The Wide Wide River of Regret 

You wake to find yourself adrift in a boat, floating on a river, heading out to sea, and then you realize the boat is a coffin, and it's yours, because you're dead.

Funny things happen in your brain while you drift out to sea in your own coffin.

"Did I leave the stove on?" "What was I wearing?" "Did I tell her that I loved her, enough?"

"Did I love the right ones?"

It's a wide wide river of regret, and you are floating in it, for a while. Your self-pity is warmly comforting: "Why me? Why now? Why so soon?" Second-guessing helps you pass the time: "I should have worn more sunscreen." "I should have driven slower." "I should have enjoyed that German chocolate cake."

Very few of these regrets are actually yours. You've inherited the idea of them, residue from some life you believed you were supposed to have lived, learned from TV and movies and from not knowing yourself well enough. You sail through this clutter, this Sargasso Sea of fabricated desires, bumping up against them with hollow thuds, till finally your boat hits something softer:

"I wish I'd been braver."

"I wish I understood that people cared about me, and let them."

"I wish I'd found something to care about more than myself."

The boat floats on toward the sea. There's no steering it. There's no stopping it.

One morning, you wake. You've rounded a bend, and the sun hits you right in your dead face. Everything is bright and clear, and you can't remember anything. You can't remember who you are. You don't recall where you came from. You watch the birds flying low over the river with great clarity, but you no longer remember yourself as the one who lived in that house, the one who went to that job, the one who loved that woman, the one who hoped for … whatever you hoped for.

Now you're just the man floating in the coffin on the river, on the way out to sea. You've finally arrived, in death, at yourself; and it's wonderful. 

Voodoo 

This entry is not currently available.

Floating on the River 

You're in your house. It's not big or ostentatious, but it's comfortable and cozy and it feels like yours. You've lived there a little while: you have some agreeable furniture, some wall hangings, a few houseplants, a small collection of coffee mugs that make you a little happy each morning. It's a place where you've coalesced many of these sorts of things—objects that make you a little bit happy.

You like your house. You feel comfortable in it—so much so that you often forget that it sits in the middle of vast river, and it's slowly floating downstream.

You drift down this river, through rough patches and slow meandering bends. Sometimes you stare out the window at the trees on the muddy banks. Sometimes you look at an egret perched on a mooring.

You can't steer your house against the stream, but you do give it a push now and then, to avoid a rock or to pull closer to passing flotsam.

Or people.

Sometimes people drift by on the river. There was a man in a rowboat who wanted to talk to you about salvation. There was a swimmer you rescued from drowning, and took in briefly till he recovered and swam on his way. There's the family on the barge, who sometimes passes you on the river and sometimes you pass them. "Your boys are getting tall," you say. "We baked some muffins," they say. "Do you want some?"

Now and then, not too often, you come upon another house drifting downstream at the same pace. Its window is just across from yours, and you engage in conversation. "Would you like a cup of coffee?" "No, thank you. I'm more of a tea drinker." You start talking, sharing with each other while you drift side by side, and everything feels a little lighter, a little easier.

Eventually, you decide to lash your two houses together and float down the river as one, for a while.

Aspirin for Gangrene 

MP3 audio track

You're new. You show up in town with a few things you stuffed into a bag. They're not essential or valuable or even all that well-planned; they're just the things you happened to bring. You arrive for no particular reason: everyone has to live somewhere; and maybe it doesn't matter where, as much as people think.

This place will do.

You walk a lot, somewhat relentlessly. You could take busses or trains, but you don't, because you don't want to miss anything. You want to see everything. You want to learn to distinguish that corner from that corner from that corner; and you do. You've only been in town a few days and already you see the sense of it.

You learn your way around. You learn the bus routes and the ways people talk, and why it's better to buy your coffee from here and your lunch from over there. You find an apartment and a way to make a living, so you go back and forth, carving out a new routine, slowly, like a river carves a canyon. There are people you begin to see regularly, co-workers, neighbors; and you see some of them regularly enough that you call them friends.

You learn some shortcuts, some efficiencies. Direct routes. The routine cuts a little deeper.

But unrest is a whisper in your ear, or maybe that's ambition, and you find another, better job; and like two points plotted on a graph, you can now connect your two jobs and call the line a "career path." You find yourself out at restaurants and bars for the second or third time, remembering the first time nostalgically. People sometimes ask you for directions on the street, and you're happy to oblige.

You meet still more people, and some of them become new friends, till you've accumulated more than a few, enough that you actually sometimes lose track. You wonder, sometimes, whatever happened to that one, that old friend? You haven't talked to them in a while.

The freshness wears off. The grocery store, the pharmacy, once sources of small pleasurable novelties—cereals and toothpastes you'd never seen, medicines with unfamiliar labels—these things are the new normal. You cease to notice the quirks on your walks—the gaslights and the cobblestone streets, the woman who hawks newspapers a little too aggressively, the fountains and sculptures and scenery, the man who needs one dollar to ride the bus.

You're discontent; you're not clear why. You think maybe it's because the color of the light in your apartment is wrong, tinged with too much yellow. You find another job, but you're not certain that it's a better one. It offers you a fresh commute in the morning, and new people with whom to small-talk. You wonder if it's like aspirin for gangrene. You sigh deeply. You take longer walks home, if home is the word you mean. The routine cuts deeper, a habitual insulation that it's easy to confuse for continuity, direction, meaning. Nothing is actually bad, but still, you find yourself packing a bag, a small one, filled with arbitrary things, and thinking of other places. It doesn't matter where. Any place will do. Somewhere new.

Less Than 

It's because of the shrinking.

