When powerlessness is a super power

The picture is wrinkled and warn, slipped between the envelopes in the plastic container on his dresser. Inside the envelopes are old credit card agreements, the ones you get when they send you a new card. There are some that are over a decade old and they’re not what I’m looking for; I’m looking for the actual credit card statements, the recent ones, and they’re nowhere to be found. Not in the office, not in the bedroom, not in the basement. It’s like he took them with him when he died and now we have to piece together the assets and obligations like a shattered mirror. He kept the least important part out in the open and hid away the rest.

The snow is melting. Nearly 60 degrees of sunshine breaking through the layers of ice and grit to expose the mashed up sodden remains of last fall’s leaves. They call it “Fool’s Spring”.

“Trouble, you’re trouble,” she said, scanning me like the fried shrimp on the buffet at Golden Corral. You regret it before you even put it on your plate. I wondered about the choice of Johnny Cash black, less a choice then a necessity. Sure, I had 20 grand in my pocket, but that’s about all I had. I’d never really understood the word empty before. I thought it was a temporary condition, like being out of food, or out of cash, or out of gas. But this empty wasn’t temporary. True empty is when there’s nothing to fill and nothing to fill it with. It’s blank.

Sometimes the perfect song comes on while I’m running and I imagine I am Offred in the Handmaids Tale escaping. Today it was Arcade Fire Wake Up. The fantasy is always the same. I am somewhere near the Canadian border and I just keep running, all the way to freedom. It’s an odd thing, a strange kind of imagining, that’s happened more than once. And every time, I can feel the corners of my mouth turn up into a smile. I can taste freedom as if I have anything to run from. And who am I kidding anyway. With my age and barrenness, I’d be a Martha if I were allowed to live at all, not a handmaid. Still, the feeling of it lasts for the whole song and then my music shuffles and I’m me again, on country roads, running in the heat and counting the number of 5-minute segments, sometimes counted in guessing the number of songs left to hear, until my run is finished.

I have to make a choice, is the husband good or bad? An empowerer, a tyrant, or a thief claiming her genius as his own. It depends on my general mood. My general feeling toward men on that day. Do I trust them? Generally no. My romantic notions of men have abandoned me in my late middle age. Once so dead set on their goodness, on the restorative power of their love, those notions seem foreign to me now.