"Humankind cannot stand very much reality."
---> T.S. Eliot
disillusion: to free from illusion
also : to cause to lose naive faith and trust.
When he came to the record store he wasn't quite what I had expected. I expected him to condescend, to criticize--to take stock of my age, my gender, the sum total of my indecision and incompetence and inadequacy and then to roll it around in his clever head and spew forth pronouncements about the state of my racks and my prices and my hair.
But it was not so.
He was not the man I had prepared myself to meet. He tried to encourage me to stay open. He told me about the time he closed down his own store. I told him about my new job. In an office. He told me about feeling like a rat. So for the first four months...no wait...I mean two weeks...or days or something... I occasionally had it pop into my head that working in an office is like being a caged rat (cue Pumpkins riff, cue a gravely ethereal Billy Corgan, cue image of me sitting at my desk, typing, humming despite all my rage...).
It's not that I don't miss the record store. I miss it like I think divorcee's miss their spouses. It's like a divorce for me now. I used to think of it like a death. But then, it's not quite as exhausting as a death. It's not quite as final. But it is final. Or it will be someday. At this point I am done with depression, with mourning, with sorrow and second guesses and backward sighs.
Something new is settling in, settling down deep at the base of that lump in my throat.
Something wild and curious and growing faster than my desire to contain it. Lately I am wanting to set off in the sunset and plow down someone's picket fence, knock off someone's hat, shoe polish someone's new car. Lately I am wanting a set of windows, a pair of ringneck doves, a topiary to put on my desk. A rain cloud for a hat. Heather for my seat. Honeysuckle for my screen and blades of grass for my keyboard. I want to fly kites on my lunch break. I want us all to carry our chairs outside and read Shakespeare on the front lawn. I want a field trip. But we don't have a front lawn. And we never get field trips. And this is only month four.
So I guess I am marking Accountant off my list. It's fine for a job. For a year or two or three. But for a career? For the rest of my life?
I'd rather live with Illusion than a migraine.
