The Sun, Narrow Escapes, Destiny and Fate

Marshall got me a subscription to The Sun this year for my birthday, and I’ve been reading the first issue (January) bit by bit since it came in the mail a week or two ago.  The fiction seems to be a little weak this month, but The Sun is about people and their own lives, to me, and the essays and “Readers Write” are just luminous, I don’t even know how to talk about them without using metaphors of light and shadow.  This magazine (& especially “Readers Write”) has found its vocation in hearing and publishing the voices, often the smallest, inner voices, of our fellow-citizens of today, our fellow-living-people, & I am poring over them with the intensity of just another person who has such a hard time engaging the world outside my own head.

“Readers Write” is a charged section this month, the tagline being “narrow escapes”; readers have written sometimes humorously but mostly seriously, sending in stories of attempted rapes, domestic violence, brushes with political violence in Burma and Vietnam, and the subtler violence within abusive relationships.  Each story, not one longer than about a column and a half, holds an imperfectly captured danger and a perfectly expressed sense of escape, relief, and wonder.  Wonder, that something should come so close and miss, or be so nearly embodied and then vaporize back into possibility.  These stories are crafted with a precision that I’m imagining has come through the hundred seives of intervening years, and all the ponderings therein…I want to say that each one is written with the gravity a person gives to some central or iconographic moment in life, and with the same great care.  It’s sobering, and you want to consider again your life and every invisible doorway.

This issue also has an essay in it by Megan Kruse,  a former social worker in domestic-violence-intervention, one who dealt mostly with “women who were classified as having a ‘high risk of lethality’ — the ones whose abusers were terrifying, relentless, and always one step behind; the women who were likely to be killed.”  These stories, of women who have to dye their hair, move their kids from house to house, change their names, and who still often follow a pattern of abuse and flight, abuse and flight, are fairly devastating.  Strange to imagine that this happens all the time, that mothers are beaten to death or within an inch in front of their kids, their young kids, these new human beings who are building a way to understand their world, which is their mother’s world, which is cruelty’s world.  These, too, are fellow-citizens, fellow-living-people, along with others who narrowly escape some grief or some accident.  I, when I realize that my boyfriend makes sacrifices for love of me, am living inside the same hour as the woman across town who is leaving court with a restraining order in her hand.

I want to think about these things, and I want to not have PTSD.  I want to banish suffering at the same time I want to understand it as holy, a place where God, inexplicably, is.  I want to be a writer, and when I’m fifty, write down some wisdom that seven people will read and copy down for their friends.  To begin: I want to write about my own “narrow escape,” now, of getting the pathology report back after surgery.  Even though I really never saw it as a “close shave” or any kind of escape, I still see it as a door closed quickly behind me as I ran through it.  I want to have some kind of fatalistic argument with my more flexible thoughts on destiny and ends … is any narrow escape really all that narrow?  Or are they just whistling through the air at a greater proximity than normal?  Or are all possible futures riding along beside us, equidistant from each other and from ourselves, as unable to intersect as parallel lines?