The Road of Flat Squirrels

Dear Diary –

You’ll be happy to know that by now I’ve exhausted the entire lexicon of Sage Advice for Surviving Horrible, Vicious, Soul-Shattering Divorce. Well, most of the advice.  I had to skip the bit about “rising before dawn to nurture your inner peace.”  What inner peace? The only reason I’ll rise before dawn is to catch a plane and I’m miserable for a week afterward. But I really have made an effort, Diary, enlisted friends to be supportive or at least fake it, exercised until I can bench press the Unabridged OED, lived for months on blackened Brussels sprouts and fair-trade grapes and acknowledged my own role in the ruin, ie: I should have seen it coming in the beribboned glass vases of rose-scented Epsom salts in every room.  Who could fail to see where those were pointing? I was clueless.

But now I’m stuck on the last chapter of Sage Advice – “Move!” Every square inch of space shared for decades with a suddenly alien partner, Sage advises, is a chamber of horrors, a poisoned landscape more toxic than Anthrax. I’m supposed to jettison all that and flee to an environment free of the sadistic ghost.  Well, okay, but didn’t Virginia Woolf say it better?

“She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there were gone: were rubbed out, were past, were unreal, and now this was real, the boat and the sail with its patch.”

Ah, the patch!  It gives character and threat to the necessary journey. It’s a bit of old quilt, a flash of color sewn to dun canvas, delightful.  But it can’t withstand a storm or the teeth of ice, can it?  So to flee is at once brave and portentous. One does not necessarily survive a move.  It’s a crap shoot. I’d rather not. Cowardice the shameful default to which death is preferable.

So a lifetime of books are packed in trash bags for a short move, except maybe it’s going to be a long one so they must be repacked in a thousand boxes.  They will follow me, but to where?  North Carolina?  Massachusetts? The former is breathtaking natural beauty and, outside the cities, home of unbridled stupidity.  The latter an intellectual haven with lethal winters. Tough call. Be murdered by some brain-dead goon with an assault rifle making a supermarket safe for Christ, freeze to death on the way to a life-changing lecture in a hall where Emily Dickinson once sat, or just stay here, flattened into oblivion by entropy?

The saying goes – The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn’t make a decision. Advice welcome!

Photo by Trac Vu on Unsplash