She Thinks

She thinks:

Since I’ve stopped drinking I now notice a plethora of peculiar smells, from people mostly, many have bad breath. This is how she thinks, in words. She thinks, I am not saying that I don’t have bad breath, I cannot smell my own breath but this is something that has come to my attention, and if they don’t have bad breath they have body odor or too much cologne, thank God I still smoke.

She lifts her arm over her head and breaths deeply through her nose, just a little odor de sweat gland, she breaths out through mouth into hand, but simply cannot tell if pyorrhea has made an introduction, certainly emphysema is just around the corner but her attachment to the smoking ritual is too strong and it hasn’t become painful enough just yet to warrant enduring cold turkey detoxification from the long held love of tobacco. Damn Indians, she thinks of their curse upon the white man and woman. She thinks about how smoking probably killed Ayn Rand, and how she probably died at her typewriter while trying to spin out more philosophical propaganda for the capitalistic cause. This is how she thinks in pictures. A sagging corpse across a writing machine called Underwood, a cigarette still smoldering in the ash tray.

As she moves through the house she wonders where she will find the time to do all that needs doing, and all those things she wants to do but has put off. Avoidance has been a main stay, avoiding responsibility and ridicule, if one does nothing one is not subject to criticism, all one has to do in life is look busy and pay their bills. Chances not taken are the safety of the masses but when age strikes and the time is short we sometimes consider taking a chance. Not the kind of chance that youth takes, not the beautiful bullet proof vestiges of teenage angst or self righteous indignation of a twenty something. The chances of the aged and mid-lifer are more accurate, these lifers know what risk really entails. She’s been told that she should write a book what with all that talent, she thinks in words: I should write every morning, they say you should set aside a time every day to write and I should write in the morning. But he is here every morning and she feels obliged to sit with him, with coffee, and hear him out about his day. Not that she doesn’t enjoy this, it really is one of her favorite things to do, except the guilt. The guilt arises about the enemy. Time. Time is short and at 46 after drinking away her youth she feels she is running short of it. In words she thinks you can never make up for lost time; and thus taking chances becomes pivotal. But chances are a risk and she feels crushed about not having a sure thing, as she talks away in her head trying to convince herself that all is well, all will be well, all has always been well. Some part of her thinks she can take it with her.

A culprit of procrastinations has stolen her life while she was drinking and thinking in words and pictures about how some motivation would overnight strike and she then could be suddenly competent, enduring, and patient in and with the world. She would be loved and loving; a cross between Audrey Hepburn and Mother Theresa. She would exude stoic compassion; she would shake those about her with profundity. She would willowy rise with grace and dignity, this is how she visions in pictures and words; and then she remembers how very, very dangerous this kind of dreaming can be. How this had started the whole mess of her life, this dreaming of who and what she would like to be instead of being who and what she was. Once, actually more than once she had dreamed of lying in the soft grass, but in reality there was always bound to be an ant bed near by.