Regret is my secret to a long life because I can spend hours looking back thinking my god will it ever end, and trying to imagine a time when all will be forgotten and wonder christ will that day ever come. There are great, flat stretches of forgiveness full of forget-me-nots, unending fields in my head like the miles between Lincoln and Saskatoon on a trip I took some 15 years ago. Long life is like driving over northern prairies, expecting at any moment to see mountains spring from the ground and instead fall into a pattern of tapping the window with your fingernail and swerving over the median, because who cares. If I had been driving alone, I likely would have screamed at the wheat, hit this memory right in the breadbasket.
Today the snow falls in uneven clumps, sometimes a mixture of sleet and light hail, as though the skies don't know what they are attempting. I'm embarrassed for the inexperience of our local weather, every year the same hesitations when the clouds can't drop rain. People cannot hibernate in a place like this, slow down their daily rhythms to conserve our energy for when the grass grows green again. It takes every ounce of strength to chop up firewood for the stove when you can't forecast the difference between rain and snow. These drops like regret land upon the back of your neck, then stream down your back, and you can do nothing but stand still and bear the cold as it makes its painful way.
I remember once traveling through a small town called Porambacu de Jos, and winter was coming on fast, and the family had this extravagant home at the base of the mountain, but no one answered the knock. They were all in a much smaller apartment, across the yard, really nothing more than a kitchen and a bedroom, and inside the furnace was ablaze, and everyone was slowing down getting ready for hibernation. In Sapintsa, I drank Turkish coffee in a similar house while three generations of women were slowly knitting from great piles of wool, and the man was telling me about a famous prison at Sighet, and I thought, 'And what's this then?' I am rude and insensitive, if only in my head. But living in my head, the offenses are no less real. I add it to the list of miles.
The distance sets you on edge when you settle down to sleep, and you get carried away and rough, and between the scratches and the bites, she strokes your cheek and says, 'my pretty baby,' right at the moment where you thought you had come upon the city limits, and damn, you're right back in the car, never having ever heard of Regina, which would have been nice before you had tried to pronounce it in front of the lovely young girl at the post office. Now there's a pointless embarrassment to remember, you think, and then there is a deluge of regretting the regretless regrets, the inexperienced words uttered, and awkward gestures, and mismatched clothes and countless trivialities only adding to your suddenly endless lifespan. At this rate, it will take twice the speed of light to get back, even if I decide to pull over right now and turn around and promise to concentrate on the horizon without beating myself all up about how far away it seems. Funny thing about the horizon, how you can watch plenty of others reach it, even while you never can. And the only way to keep someone from reaching it is to never leave her side.
But today, it's snowing, or trying, in need of some encouragement, so I will tell myself that self pity is to love what torture is to truth, a chorus of amens each time you hit harder. If I am going to create all of this, then I will work one day and rest the other six. I can't figure out why the hurry.
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