Fuck Gratitude! Amen

Continuing my campaign against gratitude even as people in my community escalate their preaching I feel more and more like an alien. Spring! Prayers! Moments!  Meanwhile I struggle to breathe and talk and walk and I am not fucking grateful. I do not prefer this. If you just give me my body back, why, then, sure I'll be grateful.

So Monday I bent down to check on the water in a vase and I guess my head dropped and my eye landed on a dryish flower. If you've never felt a corneal tear it is hard to convey the intensity of the pain. All consuming, as if your eye is on fire, there is no way to shift attention away from it. My thoughts went immediately to oh my god what if I have to go to a doctor what if I have to go the ER what if I go blind! and then, please god if you make this go away I'll be so grateful...

No I don't believe in that kind of god and I've never kept those kinds of promises, but lemme tell you that when the pain started to go away and I understood that I would be ok, boom, gratitude. It just happened, no volunteering in soup kitchens, no prescription, no act of god, no act of will. But something about the structure of reality guaranteed the result. It's like if someone tells me to reach the crown of my head to the sky. I cannot do it. The more I try the more the neck strains and everything gets worse. But there is a way to engage the right muscles, maybe only when I'm lying on my back, maybe only when there is a great deal of support. This analogy itself is perhaps strained, but what if you see the sudden startling change as the floor and the gradual relief as the awakening of atrophied muscles? Does that make sense?

Yesterday I walked down the street for the first time in a long time instead of walking in the park. I ran into a neighbor, a beautiful young woman who is a working actor/singer on Broadway. She is a person of good cheer, which usually makes me feel alienated, but she asked me how I'm doing with such an open face that I said “dying, but enjoying the day" or something like that. That’s how I am nowadays, or maybe always; I plunk these shocking things into ordinary conversation, and oh did she look shocked. I apologized but she stayed put, said “I don’t know what to say,” and I thanked her for that because it’s really the worst when people try ridiculous ways to make me feel better. And then we talked about the suffering of ordinary life, and when we parted she said: “I could look into your eyes all day.” But that's because she saw in my eyes a reflection of her own vivacity, and because she was able to witness, to say "I don't know." She changed me. 

Gratitude. 

Does it matter that she is a Black woman? Actually I think it might, if only through my own assumption that she may have experienced some suffering. That assumption structured the way I heard "I don't know what to say." Come to think of it, that should be my assumption for every woman. Maybe every man too, not sure about that. 

Amen. 

May 21, 2021