Years ago, I had a themeless website where I collected and recorded things that interested me. I don't know what became of most of the stuff, but one thing I managed to save was a series of posts I wrote that I titled: "John Prine, You Wrote My Life."
In honor of John
I have no doubt John's songs have written millions of folks' experiences. These are mine.
John Prine, You Wrote My Life
a life unstuck in time (to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr),
so this story can go on and on in dis-order, added to at any time the whim (or need) arises
Chapter 6
The Oldest Baby in the World©
---Aimless Love
She's got the mind of a child
And a body peaking over the hill
Well she would if she could
And she should, but nobody will
She may look like a woman
But she's still some daddy's little girl
And I think that she may be
The oldest baby in the world
"Don't you think you're a bit old for abandonment issues?" I asked myself when I woke up this morning. Everywhere I am, everywhere I've been, is a place where I've been abandoned. Sure, sometimes I've caused it myself - sometimes I have to. Otherwise they'd never go away, and then how could the issue play out? And, of course, sometimes I put that shoe on the other foot, and I do the abandoning. I get to play all the parts. I read somewhere that if you look at your life, you'll find a particular recurring issue that will tell you what you're doing here. I'm investigating abandonment.
When I was 17 years old, I knew I wasn't like other girls. They knew it, too, and sometimes felt it necessary to point it out rather bluntly. So mostly I just lived in my head, and kept the world outside confined to a very small space around me. Looking back, I wish I could have been bold in my uniqueness - the misfit who doesn't feel compelled to conform. But I wasn't. Back then, it always felt like a failure to become a part of the world, a goal whose validity I never thought to question. I hadn't been exposed to any psychology, or better yet, any philosophy. I was just a skinny misfit being raised on a farm in the Bible Belt.
One evening I found myself sitting on a hillside in a park, looking up at the stars. For some moments, time and my daily reality slipped away, and I experienced myself as someone - some thing - from somewhere else in the universe. I didn't know where, I didn't know who. The only thing that was clear was that I had been left here - abandoned - by others of my kind. They had a purpose for it that wasn't made clear - and it was just one stop in the cosmos for me. My fate was to travel every world, perhaps collecting information - perhaps just experiencing it. A cosmic gypsy. And it was made known to me that those who left me were never going to return to pick me up, and I would never get back to wherever they might be, nor would I ever even remember where that was. All memory of who I was and where I came from had been erased. And all I was left with was the knowledge that I would roam the universe alone forever.
It's hard to describe that moment and the knowledge that seemed to beam down from the stars that night. And the overwhelming loneliness - how heavy it made my heart in that brief moment. It happened in a time well before the "New Age" with its cosmic spiritual channelings about "Home", and when talk of alien abductions and life on other planets is common fare. It wasn't a dream, and it didn't feel like a metaphor. It felt absolutely real. More real than the reality I returned to on that grassy hill. No doubt I had to come back to the other reality, because to bear the incredible loneliness of that moment through an entire life probably would have foreshortened it considerably.
Of course life took on its normal proportions again afterward, and I forgot about that night for the most part until many years later. But I never stopped playing the abandonment game. When I die, I'll know it inside out. On this planet.
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