When Soup and a Sandwich Just Aren’t Enough
From 2009: Looking back on a decade of healing
The truth is not what happens, but how we remember it, and how it makes us feel. Today, my truth is both my freezing feet and my warm belly.
Weeks go by and I neither nourish my body nor feed my soul. I subsist on hot cups of tea and whatever dry salty snacks are on the kitchen shelves, usually an Indian version of zwieback called rusk. A meal made one afternoon provides me leftovers for days. I stay in my nighties, shuffling between the spot on the couch from where I watch DVR’ed reruns of cancelled episodic television and the desk in my bedroom where, ironically, my laptop lives.
For days on end, the phone rings only with strangers calling to ply their minimum wage trades, whether it is selling dish network subscriptions or really really low rates to call India. Recently they have been joined by unknowns who want to renew, refresh, refinance my mortgage, and some delusional who wants to buy my Prius. As if. The one exception is a constant friend who checks most days on my new text messaging self.
Still, I am not in a bad way. I am not depressed. I am not even sad. I am brewing, like a great cup of coffee. I am brewing like a well-steeped pot of tea. I am marinating in the juices of a life lived on the edge of not knowing. Not knowing myself, not even knowing what I didn’t know. Just living. Dreaming myself young, imagining myself falling in love. Marrying, having children. Running a household, raising children. Holding families and communities together. Picturing myself growing up, growing old.
Alone in this house, watching reruns in my nighties. Waking up.
Waking up, here. Here, where putting on socks is a major physical accomplishment, where a salad fork that serves as my backscratcher will never see the light of my kitchen again. Where the ebb and flow of the swelling in my feet is always hidden from visitors, especially those who would worry about me. Where I play Bejeweled Blitz inanely just one more time, perhaps to process my marinade and not have to leave the house. I force myself into my car in the windy deluge that has battered my windows for four days and nights: get to the grocery store, restock the forlorn refrigerator.
Driving through the canals that could be Italy’s Venice instead of Venice on the Westside of Los Angeles, I turn into the parking lot of what used to be a familiar haunt with the man who has now disappeared, to finally feed my body and nourish my soul. I have a bowl of tomato soup and half veggie sandwich. It seems not enough. Not enough to fill me up after four days of tea and rusks. I sit drinking brewed tea and refilling it with tears while the tender waitress tiptoes around me, keeping other diners from my table as I write. My feet freezing in wet socks, I dig into the fruit-filled crepe that reminds me I am still alive. And finally awake. I read from the book I have brought with me.
I do enough
I have enough
I AM enough
In agreement, I smile through my tears with another mouthful of sweetness.
And like me, it is perfection.
