A Feast of Burdens

The train glides with an unusual grace as cool morning droplets of dew pursue a skipping downward coarse along the wide window next to me. I look out over the stillness of the sound. The distant short, lightly cloaked in a disintegrating mist. Above, the full moon still shines brightly, watchful maybe, defying rebelliously the oncoming rise of the sun.

The tide has come and erased the shore. Here and there ducks coast, content and unafraid. Familiar landmarks are submerged. In the distance, a lone, small boat cruises; I can barely make out two figures. I imagine they’re bundled up against the early chill. There’ll be no sea lions on their floating platform this morning.

We pull into the next station, the connectors between the cars squeaking and growling. The train is remarkably empty for it being the last train of the morning. A pair of friends on the far side of the car have been chatting quietly to each other; that combined with the constant exhale of the air conditioning has been remarkably pleasing.

A dozen people board. They look dazed. They move slowly. Most of them aren’t yet fully awake. They take their seats, some uncertain as to which they should take, and the train pulls out again.

There are two sherriffs or deputies on board. They’ve walked the cabin twice. I’m irrationally nervous.

‘You want to take position up here?’ A voice behind me asks. I don’t hear an answer.

I didn’t sleep much last night. Insomnia happens sometimes. I expeted to be more tired and irritable this morning but, instead, I feel peaceful. It’s been increasing in that direction. The days have gotten easier, the toiling depression slowly relenting from its vocation, a sense of a new normalcy infiltrating this pourous state of affairs.

I wanted to be angry but I could never latch on to any. When I was younger, anger was my sanctuary. When I felt like I had gotten too out of control over the past few months, I resolved myself to find that black emotion and make ruthless use of it. But it remained elusive; a ghost from my past who also wanted as little to do with me as possible. When anger did come, like the sky unexpectedly and loudly clearing its throat on a clear day, it was flash of potassium on cool water: a bright and fleeting spark.

Instead of angerr, I often feel empty. Although empty isn’t necessarily the right word because ‘empty’ in terms of emotions has a negative connotation. It’s a peaceful kind of emptiness. But it’s all too easy to mistake it for a sense of defeat, of resignation, of failure. Maybe it’s acceptance. If so, then it’s definitely not a negative kind of emptiness. Maybe it’s emptiness in the sense of Bodhidharma. That, too, is definitely not a negative kind of emptiness.

I know, though, like those ended snarls of anger, this feeling too will soon slip away to be replaced by another. And then another. And then another.

I am in a room with no doors. I sit down.

• • • • •

I was wrong: there were three of them, those slippery majesties.

I miss my wife. Of course, I do. We’d been together for nearly a decade and she had been my ballast and best friend. She understood me better than anyone else; even moreso than the soulmates about whom I’ve recently written. She figured things out about me, illumined the darker regions of my personality, and provided order in areas of my self where chaos once ruled unchecked. I loved her—and still do love her—unconditionally and I am proud to have shared the time and experiences we had together.

For the most part, I have nothing but great memories: our yearly adventures in Leavenworth eating at Visconti’s, drinking wine, playing miniature golf, her being excited about watching the taffy puller in action, and lazily tubing down the river before our drive home; discovering and loving together 2-step and dubstep; coming home late one night to find a couple of neighborhood cats trying to chase down a mouse that we tried to save; crying together when we figured out which song she should walk to at our wedding; going with her to classes to and being present for her conversion to Judaism and sharing with her her first Jewish holidays and how we took a photo of the first year of Shabbatot we shared; walking to Greenlake and sitting on a bench for hours, talking, sipping on a Nalgene bottle full of Diet Coke and rum; … I could go on and on.

What I find interesting now is that, in thinking about some ex-girlfriends the other day, I fully realized how remarkably similar my ex-wife is with a particular ex-girlfriend. I don’t put any faith in horoscopes or the zodiac but their birthdays are a mere two days apart and they have a practically unified method for handling negative emotions: they bottle them up and thus they were often emotionally unavailable.

This was manifested uniquely between them. My ex-wife, for example, simply would never think to ask me how my day was, or ask how I was feeling. I believe that this wasn’t because she didn’t care but that the thought simply didn’t cross her mind. When we talked about things, when I reminded her to ask or when I talked about my day anyway, she cared and she showed it. When I was sick, she’d occasionally check up on me and take care of me, and when she finally took the kids and left and she was worried about my emotional state, she checked up on me. So I know that she cared. It’s just part of her personality and I don’t fault her for it.

But it’s harder to deal with now that we’re divorced. I message her, check up on her and the kids, commiserate with her when she’s going through a bad time, ask her how her schooling is going, etc. She never checks up on me. She messages me only when she wants something. When we meet up each week, she doesn’t ask me how my job is going or how I’ve been. I try to tell myself that she still cares and it’s just that part of her personality and not indicative of something else. But it’s difficult to believe. And it’s hard to deal with the fact that I still care what she thinks.

Now, to be clear, this isn’t because I’m looking for some sight of reconciliation. It’s that, honestly, I’m kind of weak here. It’s wrong of me to put any emphasis on whether or not she asks me how I’m doing but that unavailability carries a greater weight in the wake of our divorce and my subsequent bout of, I don’t know, being a regular person.

For the two years that I was with that particular and unbelievably similar ex-girlfriend, I had often talked about how I’ve always wanted a bonsai tree. Ten months after we broke up, she moved away. Before she did, she wanted to buy gifts for people. For her boss, she bought her a bonsai tree. For me? She gave me a Chia pet.

It’s amazing how in the wake of our divorce, I’ve been given a similar consolation prize.

When Apple announced the original iMac, our designer asked, ‘Why would anyone want a VT100 made out of colored plastic on their desk?’ Here at Eastgate, we’d predicted a very different product and expected the new machine would prove a debacle. We were completely wrong. A few weeks later, I spent a day visiting art galleries on Santa Fe’s Canyon Road, and the most prosperous galleries all had colorful new iMacs atop their stylish desks. Some of those desks were 17th-century hand-carved Spanish heirlooms, some were spectacular steel-and-wood fantasies of contemporary crafts, but on all of them stood Bondi Blue iMacs shaped just like that long-obsolete dumb terminal.

The galleries weren’t responding to the retro tech allusion: they responded to the iMac because it was different. It was designed. Someone had thought about it—it wasn’t just another beige box. It didn’t matter that the old beige box might have been better, in some ways; the iMac was trying to do what the old package didn’t, and you could sense a personality and a vision behind that attempt.

Mark Bernstein

The Tinderbox Way