight, like the darkness is strangling me.

How to explain to you how it tastes…

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs, Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes, Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears. What is it else? A madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet. (Romeo and Juliet I.i.)

It tastes like nothing at first, like a glass of tepid water. It’s a full five seconds before the taste assails me, clangs through my taste buds and sparks around my senses. You’re imagining that it tastes wretched. The opposite is true; it’s sweet.

It’s a kind of sweetness that’s only and entirely mine, that only I know. Like fruit yielded from a vine, pruned and harvested for generations, pressed and fermented in a divine cellar, and finally set before me as wine, as a gift I both pour out and drink myself. But what was once poured freely, girlishly, merrily, almost unbelievably, is now is served back to me as agony, as something foreign, as darkness.

It’s not saccharine; there’s just the right amount of salt woven through the sugar. But another moment passes and I realize the salt is my own; as I weep, my tears are falling into my open mouth. 

My body doesn’t know what to do, where to place the flavor, the texture, the sensation of it, how to displace the impact, how to delegate the task of digestion. Hence, my physical response is a resounding aching, tearing, wrenching sensation from my chest, from my heart. I choke a little on my meal of pain. It is like being kissed and then stabbed over and over. There’s no separating the pleasure from the agony. They come together; they are one in the same. I am now well and truly Juliet, consuming equal parts sorrow and melodrama with ardent heroism. That thought makes me gag again, makes me gasp and splutter and choke.

I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them
To make me die with a restorative. (Romeo and Juliet V.iii.)

I don’t want to eat this darkness. It knows me. It is too intimate. This darkness is soft, yet it holds me at the table; I can’t leave until I finish. I am a child again, petulant in my refusal to finish the contents of my plate, contents that supposedly will make me healthier, stronger. 

I have no doubts that this meal of darkness will achieve these things, will carve out of me something defined, something baroque, something sanctified, will turn my body into a renaissance painting: soft and forgiving, true and generous, mysterious and strong.

 But the cost of every mouthful seems too steep. 

I’d rather eat anger. Anger tastes like fire and steel. It is not nourishing, but it is animating; it metabolizes much faster than darkness. I’d even prefer sadness. I’ve been swallowing sadness since the day I could speak; it tastes like bread to me, like milk. 

“I don’t like this,” I try a phrase from girlhood. “I want something else.” 

I’d take the darkness I had to eat after my knee surgery. At least I was allowed to cut the tang of that misery with painkillers, at least for the first week. After that, I found I was content enough to eat so long as I buried myself in my chosen form of escapist fiction. The darkness didn’t taste that bad if I was more concerned with the fate of two enemies-turned-lovers than my own circumstances. 

I’d take the darkness of nostalgia, of departure, of forfeited friendship. I’d take the darkness that tastes like the worst part of grapefruit juice, that burns like vinegar, that is thick and dense like unstirred peanut butter, that is papery and leaves my mouth ashen.

My request doesn’t work, though. My plea goes unheard. The darkness doesn’t shift or dissipate. The silence says enough, it speaks with the same exasperation as my mother used to: This is what we have to eat. This is your only option.

I’ve spent enough time with other people’s darkness to know that my particular portion is by no means extraordinary and perhaps doesn’t merit speaking about. The darkness served at funeral receptions, on hospital trays, in courtrooms and prison cells are far worse. Some people must receive their darkness through an IV full of other chemicals. Some people roll their darkness into a joint and smoke it. Some people sprinkle it on top of their food, like chia seeds or nutritional yeast, some absurd embellishment added in the name of health.

Come, gentle night, come, loving black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars. (Romeo and Juliet III.ii.)

I can see other people’s darkness, but I can’t touch it. I can only hold them (if they want me to). I cradle my seizing dog, holding his erratic fury in my arms until my skin is only a canvas for the red-pink scratches he offers. I whisper to him, but he is a dog. My comfort is not comfort to him, only gray, meaningless sensation. I let my friend squeeze the blood from my hand as she lays on the hospital bed, trying to control her thrashing. I peer over as the doctor threads silver and black into her open, splitting wound. A garish, nonsensical mouth of blood and macerated skin. She cries. It’s the fearful cry of someone who can’t be reached. It’s the cry only a mother can answer, therefore I am silent. 

I am a poor custodian of other people’s darkness, not to mention my own. When I was foolish and invincible, I tried to help other people stomach their portions, as though darkness was an overlarge ice cream order, something we could split. I didn’t know anything. Later, I tried to help other people name and categorize their darkness like an eccentric, empathetic nutritionist. “How does it taste?” I used to ask. “What does it feel like, what’s the texture?” This did not help. They only cried—first slow and then harder, setting fork and knife down to blow their nose and look up at me with a child’s gaze: fear so exposed, an injured, innocent face wailing over a half-understood wound.

“I don’t know,” they’d whisper, the words helpless and lost. “I don’t know.”

I cried with them. What else could I say? I didn’t know either; I don’t know anything.

I rock back in my chair in frustration, in anguish. I’m not hungry and I don’t want to eat. I’ve become unaccustomed to eating my darkness alone.

The pool of it swells, brushes against my cheek, lays a playful, familiar finger atop my nose. I choke again, but not in disgust. The sound of a sob ripples around me, tearing away like dead skin, rough and ragged like an old dish cloth. 

Whenever I sit at the table with my darkness, I always think of the my friends who ate gracefully and without complaint. It’s almost St. Maximilian Kolbe’s feast day. He offered his arm to the Nazi soldiers who laced him with so much darkness, he died in his cell. St. Catherine of Sienna subsisted on nothing but darkness and the Eucharist. St. John the Baptist: locusts, honey, and darkness. I fight through another mouthful and fear I will never become their peer in Heaven. 

My disposition is inherently tragic. My modus operandi is a pair of frightening fists with which I cling to any semblance of control I can find. White knuckles aren’t enough; my grip is such that both hands are bloodless. My tendency is resentment, my face slackens and tenses like a clothesline as emotions are shaken across it like laundry. Vengeance dries in the sun, drips away to leave love-hungry garments of Openness and Devotion drifting lazily in the afternoon air. Jealousy and Panic leave unforgiving stains on the fabric.

I am no saint, only a girl refusing to eat her dinner. 

The dining room is a dim, dusky swelter. The remaining daylight glows lucid like gemstones at the corners of the window behind shadowy boughs interlaced with night. The sound of the traffic depresses me. I’m growing to hate the city I used to love so dearly. 

Can you see me, skirt wrinkled, tear stained, and sweaty? Do I look brave, do I look beautiful? Do you pity me? See how my figure blurs into the growing night, how the hours grow thicker, covering more ground, slow moving like crusted honey from a plastic bottle. You can’t differentiate my hair from the curtain, my arm from the chair, my hand from the table. Another day is ending. I take another bite. I whimper. It’s pathetic, I know. 

I won’t conclude this depiction of my sorrowful meal with an over-spiritualized call to action. I can’t lie and say I’ve adopted Fiat Voluntas Tua as a creed I believe in my very bones. I’m not there yet. God willing, I will be one day. Like my Blessed Mother before me, I will hold my arms open to consume any manner of darkness in whatever form I’m asked to consume it. But, no, I’m not there yet. Instead, I remain at the table, eating slowly but surely, periodically pausing to cry or choke or gag or curse at my plate. I might never grow to love the taste, I might never finish my portion. 

But, one spoonful at a time, I will eat.