Proud

Mother Mary comes to me.

Down Below (1941) by Leonora Carrington

When you grow up, I want you to be an unproductive artist, sitting in the garden with your friends, smiling at the clouds for no reason, like a fool.

I feel proud of you already, for smelling honeysuckle on the wet breeze, for inhaling the hawk’s cry and the cicada’s buzzsaw and the grumbling of trucks on the freeway, for wanting to capture the sound of one invisible plane too high to see, cutting a straight line through the dense blue air, but not knowing how you’d ever describe it or recreate it, so you leave it alone.

I feel proud of you for letting the invisible plane’s noise fade to nothing, but remembering it without trying to remember, recalling it, the invisible knife of it, the deep cut through cold air, the space between your body on the crust of the ground and the bodies in the plane and the gods beyond, laughing and rolling their eyes and kicking holes in the clouds, wanting more from the day, wanting more and more and more.

I feel proud of you already, for wanting less and less and less, in inverse proportion to the greedy gods, because the less you want the more your truest desires keep expanding in every direction, your senses lifting and falling and turning in the late spring air, until you’ve surrendered your day to crickets and tree frogs and your friend Catherine who doesn’t want to walk anywhere this time, doesn’t want to talk about last night or plan anything for tonight, just wants to eat this apple, the one good apple left in the world, dense and tart and pink, the last good apple in the universe.

“Catherine, you’re the last good apple in the universe,” you’ll say to her, and you’ll both sit there on the last good blanket in the last good garden in the universe, and you’ll feel yourself emptying as the will of the day flows into you, replacing answers and fixes and rewards, replacing proof, replacing validation, replacing rattling rusty reasons for being here, your mood lifting on upward drafts of bittercress and pokeweed, your open arms embracing what a fool you’ve grown into.

That’s when you’ll remember that someone at dinner last night called you a ridiculous person. I feel proud of how you looked into their eyes and felt sorry for them, dragging around so many clattering and banging and broken justifications for never breathing cool air, for never waking up early just to look at the morning stars, for dragging terror with them everywhere they go, for feeling the invisible knife of it but never hearing a sound.

The gods love the ridiculous the most.

I told you this once but you won’t remember that it was me. You’ll just sit there, feeling ridiculous, a good feeling, but you’ll also feel other things, because of course not every cell will be filled with empathy for this clattering, clanging human, of course the sediment of self-doubt will linger in some distant corner of your universe, and of course anger will spark in some far away galaxy of your microbiome. But I feel proud of you already, because you will feel everything without carving it into the nearest tree or welding it together with your other feelings, into some clanging appendage that you can’t put down or escape, banging into everything, smashing everything with what you’ve made.

The ridiculous offer no proof or justification to the birds, to the sky, to the selfish gods, to the selfish worms cutting invisible lines through the dark sea of soil underfoot. The ridiculous don’t require love from this world. But this world loves them anyway, because nature is ridiculous and all of these animals are fools.

Which is why I feel proud of you already for failing at all of this and everything else, for struggling to live up to your ideals and mine and falling short, over and over. I feel proud of you already for making too many friends and losing half of them (including Catherine, who threw her apple core into the woods and announced “I’m bored now, let’s do something else” and later moved to Boulder and married a rich man and then stopped replying to your texts). I feel proud of you already for dragging around so many clattering and banging and broken justifications for never breathing cool air, for never waking up early just to look at the morning stars, for dragging terror with you everywhere you go, for forgetting every lesson, for apologizing too much and saying too much and trying too hard and fucking up again and again. I feel proud of you already for feeling everything anyway, the shame of being who you are, the pain of seeing the world clearly, the rage at the selfish gods for kicking holes in the clouds for no good reason, the agony of wanting to patch holes you can’t reach, the sadness of loving the cardinal’s insistent call too much, the anguish of wanting to capture it, the fear that you’ll forget that sound, lose that feeling, miss that moment, the invisible knife of it, the deep cut through cold air, a fool on the ground, wanting more and more under this wide ocean of sky, above this dark sea of soil, the space between us, me already so far beneath you, little you up there on the crust of the ground, so grown up, wanting more and more and more. I feel proud of you already, the last ridiculous animal in the universe.

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Thanks for reading Ask Molly.