It must have been a heart attack, yesterday, a mild one. No other explanation satisfies my desire to speculate towards myself as thoroughly.
Carnivale Selah' tells me that he agrees, and he has a background in such things. He is, at least, as intelligent enough to almost stay off of Facebook, which makes him pretty smart.
No, I kid like him: only in part. He warns deeply of the heart, but his severest caution is for the mind. He tells me to go to a doctor right away and make sure that I have not had a stroke. He believes me to have been having one for many years now.
Yes, it all seems vaguely funny until my tongue becomes a sliding board for saliva, to turn my cheek into Wet and Wild at Spring Break every time I try to speak.
There is that.
It is the stress of all things that I am experiencing, pretending not to be. Something feels wrong to me. Something feels off.
CS tells me that I will put Rhys under too much pressure to be the something in my life which will somehow make it all make sense. He might be right. I do find myself saying things internally like, Well, if I can just be a good father to Rhys, then there will be that, and that is something.
If all else falls apart I can just focus on having the best relationship that I can possibly have with the boy. That is something that I needn't be disappointed with.
But, in doing so, there is the pressure placed unwittingly on the child. Enormous weight for such small shoulders to bear. Love seems unfair, even devious, when it is all that you have to offer. Rhys will become the channel through which all of the stresses and strains that Rachel and I experience collect and then travel. Whether we wish him to be or not.
The more we hide our troubles the more he will become the receptacle for those hidden fears. His desire being only to love us and to make things better, just as ours is for him.
I must find some way of re-collecting myself, even if it costs me in the immediate sense.
CS recommends some serious healing hoodoo: chanting, yoga, and some Baba Ramadan noodles.
All of it.
Now, I have all of that also to think about, to not try to love my son too much, to place too much importance or insistence upon his happiness, that in doing so he might become a reflection of my fears and disappointments. Then somehow, perhaps even most of all, to make sure that I am not trying to prevent Rachel from doing the same.
Facebook is useless, of course, but a friend did post a quote yesterday that I bothered to memorize. I do not remember the source, though it was a yogi. I could not find it this morning when I quickly looked before rushing off to work, but the quote was quite memorable and rang clear and true:
"You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free."
There is that also to consider, this morning, as the heart ticks forward into the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.... borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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