A Tale of Two Wallaces

How can he keep living that way?

How can someone consider himself dead inside, void, a mathematical equation that was never meant to be. 

Yes, it's as grand as all that.  Hello, goodbye cruel world, blood stains on the inside scribbling notes of some unforeseen equation.  Mathematics proves time and time again, he says- he used to say, that none of this is good, or right or positive.  He was only ever happy when he disengaged from himself, from that mountain of a mind, which was really just a photographic storage bin for all the knowledge he used to take in.  Yet, he never appreciated intellect, not really, and certainly not the truest kind, where humility and emotion take all those thoughts by their heart strings and haul 'em to town with you.  He couldn't do that.  His wheel was misshapen, the axle busted.  He did not have the tools to feel, and simply recorded, noted, did not react and remained passive to other people's strands his whole life.  The Jesuits did it, his mother did it, the blackened shadow of his dead father, looming over him at age 13, his father's dark hair and clunky professor's glasses, the former of which he inherited (he would always take his contacts out at night, and never put on his glasses.  Meanwhile, mine were seared into my brain all those nights I did not come prepared). 

His passivity was so deep down into a hole of despair that he simply could not move.  He should have found ways to escape his brain - the beast, but he could not.  He concentrated too much from within his own Lack- to just exist the world as he was.  It was never good enough; it was never right.   He had this strange good Samaritan thing he took to a faulty extreme - doing good deeds for those not closest to him, so he could be thought of as well in their eyes, since it was their eyes which reflected his worth.  He took the idea of doing kind things and wrangled it up to him, his own personal smack habit of good deeds.  He gave away and lent books, endless books, always but in droves and in particular times he must have felt so heavy.  Then, at the end, at least at the end of my seeing him anymore.  The final push, the bargain basement giveaway.  Leaving the few of us, namely me, who has a whole new library now, to wonder -- offered up that sticky, dark feeling when you see that it's books he's already lent you, books you read, returned and spoke of at length with him about.  And he knew that.  First editions, including the one about the mad scientist who wanted to conjure up the moon child --the summer on the boat, when I had folded the ear of the page down, and he gently asked that I did not, since it was such a special edition -- it was there, along with the other, less impressive biography that I also read and returned.  His Best books were there.  It made you feel terrible, and truthfully, I don't like looking over at my bookshelf much these days.....I prefer to spread them out, rather than see entire acres of his mind piled up like trash at the side of the road...I should stop talking about him like he's not alive. He is- I think.

I know he still goes to work and shows up.  He doesn't know I know that.  But I wanted some third party proof.  I hope he still takes good care of that white abomination of a pit bull who I miss so very much.  I hope he is not in that place of immovable naught, just shy of the executioner's dirt pit, and the line to the beautiful death that he just cannot make happen for himself.  How must it feel there, in the shadow of the day, hearing the world chime and bellow just around you, with all of us in your midst, with my words like a broken record threatening to cut you if you didn't just "be a man" and "get happy" and "try to see the beauty in it all"...the weapon of choice in your hand (if applicable), and that giant and unforgiving brain beating, and beating, and cornering you into this.  But the courage doesn't come.  I hope you sit up and see the day forming, outside your one, particular spot.  What's worse, that moment if you did finally cross that finish line, and regret it the 3rd, 4th or 5th second afterwards.  Maybe your math talk was right.  Perhaps both sides of the coin do bring on nothing but big fat zeros.

M. Lucia