Nov 8, 2017 Original Poetry

Tags: #Age, #Flesh, #OriginalPoetrybyVijayaSundaram

Mar 30, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Character Vignettes for Possible Novels, Original Short Stories

Loneliness — A Vignette

©By Vijaya Sundaram

March 30th, 2013

The old woman sat, enshrouded in sadness and loneliness.

Her spirit was young, gay, schoolgirilish.  Her mind was brilliant, but old.  Her heart was carunculated, folded over and over by memories of grief, loss, hatred, jealousy and despair.  Her body, though old, was strong, and her face was beautiful, like a translucent paper-covered lamp.

She had always been on the outside looking in.  She had never fully understood herself.  She understood others, but as an alien might, through long observation, experimentation, attempts to blend in with the locals, and even achieving a measure of success in that, but always with a sense of strange isolation.  Humor and a biting wit had sustained her through all that.  Faith gave her some comfort, but her mind always interfered.

She was generous with her gifts, but longed for acknowledgement, which she felt she had never got, at least, not enough.

She took care of herself, never imposed on anyone, was independent, hard-working, good and moral.  She gave of herself to all who came to her.  She sought, and got, contradictions, arguments, verbal sparring.  She loved that, but didn’t understand that it distressed others.  She was often critical, very critical of others, because no one could match her standards, not even she.  This left her feeling desolate and always dissatisfied.

She could never stand anyone for too long.  People irked her.  They felt like burrs on her clothing, clinging madly, like little irritants, feeling poky and interfering.  Yet, it was she who would long for their company, and would ask for it.  Now, they bothered her at every turn.  She felt as if they interfered, but it was she who interfered when she had a chance to, correcting others, expecting a weird sort of subservience, and hating it at the same time, positively glowing with impish delight when she caused distress of some kind, or disturbed people’s equanimity.

She was a mass of contradictions: A pillow stuffed with confidence and anxieties, pleasures and sorrows, losses and grief, indifference, affection, detachment and attachment, delight and irritation, love and hate.

And she was the loneliest person on the planet.  Always, in her mind, her own dead mother’s voice spoke, critical and caustic, seemingly unloving and cold with a Puritan coldness.

The tragedy was that the old lady didn’t love herself.  And though she felt herself to be the loneliest person on the planet, she was loved.  She just didn’t fully know it, and always rejected a little while after she encountered it.  After all, or so it seemed to her, if others loved her, then they didn’t really have any good taste, because she was unlovable.  Therefore, she could reject them with ease.

Now, in the closing darkness of the noon, she longed again to be understood.  She called her son, and got her daughter-in-law.

Her daughter-in-law, inexplicably, loved her.  They both loved one other, even though they each might have got on the other’s nerves from time to time.  They spoke.  The old lady stated her thoughts about what she had been through recently.  Her daughter-in-law assured her that everything would be all right, and reassured her of the love of her children for her.  After a few sweet reminiscences about other things, the old lady said goodbye and hung up.

And after that ‘phone call, the daughter-in-law knew this much:  Her mother-in-law had achieved a lot in her life, but all that had faded away with the onset of years. Age is a thief, an inexorable, ruthless and hateful thief.  It takes away and takes away.  When the daughter-in-law was young, she thought it would be lovely to grow old.  Perhaps, for some, it might be, but she saw, first-hand that this romanticising of age was just that: A romantic notion.  Age was cruel.  Loneliness looms large.  Loss and sadness linger.

For the sad truth remains:  All of one’s achievements are naught beside the huge, pervasive threat of imminent amnesia and death.

So it is with the old lady, and so it will be for all of us, except, perhaps, those who seek immortality through art and music, because, as Nabokov said about Lolita in his immortal, shocking, dark and deeply moving book:  I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita.

Finally, this:  Ozymandias by P.B. Shelley.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Age, #Death, #Loneliness, #Love, Amnesia, Despair, immortality through art, Long Life, Nabokov, Ozymandias