It is Sunday night, we're about at that point when it's Monday morning, and I am curled up into the fetal position on my bed. I sit here with my face in my hands as if to catch my head, to keep it from rolling across a field like a soccer ball that someone might kick by accident.
And the thing that's really bugging me, as I lie curled up, is the scene that I'm enacting reminds me of my entire life.
These are the same tears I cry when I hear the gospel song that goes This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, and I think of the way ordinary people are able to triumph, in ways small or large, over adversity. And I remember crying like this after seeing Robert Redford in The Natural, crying over the way determination and conviction can make a simple baseball player do supernatural things. And everyone thought I was stupid, but I wanted to tell them that I was crying because whatever my gifts- the pieces of good buried inside and under so much that I feel is bad, is wrong, is twisted- are less clear than the ability to hit a ball with a bat. My gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world. My gifts are unspecific. I am an artist manque, someone full of crazy ideas and grandiloquent needs and even a little bit of happiness, but with no particular way to express it.
Now I'll go smoke a cigarette, return to my room, watch the 11 o'clock news, and fall asleep with the blue light of the TV still on, feeling completely pathetic.
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