More About Ghosts...and Biscuits

When I was a very young child, I saw a movie version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and it scared me to death. It wasn't the ghost of Jacob Marley himself that terrified me--the old bearded man looked a bit like Santa and there wasn't anything visually gory or graphic in this black and white classic--it was the idea of dragging your past around like a set of chains. "I forged these chains in life," Marley says.  I don't know if I understood what that meant when I saw this movie as a five-year-old, but I was beginning to figure out that everyone had a past. Previously, I'd thought that God made people in sizes--small, medium & large--and baked us in some celestial oven like biscuits. When my grandmother came to stay with me as my baby brother was being born, she mentioned something about my mother having been a little girl and I got it then. We are all born little--and we all have pasts--and if something goes wrong, that past is going to be heavy and cumbersome and we're going to drag it with us through this life and into the next.

Is it too late to avoid this?  Really?

I want to wrap things up with Mr. Ex and it's not happening. My stomach is in a perpetual state of revolt. (Current fave food that goes down well: wine.) And even worse, I'm beginning to understand that even when (if?) we settle our finances, I will be dragging my past with the man I once considered my one true love around FOREVER.

I forged those chains.

Proposal

I've recently sent my Mr. Ex a proposal to settle our financial affairs before our attorney costs whittle our bank accounts down to the bone. I have a sick feeling when I think of what we are spending to leave one another in this time when so many people are struggling to keep their homes. Divorce and the dragging out of our financial affairs feels like a sordid addiction or a luxury so extravagantly unnecessary that even the desire for it dirties us.  

But he hasn't responded to my email and today when I worked up the nerve to call him and ask him about some things I needed to know in order to file my taxes, I took a deep breath and said, "Oh--did you get my email?"  

"I'm chewing on it," he said.  Chewing.  A rivulet of vomit worked its way up my throat.  The image of some rapacious monster devouring a village, Marie Antoinette and her cake, greedy bankers and fund managers and people reduced to beggars, people who need really need basic things just to stay alive plopped from my mind right into the pit of my stomach. What I am involved in with this man I once loved makes me sick.  

Chewing.  I can't stop thinking about it.  The animal caught in a trap gnawing off  its leg.  The cow with its chambered stomach senseless in  its pasture.  

I think I use this blog to pray.  Cyberspace, for me, conjures an image similar to  heaven. Clouds streaked with the energy  of people's prayers as they rise from earth seeking fulfillment.

Please.  I feel dirty and greedy and I want to be clean.