Focus Part 3

But in the later rehashing of this story to his sister, Gary does not feel stylish.  Not one single solitary bit.

He is defeated. Disappointed. Disheartened.  "I try.  Every time, I plan to do good.  And then it gets near," I can hear the brokenness in his voice, "And I f-ck it all up!  Every time!"  This isn't true, but he loses sight of the smaller successes in the viewfinder, unable to zoom in on them.  In my fatigue, I give in to a personal rant on all of it. “You must like it on some level, because you give in!” I struggle for breath, releasing the need to fix him, and allow myself to feel something just for me, “You’ve got people who love you. In the past two weeks, you’ve had yourself more visits than most of your fellow patients will ever receive in years, if not their lives. People gave up on them a long time ago!” This is not new to him. There’s not too much I could say that he would not instantly recognize as truth. It’s the putting it all into play that trips him up. We are both silent for a long moment. The dialogue to the final half hour of “Slumdog Millionaire” is rolling across the TV screen, some previous hotel inhabitant having selected the closed caption option during their viewing.

Finally, he blurts out that deep fear he can no longer contain, “It’s YOU!” he yells across the wires or satellite signals or whatever modern gadgetry conveys his sounds to my ear over the distance between us, “It’s you! I don’t care much of the time. I want to but I don’t. I don’t know how to change all that. But you . . . you care. You always care. If I mess up, it don’t matter to me. I do it all the time. But it hurts you. I can’t live with that burden, that responsibility. It’s too f-cking much!” He’s crying now. I take a deep breath. One breath at a time is good advice for anybody.

I sigh, “Gary. You can’t worry about that. My caring is a part of my opening myself up to you. It goes with relationships. It goes with love. If one opens up to another, exposing the mess and the muck along with the charming and cheery, then yes, hurt can get in. Most times, hurt WILL get in. But I accept that. I’m okay with that. I make that decision!” I’ve hit my stride now, “You hurt yourself much more than you ever hurt me when these things happen. When I hurt, I can run to one of the many lovely and accessible people in my life, spill it out, gush it forth, let her rip. I’m comfortable. I’m free. I have a husband and children and a home at the end of the day. That’s some pretty cushy hurting I do. I’m not discounting it. Just qualifying it against your situation.”

It was then that the new image was borne.

The new love.  My epiphany on the plane over Nevada. The deeper love set apart from my personal emotion and its interpretation of the fact. This previously unknown-to-me love attached to a larger body, a creator with a vastly greater grasp of the underlying issues which snake through every situation, each motivating factor, all inducements to give and surrender and confuse. How could I find fault in the fallout of my connections with those around me when fallout is exactly what we should expect from one another when we actively choose to love? I’d always known this on a semi-conscious plane, but I hadn’t yet pinned it to my fridge or pressed it between the pages of my scrapbook or enlarged it for framing.

Before moving on to more trivial subject matter lest we both went blind in the searing light of such openness, I gave it one last try, “Gary, you so hate to be like everyone else. But it’s fear. And we all have it. We all act on it. You fear what might be, unable to see that far ahead, too acquainted with the failures of the past, so you nip it in the bud before it begins. You say you plan to do it but duck out in the end. I say you NEVER planned to do it, only gave it lip service, because . . . " he needs to see it.  Before we hang up, he's got to understand this one thing, ". . . you love me, but you don’t love yourself.  You don't value yourself.  Not enough to truly plan and execute.  Deep down, you believe you don't deserve it, so things turn out that way. You've got to figure that out.  Unravel the twisted maze of self-hate.  I can’t do that for you. Can’t give it to you. There you walk alone. And try. Just like THE REST OF US!”  And then we did move on.  There will be more of this.  It's what we do.

Focus is not automatic. Not if the most artistic rendering is desired. Any good photographer knows that. Adjustments are made. Lenses are switched. F-stops come and F-stops go. There is an experimentation of light and shadow, color and line, depth and sharpness. And, out of every hundred or so attempts, there emerges, victorious and exultant, the perfect shot. I’m grateful for this one, found as it was among the discards of past days, weeks, and months.  There will arrive in Gary's life a moment where he shuffles through the discards at his feet and draws out the one worthy of tucking in his album.  He'll stick it somewhere between the shots from his visit to Africa with mom and the candids of us kids as little cuties living in Alaska back in the 70's. 

Focus.