Last night I didn't get to sleep until the nearby Norfolk Southern blew its 2am whistle. This morning I woke up hungover and a little high. And today, well, today was an all-around bad day. I feel it, too. Precious frustration. It must be precious for as tight as my mind and body hold onto it. Out of control and out of ideas. Afraid. Nervous. Weak. My cat won't stop squeaking and she's driving me mad. And it's all compounded by the fact that I'm struggling to hit my Advent stride. Is it really Advent? It was 50 degrees today. This can't be Advent. And I can't write. I can't do anything. My self-help books tell me: don't catastrophize. That's the ugliest word I think I've ever read or said.
There's this damnable hole in my wall that I've been trying to patch for close to 3 weeks. Way back when, during a really bad day, I put it there. I always think about that day when I listen to Jackson Browne's "In the Shape of a Heart."
There was a hole left in the wall
From some ancient fight
About the size of a fist
Or something thrown that had missed
And there were other holes as well
In the house where our nights fell
Far too many to repair
In the time that we were there
I've ignored that hole since 2014. For a while I covered it with a long scarf that hung from a hat rack. Eventually I stopped using the room and didn't have to look at it. Now I have some plans for the room and so this month I decided, finally, 3 years later, it was time to fix that hole in the wall (which is, indeed, the size of a fist). This hole is a bitch to drywall. It's been impossibly uncooperative. Sanding issues, drying issues, spackling issues, putty issues. Enough issues for multiple hour-long therapy sessions. My girlfriend, after watching me re-spackle the hole for the 4th time, asked if I regretted putting it there. "What even is regret?" I asked. I looked down at all the dust and paint and mess and I shouted, "YES, I REGRET IT."
Why do people punch holes in walls? When we were all much younger, teenagers, my cousin punched his floor. Family shit, I think. He broke his hand. If you have to choose between punching a floor or punching drywall, always go with the drywall. When I was 20 I punched a cheap fake wooden door. The heart controls the fist. The way I see it, you buy drywall putty for two reasons: 1) after a clumsy accident or 2) after a killer heartbreak (and it could be any heartbreak, not necessarily romantic). An important note: people don't punch holes in walls to solve their problems, so "what did that accomplish?" isn't speaking the correct language. They don't do it "out of anger," either. That sounds like something from one of my Buddhist self-help books. No, they do it because there's not a damned thing else left to do. Some might call it "catastrophizing," but when there's no way out, you make one...with a hole...in a wall. Like Andy Dufresne, who put one big hole in the wall of his prison cell and crawled to freedom through 500 yards of shit-smelling foulness and came out clean on the other side. Lucky for him, he didn't have to patch the thing.
Monday's Christmastide Vespers Office Refrain
He will judge the world with righteousness and the people with his truth.
I wonder if this hole in my wall isn't alive, if it isn't rejecting my feeble attempts to repair it because, like out of some sci-fi/horror movie, the real wound is festering, in some heart, in a life, and hasn't been healed. This house is young, built in 2009, but it's seen its share of pain. Maybe places and homes need truth and righteousness as much as people.
When I hear that Jackson Browne song, I think about how I put that hole in my wall because I love my mother and couldn't help her. A hole in the wall in the shape of a heart. I think of the cross and the sacred heart of Jesus. I don't mean to mix our liturgical seasons here, it's Advent, not Easter, this ain't the time for crucifixion talk, but if we're out here waiting in the dark, with our candle lit, then it helps to know that the god we're waiting for might just be willing to punch out a hole in the universe for us
in the shape of a heart.
Amen.
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