THE GIRL WHO NEEDED THE WORLD TO PAUSE
A long short story:
She had come to that place. That place in life, when everything just needs to catch up with itself. When you just need to play your favorite song over and over on loop, to let all the memories get into one room.
So much had happened to her, even recently, she could not keep up. Her memory was fine, as she said-just fine. But even a good memory needs a coda now and then, a pause in the music to let the whole orchestra breath before it goes on.
This was one of those moments. Someone else had recently died, and once again she missed the funeral. She just couldn’t keep her days straight, so had to have private personal funeral rituals in her room after the fact.
The fact of life is, things stay in motion, but I need them to stop—freeze frame, snap shot, still life for a moment. But life is frenetic, electric, like an underwater organism, or a shooting star. I need the stars to freeze like that Van Gogh painting. I need the whole sea to freeze over, at least for a night, she thought.
Her older friend, the one who had told her to carry a small pocket mirror in case she came across someone who was dead, she could tell by their breath, that lady who had also taught her the indigenous flowers in her backyard, did not know either how to pause time, but did offer that she stop wearing her I-watch.
“Who cares how many steps you take, or what the market is doing. You don’t need to know that stuff, when walking and looking at birds.”
That helped for a day, but no longer.
She was stuck in a sped up world, which she couldn’t slow down.
Should she join a monastery and borrow their time frames. Prayer, potato planting, scripture reading, cleaning dishes, more prayer….but a borrowed spirituality would not work at this stage of her life. She needed that river that the old philosopher said one could never step in the same twice, to just stop, so she could step in exactly the same spot of the river over and over, until she was ready for it to move again.
Therapy wasn’t helping. Even depression could not stop time long enough to access her life. She needed something drastic.
Sex with her husband almost worked, but she hadn’t felt like that for years.
She needed a real media-pause. Not a menopause like on tv commercials where one “got on” with life. She needed to not get on with life, but to let her’s catch up.
She needed some great art studio on the sky where no one would interrupt her much needed timeless pause. She needed to finish each story she had ever lived, and go back and paint their endings in thanks and sorrow and joy like all true laments. Yes, she needed space to lament, edit and complete the chapters of her long life.
Yesterday, the old lady told her the county fair was in town and that she should go. So today, she decided to do so.
She knew what she had to do. She went immediately to the Ferris wheel, bought an all day ticket, and rode it up and down for hours, until she was starving. Stopped and ate two funnel cakes, watched children smile, and returned to ride another hour on the grande wheel. Each rotation she would restore another memory, she thought. And it nearly worked.
By evening, she had made it from childhood into her forties. But the Ferris wheel of integration, as she was calling it, could only take her through so many revolutions of memory. And here again she was making a new one to add. It was all just too fast, and never ending for her. She wanted time to actually stop long enough for her to catch her breath in all directions, to see things more as they are, or were meant to be.
She wanted to world to pause, and simply wasn’t sure how to make that happen.
That night, she dreamed of being on that ferris wheel, when suddenly the wheel itself broke off and started floating upwards. No one was afraid, but it hovered just below the clouds for what felt like forever. From there she could see her entire life in all directions-past, present and future. She took a very deep breath, saying thank you over and over, until the wheel resettled on the earth.