I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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It was very kind of my ex-husband, dead these dozen years, to show up in my dream last night. At first I was scared: when we parted there was blame to spare. We were young together, we were idiots, we literally drove our car into a ditch, and I no longer recall how we got out. Some helpful stranger, probably, equipped with chains. There was need of rescue, from our own folly most of all. But here’s what I miss: no one else remembers the summer we were twenty-six, invincible, directionless, driving the back roads of Kansas or Utah, stopping for Cokes and to stretch our legs at some dusty gas station where the locals eyed us with suspicion: You’re not from around here, are you? No, obviously, we didn’t fit in — except, for that small span of time, with each other. In my dream last night we didn’t touch. He was beaming at me, though, in the old way, as if I’d been forgiven all my failures, as if there were nothing to forgive.
Alison Luterman