Gloria FRYM
Guilt
One has done everything one could and yet, one still feels the quiet, ineffable knaw. Did one do that very specific thing, attend that very important moment that might have changed the fate, even the destiny of the outcome? Or were the fates in charge and was one always helpless to alter the course of the small yet significant history of a life, a narrative that moves on whether or not one interferes? The rain, the sleet, the snow, the sugar content of the food one consumed the night before the conversation the event, to the quick at the ready to the hilt—were any of these responsible for what became eventually the story? Who or what was in control of the selections, who knew or didn't know, who waited or proceeded or did nothing which was a form of action a means of being a method of structuring the inexorable? The question marks screw little holes into the situation as one ruminates the possibilities, as one continues to live as others die, as one sleeps and wakes as others fly, caught in the restlessness of maybe of it of the subjunctive conditional terms of the problem which always resemble the fairy tale of the house that Jack built, the mournful memory of a youthful enchantment, the direction one followed, seduced by an unexamined magnetism, an instinctive yet perhaps ill-chosen decision, that created the subsequent disquiet. Chance and luck could also be considered, and yet one does not exactly subscribe to these even as one reads the daily horoscope. The stars could have their part in the all phases of the narrative. Luck is annihilated by hard work, chance, that invisible throw of the dice, one considers agnostically. One feels a rising in the throat, emanating from the center, which has its own primitive brain. If it were wise, it might offer alternatives to sleeplessness, stomach aches, neck spasms, slippages. No, the rising rises to the big brain, finds a small spot and makes its self altogether too comfortable, often for a lifetime. Often displaying itself at the entirely inappropriate moment. One never asks a question to which she already knows the answer; another always asks directly; and yet another, never asks questions at all. Each plagued by guilt, engulfed, drifting into its quick drying liquidity. So that one notices whole bodies held together by this substance that would break into pieces without its pathetic, ahistorical mortar.