Mallory's Camera

Yesterday. Better than the day before. Though I noticed things were getting dark around the edges from the inside out – like a healing incision – while I was closing up the store. And realized, oh, right – I haven't eaten anything in thirty-six hours. I do that when I'm stressed out. Forget to eat.

So I came home, made myself a huge bowl of curried scrambled eggs, some toast, and literally fell on it. Felt better instantly. Must remember: Food is Fuel.

I'd spent the day – a reasonably busy one – feeling… well, I suppose, feeling sorry for myself. Although being me, self-pity clothed itself in so many layers of abstractions that the actual process of feeling anything was an intellectual strip tease.

First I thought: I'm a lungfish. The first member of my species to crawl up out of the slimy depths of personal insanity and hideous maladjustment into the light of relative sanity. As such, I'm a transitional life form and it doesn't really matter what happens to me, it only matters what happens to my children.

It doesn't matter if I'm happy; it only matters that my children are happy.

I'm not entirely sure I'm capable of happiness anyway. I'm very damaged. I had a really hideous childhood with all sorts of abuse and neglect. It dawned on me some time this past year that the real reason my life is always teetering on the brink of some dire catastrophe or other is because catastrophes distract me from thinking about what happened to me while I was growing up. That catastrophe is actually preferable to thinking about it.

I tend to behave in self-destructive ways when things are going well for me. I'm sure that's the reason.

Which is not to say I wouldn't like to give happiness another shot one of these days. I'd like to fall in love again – now that I've reproduced, gender is no longer a criteria. But I have a hankering for a scientist, someone with an innate sense of an orderly universe.

I'd like to have a tranquil domestic life.

I'd like to cook and decorate.

I'd like to go on vacations.

I'm not sure I have anything to barter with for that, of course. I'm a middle-aged woman without a dowry. Every day brings fresh visual evidence of time's ravages – yesterday, par example, I noticed that my cheeks had started to sag around my lips. Not laughlines, no – this is really one of the visual cues of growing old. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, I repremanded myself. But I felt the chill nonetheless.

Go, read Shakespeare, I ordered myself sternly. There are only two writers worth reading on the subject of impending mortality – Shakespeare and Alice Munro.

Instead I switched on the tube and whaddiya know, I got lucky. The Disney Channel was showing Holes!

From time to time – sorta Continuing Education for my pop culture cred (thank you, Nick Hornby!) – I make lists of My Top Ten Movies Of All Time. Fellini's La Strada and Losey's The Go-Between are generally at the top. But Holes is right behind them. Except for its truly dreadful soundtrack, it really is a perfect movie.

I was happy watching Holes.

Go figure.