#lang pollen
◊; Copyright 2003 by Joel Dueck. All Rights Reserved.
◊(define-meta published "2003-07-07")
◊title{What You Might Have Done}
◊caps{You had} just gone into the den to grab your coffee mug, which you’d left there after
breakfast; but when you saw the ◊index[#:key "paperbacks"]{dingy paperback}, your presence of mind
failed you, and you paused. It somehow recalled the scratchy, stuffy days of your elementary
education, and it rather sickened you. You looked out the window: it was raining. I have to get out
of here, you thought. You might have stood there all morning, but in the rapidly thickening clouds
of your mind, something told you to back out of the room and take a breath. And immediately the
skies parted, you laughed at yourself, and you were home again, with twenty years safely between you
and the starched collars of your youth.
◊index[#:key "drowning"] This is what a drowning man must feel like when he’s gone down, down, and felt
the water entering his lungs and the lights going out, and then been hauled up and given his life
back by some brave stranger. You’re a little more grateful for having gone through it. Maybe when
he’s got over it, the nearly-drowned man will go back every now and again, and have a look at the
lake that nearly was his grave, and take fresh joy in the fact that it didn’t get him after all.
That’s fine up to a point; but it isn’t healthy to do it too often.
But there are differences between you and the drowning man. You had friends at the bottom of your
lake, people you knew and joked with and who had some good points about them. You can never go back
and see them; for one thing your soul revolts at revisiting that episode in any way, shape or form;
and for another, they are gone. It’s too bad they didn’t all turn out like you. They would have been
happier.
And maybe in another five or ten years, you will go back into that den, perhaps to pack its contents
into boxes for a move, and you will come across more dingy paperbacks and yellowed notebooks. Some
of them are missing; you loaned them away, and truth be told you’re actually glad they were never
returned. You will never read them; and someday the sight and smell of them may throw you into
a gray reverie from which you never emerge. Listen! If you have any sense, you will burn them in the
firepit and then take a short walk with your wife. Better a small loss of sentiment than the
straightjacket.
