Driving on a depressing dim dusty morning, the sky the colour of ill yellow, all shapes obscure and my vision is hazy, a sign on the road reads “He is watching you”. He is always watching, he is always waiting for our mistakes for our deeds, he is always recording our movements, our thoughts, every breath of intention. There is no break, no time off, just doings and passively holding back. There is good and there is bad, there’s nothing in the middle and so we strive, and sometimes get tired or lose touch and some of us never know why? Why we need to keep going, why we need to try again tomorrow? I don’t have the answer why but I always remember my friend Anna who had suffered from depression her whole life and rescued injured birds and loved tragically and laughed hysterically and cried passionately, I remember her cold phone call that night when she told me she wasn’t looking for sympathy and that I needn’t worry but that she was thinking of taking her own life. And before I could say anything she said that her decision did not come from the ability or disability to bear life but that she felt she had lived, and has had enough of living; that her decision came from the mere acceptance that what she had lived already was enough, enough for her soul, herself, the inner walls of her being; that her greed for everything life offered of happiness, sadness, adventure and normality was no more. I remember her voice, they way she spoke so casually of death, the peaceful ending, but why do we link death with peace, with silence, with eternal quiet, when we know not of death, we know nothing of where we cross when we do, if we do, where we go, where the little parts of our minds that were stuffed with morning rushing and bread winning and child baring and crying over love lost and the exhilarating heart bounce a new romance brings, those parts of our mind are then filled with mud, sand, nothingness.
Anna’s voice was quickly replaced with the voice of my six year old daughter as I ran around the house finishing chores, begging her with a harsh demanding voice to finish her dinner, huffing and puffing and complaining in such bitterness about how hard it was being a single mother. She would sit there playing with her food then look at me with her six year old disenchanted eyes and say: “I’ve had enough”. And it would seem to me the strongest of all arguments, even if I try to reinforce myself, to object to her satisfaction, that she needed to eat more, I couldn’t. She is right, she has had enough and that must be true. When she was an infant unable to speak, she was still able to signal she had had enough, there was never a time in her life as a human being when she could not say ‘I had enough’, the moment she came into this world and expressed milk from my breast, she stopped and turned her face to the other side when she had enough, she has always had the discretion to want and refuse and always knew how to use it, I know this now, and as the sun rises a blurry grey ring on another miserable dusty morning I know that he is always watching and reminds us of this, setting a circle eye every morning and a circle eye every night to remind us that he is watching. I observe this and observe that both ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ begin with he.
