Even better than the real thing

This is a second post on the topic of Stand-Ins (which seriously need a sexier name). Stand-Ins are things used as an outlet for other things, whether consciously or unconsciously. Since I totally get off on this stuff, I like to look for mine whenever I can. (Also, it helps with the whole mindfulness quest.)

On the very last day of my sojourn back to Virginia, I found myself in a mall bookstore with about half an hour to kill waiting for someone. Clearing out my apartment for the big move had been a stressful seven-day endeavor, and this was the very first moment I had to stop without feeling like I had to jump immediately into my next task.

I exhaled and decided to relax into browsing detective novels, or something equally light and distracting.

Almost immediately I picked Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking up off the new releases table. It was idle. I didn’t know anything about the book or its subject matter before being drawn to it. I had heard the author’s name before, and my thought was simply ooh, magical, cool!

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.

Uhh, you might say the book is not about a happy or lighthearted kind of magic. It’s about the first year of the author’s life after her husband died suddenly. It took less than a page for me to be drawn into the story, and I spent the rest of my time standing there reading.

Her words electrified my skin. When my friend came to get me, I felt raw and exposed and teary.

I bought the book.

Since my apartment was all closed up, I spent that night at my dad’s house in the same room where I stayed when I first moved to town. After my own life had changed in the instant. I looked out at the lights of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel floating into the darkness and cried messy tears.

I cried because I was leaving a town and friends I loved. And I cried because I was leaving my pain. Pain that would always be a part of me, but that I would no longer dwell inside. Pain that carved me into something new and so had its own specific beauty. I cried because the life I was moving to contains so much joy that it hurts.

But all of that was sooo big. Personally, I can’t summon the emotion to cry about the paradox of life and how unique and perfect it all is. I think I would disappear if I did that.

So in that one moment, I was just crying over the book.

If you enjoyed reading this, you might want to:
 Subscribe to the Soul Sleuthing RSS feed  or