Fate For Sale

There was a time I thought that Erik and I were meant to be together--that it was fate, primarily because being together was so easy. No disagreements, no fights. It was only much, much later that I realized that the reason it had been so easy was because all of the hard things were not being said; and as anyone who has followed our story thus far can see, it clearly was not our fate to be together.

Which puts Frances in something of an interesting light, doesn't it? She is the best thing that has ever happened to me, the best person I have ever known; but if my relationship with her father was an accident from beginning to end, then she wasn't fated, per se. A massive serendipity. One of those fluke gifts of the universe, maybe; something that you could not possibly have deserved, but ended up with anyway.

Because the more I think about it, the one hallmark of fate is that it is never easy. It isn't something the universe throws into your lap. It's more like a gun the universe holds to your head while you're standing on the edge of a cliff. "Jump," it says, "or I'll shoot."

Who would argue that it wasn't Martin Luther King's fate to be the person he was, doing the work he was doing; or Gandhi's; or Bhutto's; and look at the terrible price they and their families paid. Or how many authors and musicians were jailed or killed, the price they paid to give us the work they were born to do. And how incredible it is that they paid it. It's hard to fathom such bravery. They must have known, or at least suspected. I think most of us are not cut from that cloth.

I know I'm not. I've known since I was five years old that I wanted to write and be a missionary, and there's nothing else on earth I'm better suited to. Ok, the mission changed; but I still have the soul of an evangelizer. (I hide it well.) (Don't laugh.) Unfortunately I've known since I was seventeen that I have an expensive chronic illness, and the price to pay to do the work that I still believe I was meant to do is simply too high. Both missionaries and writers are lamentably underpaid and have truly shitty health insurance policies.

Some cost even more.

One in particular I have carried around like a jewel in a little velvet box for a very long time. I took it out and looked at it sometimes, polished it, believing that if or when the time ever came, I could pay the price. The time came and I tried to pay it. It was fate, you see; how couldn't it be mine? And I'm strong. I'm very strong. If I can't pay it....

I can't pay it. The Universe is just going to have to shoot me.

I guess I'm stuck carrying that little velvet box around. Opening it up sometimes and polishing the jewel, then putting it away again. It's fate, you know. You can't just leave it on the curb for a dumpster diver.

What do you do with these little bits of cast-off fate, when the price was too high to make it real? How do you grow a scar around the place where it was supposed to be, so you don't tear it open again on a thousand little things? How do you reconcile the life you have with the life you still believe and can't help believing you were supposed to have?

Posted by Andrea at March 24, 2008 2:16 PM under Friends and Others , Me

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