It was hard to notice at first. Remember, growing was like that: "How big you've grown!," the cousins whose names you never learned would always say. And you would think, defiant: "No I haven't."

But you had. You'd grown imperceptibly, day by day. To prove it, your parents would mark little indisputable lines on your door jamb in pencil ("July 21, 1980: 47 inches"), till your incredulity was replaced with a hard-to-explain, slightly misplaced pride whenever you sized up your hash marks: "How big I've grown!," you would think.

Shrinking is like that. It sneaks up on you, without any giveaway signs. The hat still fits; the pants are tighter than ever—but you know that you are smaller than you were. You know it as surely as you knew looking at those pencil marks as a child. You have shrunken. You are less than. You realize, too late, that hopes and dreams have mass; that their mass centered you like ballast; they plumped you up; and now they're gone.

Shriveling. Wilting. Shrinking into less and less.

If you know, then it's only a matter of time before everyone— friends, co-workers, the nameless cousins, the strangers on the street—realize it too. It almost doesn't matter, though, because at the rate you're getting smaller, by the time they realize, you'll have disappeared altogether.

Parable of the Salve 

Let's say, you have a condition.

You have a rare, debilitating medical condition that causes you chronic, widespread pain, and you have had it as long as you can remember. Your condition is hard to describe: sometimes the pain is in your stomach, sometimes in your liver, sometimes in your heart, sometimes in your neck. Sometimes you feel it acutely over all your skin. Doctors have examined you up and down, and they can find no cause for your pain, no symptoms, no clues that might lead to relief. They prescribe pain killers which have fleeting, incidental effect. The doctors want very much to help you. But they can't.

You go on like this for some time. You begin to lose hope that anyone will ever be able to understand your condition, or to help. Then, one day, you are visiting a new doctor, explaining your condition (as you've done fifty times before)—only this time, the doctor nods and says, "I understand. I know exactly what you need." She reaches into her medicine cabinet and fetches a small jar. "This salve will make you feel better," she says.

It is miraculous. You have lived with your condition for so long, you'd given up hope that you might ever feel good again. The salve changes everything. With the salve, you forget your pain. You live happy and free, and every few days, you return to the doctor for another application.

Years go by—so long that you forget what life was like before the salve. So long that you begin to doubt there ever was a "condition."

But you begin to notice a change: the doctor is applying the medicine in smaller doses. Your weekly appointments become monthly, and the pain begins to creep back into your belly, your skin, your bones. You return to the doctor, desperate and demanding. She looks at you sadly. She tells you that she is sorry, but she has no more salve to give you.

The pain comes back now. It is familiar, like an old friend. It is hard to describe: it is sometimes in your stomach, sometimes in your liver, sometimes in your heart. The pain comes back, worse than before, because now it is augmented by your memory of the salve—by your dreams of relief. Through your pain, you work to remind yourself that it is not the doctor who gave you the pain, by withholding the salve; she is not the cause of the pain; but rather, it is the doctor who relieved the pain, if only for a while....

Everywhere You Go, There You Aren't 

You wake up before the alarm and you're completely disoriented: the way the light comes through the window makes you think you're in that apartment you had in Santa Monica, all those years ago. When you come to, you head to a coffee shop down the street, which reminds you of one you visited a few times in Berkeley. Later that morning, you stroll through a park, a copse of trees that looks a lot like a section of Valley Forge, near where you grew up, and that bend in the stream reminds you of another spot, in Westchester County. That afternoon, you're riding in a friend's car, suffering deja vu from a road trip somewhere in Arkansas, and you pull into a parking lot that strikes you as looking oddly like one you visited in Phoenix. Your destination, a grocery store, is laid out exactly like the one you used in Ithaca, New York. Finally, you get your bearings in Harvard Square, a place that looks, thankfully, like Harvard Square, but as you look around, you're nostalgic for another time, ten years ago, when you and some good friends spent a summer here. You duck into a movie theatre—escapism from all of the escapism you've been feeling—and once the lights go down, thankfully, you could be anywhere. You could be nowhere. By the time the movie is over, you sincerely have no idea where you are...

This Is Your Life 

MP3 audio track

You wake up a little before sunrise. You sit up but you can't see; you have a cracked pair of glasses around somewhere but who knows where. You must have been sleeping on your neck, because it feels like whiplash. Something's not right: an amber flicker on the wall, which your myopia reads as sunrise till you glean that it's the candle you left burning all night. You reach for the plastic cup of water by your bedside, and drink half before it slips and spills on the bed. You roll to the opposite corner and fall asleep.

You wake again an hour later, the sun now bright enough to find your glasses on the windowsill, next to the half-liter of whiskey that survived the night before. Outside: the small yard filling with brown leaves where squirrels find some refuge. Across the way: a symmetrical grid of darkened windows, ethereal in a morning fog, like row after row after row of Mark Rothko. You see all this, like you see every morning, through a set of wrought-iron bars. They are there, you remind yourself, for your own protection.

Your body is sore and your mouth is dry and you can't say why, exactly, you feel so bad. Winter and its too-short days. You think of recent events and how the sum total of them should add up to more than this, this vacant feeling, this deep-down boredom and disappointment. You think back to a doctor's appointment earlier this week, as he ticked down a list of test results, each one "Negative." You found yourself wishing, Please, let me have something. Please, let there be some measurable deficiency, some quantifiable cancer or lurking parasite, some infection, something. Let there be an explanation, or at least an excuse, instead of this general malaise, this incurable unwellness.

You refill your plastic cup and drink it. You blow out the candle. There's no reason to be up, yet, so you don't bother. You return to bed, confident or at least hopeful that by the time you wake, next time, things will look better. They often do.