ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 33: Work and Clutter

I think back to Ernie’s Letter of Proposal to me. I love you deeply and dearly, even your damned sarcasm, bad grammar, and affected, sexy crap. . . . If you don’t know about me, then it is no good. If you do know, if you do love me, we will tell the world.

Ernie and I married, and our marriage became a life of work and clutter. We worked, and we bought clutter. And the work, involving books and papers and manuscripts — became part of the clutter.

Now, with this writing, I’m adding to the clutter. Yet with this writing, I’m trying to unclutter my mind, to find clarity.

I think I am. I’m finding the reasons for my great sadness and guilt, and the origin of my great fear. I’m also finding an Ernie I never knew before. I didn’t have the capacity, the insight, to know him when I was new to him and he to me, and I never developed this capacity, not until now. And he never knew a me who wasn’t defensive, which made him defensive. “I can’t fight you and everyone else, too,” he once said to me.

Fighting wore him out. It wore down his body’s natural defenses. It enabled cancer cells to proliferate.

This is what I know now. I’m sad, knowing all this. Sorrow and pain have burrowed deep within me, yet they have also carved a deep space that can hold peace and joy.

I seek peace. I hope for joy. I will find them. My inner self will find a way to them.