m&ms487

The other morning I read a horribly depressing novella. It's call As We Are Now by Mary Sarton.

It's about an older lady who is a retired teacher, who never married, and is put into a nursing home run by two uncapable, corrupt, and inhumane women.

The woman, Caroline, slowly starts to lose her hope of ever returning to a normal life. She is constantly emotionally battered and humiliated. She becomes childlike in the way others treat her, and in the way she becomes frustrated with simple things.

Eventually she can stand her life any longer. She asks a friend to bring her lighter fluid every so often. Eventually she sets fire to the nursing home, and presumeably kills everyone inside: herself, the ameoba like dirty old men downstairs and the two women she hates.


I don't want to be like that when I'm older. I don't want to revert back to a childlike state. I don't want to know my life is almost over.

I do understand the frustration, the need to escape. However, the degenerate course of her mental state throughout the novel, slight, but noticeable, make her commit an act that she would have deemed unnatural a few months earlier. Desperate situations drive people to desperate acts. The old and incaplable are left to their own devices.

I know I keep rambling on, but the novel touched me in a way I will not realize for many years. I will probably not even remember it (the novel itself), however, I will always remember how vividly the author constructed a picture of Caroline's degeneration, and the thought I must never end up that way: alone and desperate.


I've been working a lot lately. I have fourty hours this week; a sizeable check. The future is starting to look shading and every time I do it I feel I am one step closer to fucking up my life. However, the boredom and drudgery of every day life always counter acts that feeling ( not the best choice, either, but what the hell...).

Am I falling into the cycle that other before me have? I'm at a jumping off point right now. I could choose to work at Meijer the rest of my life (oh, i know, a promising vocational choice...), become a begrudged, senile member of the working class, get married, stretch out my vagina and other organs numerous times by having children, watch them grow up not having everything they want (i wouldn't give them everything they wanted, even if I could, however), worry about debt, and how I will stay sane, and hopefully make it through all that just to retire with a broken down body and a mind lacking the refreshing breeze of valueable knowledge and thought.

Or I could go to school.

Choices, Choices...

The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live. ~Flora Whittemore


-michelle

1 Say what?? | Say what??