Sunday Whatever – The Bony Old Ghost of a Whore by Dale Williams Barrigar.

                         “And tell her there’s a darkness on the edge of town…”

                                                  – Bruce Springsteen

I don’t know where she is now so for me she doesn’t exist any more except in the memory of her blue eyes.

She had the bluest eyes that I had ever seen, especially when they were washed by tears – and they were frequently washed by tears.

Her laughter – only the intensity of her laughter, sometimes, could match the intensity of those tears.

The second I saw her I knew that we would be together, and I also knew something else.

I knew that we would be together, and I knew that it would also never last long.

I was right on both counts.

When she was in her right mind, she was one of the happiest, most lively and endearing people I have ever met.

But when the shadows came, when the dark clouds descended upon her (and upon me when I was with her), she turned into the most disturbing individual (or one of the most disturbing individuals) I’d ever known.

It was always projection, projection, projection, according to my interpretations of all of this.

She was always projecting things upon me.

Telling me what I was thinking (when I wasn’t thinking it).

(But sometimes she really could read my mind.)

Telling me where I’d been (when I hadn’t been there).

(But sometimes she was right and I had been there.)

Telling me what I wanted to do (when I didn’t want to do it).

But sometimes I did want to do it.

She was astounded by my “sexuality” (dastardly word), which must have struck her as a rendition of Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow (or Charlton Heston as Michelangelo)…(she understood the romantic relationships in both of those films very well after she was finished with me)…

And the Desert Fathers and Christian saints, like Paul (who also remain celibate for much of their lives, most of their lives, also like the knights, say, Lancelot, Don Quixote and Galahad)…

(Freud’s “sublimation” is a tragicomic reality for some of us.)

For her, who had made her way through the world by using her body (and her mind) so much, someone who could take a pass on using that body (like I could) seemed like an utter confounding mystery and piece of misery.

It was just another thing that came between us.      

The fact that I was married (but didn’t live with my wife) was another thing she never could get her head around.

Samuel Beckett once said of one of his characters that he was alone, utterly alone. And if he had been married, he would have been just as alone as he was without being so. Or even more so.

There have been three women in my life named Mary (or versions of Mary).

I nearly married all three of them, and spent, in reality, very little time with any of them. But these three (so far) have haunted my dreaming days and waking nights in a way that has gone way beyond the ordinary.

Someone once said about Samuel Beckett’s great character Krapp that “all his women are ghosts.”

I think of the girl in the shabby green coat standing alone on the station platform in the snow waiting for another train to take her away.

I think of her turning away from me and me grabbing her shoulders (then gently) and turning her back toward me to see her blue eyes again filled with tears.

I think of her saying, “It’s only you I can tell any of these things to, and it’s only you who has ever understood me at all” (and I wonder if it’s true…).

The world is filled with many sources of sadness, and all of them (or almost all of them) have to do with some sort of separation.

When we are alone so much we turn to other things.          

Theodore Roethke sang, “The mind enters itself, and God the mind, / And one is One – free in the tearing wind.”      

Dale Williams Barrigar