If Stone Could Speak

4. it must ensue

"Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself."
- Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

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No one knows me like my sister does. Lexi, although trailing behind me in years, has always made up for it in her ability to grasp the core of who I am and what I mean to say so completely that I don't even need to finish my sentences. It's an odd thing, that you can find yourself so unimpressionable and unsure, and yet be a vivid, coherent presence in someone else's eyes.

I am so drawn to people who know who they are; they're like magnets to me. I don't know what it is to have that kind of self-assurance, to fill all the edges of your own shoes so unashamedly.

Sometimes I'll see myself in a clouded vision, as some kind of cold and distant professor that knows more than they let on; or as some kind of writer with a heart that bleeds through the pen into impeccable lines; or as some kind of elusive, unreachable goddess of a woman who's trailing cigarette smoke out her lips in some early-20th century café and speaks in riddles. I'm none of these things. I get a jolt of delight if ever I touch the frames of my own archetypes, but never do I fill them. I don't think I'll ever be anything all the way through; I'll always just be dipping my toes into pools of things I could be.

Here's something you need to know about me: I'm desperately, consumingly afraid of death. The type of fear that you can't just assuage from your mind. The type of fear that sits at the centre of it, as the eye of the hurricane, bringing all the other minutia of life into its grip.

It's a fear I keep running from. I would have tried to argue, at one point, that this wasn't the case. I would have dressed it up in all the armour of denial, but that only served to press it down further and further until it exploded in my stomach.

This is where it first exploded so long ago, in these same halls of my childhood home. Nowhere on earth constricts my vision to a tunnel of panic like they do; they are lined with photos of grandparents, and our distant ancestors; and all my life I've looked up into their young eyes and wondered if they knew they were living in someone's past. I think once I realized I was also living in someone else's idea of the past, my brain flipped around and has never it been the same. We are living, and we are dying. How can we be okay with that?, has burned holes into many family dinners. Silent clanging of forks against plates; no one could answer my question.

The despair, eventually, gave way to something resembling a fiery determination. I would beat the clock at all costs; I would outrun the eye of this hurricane sucking me in, like one runs against a conveyor belt moving backward. My childhood room is left a time capsule of someone unsure of themselves but imposing certainty; desperately unhappy, but imposing joy. "The things I have accomplished this year," are written on a sad list, in faded pencil, across my wall. Eerie smiley-faces I know I didn't mean are circled around it. 14, 15, 16... I had been counting my years, again in pencil, thinking that once I'd laid them out I'd see that not so many of them had passed. Ha, great logic; now look where you are. 23, and no sign of slowing down.

I don't know what it is. I don't think it's death; I think it's knowing I'm heading to it. I think it's looking in the hallway mirror and seeing a bit more of my mother every time I pass it. Generation blending into generation; and where does a childhood go once it's folded into another? Where do our lives go once they've dropped off their conveyor belts? I'd made a somber promise with myself, sometime around when I decided to leave this town, that I'd never end up as a photo collecting dust on a family's wall, with names and stories becoming obscured through time. I'd never be so stagnant, so forgotten. I think my fear is forgottenness, really - that muffling dust of time; and I have grasped for some way to inscribe my life into permanence ever since.