My name is Mary Gross. And I’m going to start with that because anything else I would say to you would be a lie. I think about this everyday, what I’m going to say to you about myself, and I still can’t come up with anything other than my name, or how desperate I am, or how Mary Gross is desperate. I am desperate: desperate to live, desperate to learn, desperate to identify with more than a name, and desperate for something, anything to fill this hole of desperation. I am so desperate it makes me sick. I am so desperate that the only word that comes to mind is, well, desperate. Isn’t Desperate getting annoying?
I met Desperate a while ago, I think, but I can’t actually remember. She was looking quite dazzling with her unending and unattainable prospects, her vivacious charm, and her temptations of success. I longed to be like Desperate, smiling, wide-eyed, full of brilliance. But I was always too short, too young, too stupid, to make the cut. Desperate danced lithely around me, touching my hair, my clothes, my thoughts, all the while changing me and morphing me into something newer and better, something more like her. I learned how to walk, what to say, when to do things, but as I became more like Desperate, I became more desperate. Nothing was enough; the sweetness of newness was gone. I was doing everything I was told, but I wasn’t really doing anything and nothing was actually happening. Everything was falling through, collapsing in, and I realized the substance that Desperate was missing, the substance that I was missing.
If Desperate taught me anything in this life it would be the non-importance of the material, the tangible and the absolute importance to fill the spaces in our lives with relationships. The relationship I had, and still have, with Desperate was one of teacher to student, but also deceiver to the deceived. We are taught too often to increase our self worth, to make use of ourselves for ourselves, and to make a living. These were the things Desperate was telling me to do, and the more I did so, the emptier and more vacant I felt. I was becoming a person I didn’t recognize, and I was blending in. Out of desperation, I became colorless, a null being. When I felt no more and understood nothing, I saw something I had never seen before. In the deepest crevices of my emptiness, I became aware of the nothingness and suddenly, I was transformed.
When I was a child, I would visit family who lived on a lake. Skirting between the edge of the lake and an expanse of lawn, there was a hammock. I would lie myself down gently in the hammock and let it comfort me, cradle me, as I would stare at the glitter and blackness of the water. What I did not know as I lie in my hammock was that I too was skirting in between my beginnings and my expanse. I was sitting so nakedly on the edge of my history, so vulnerable to everything that lay beyond. I hadn’t yet pondered my demise, the hammock’s demise, Desperation’s demise. The first to fall was the hammock. It was bulldozed and run into the earth, later to be swept up and thrown into a dumpster without any further thought. My hammock was forever gone, only remaining as two holes deep in the ground, holes that once held my hammock strong.
The next thing to disappear was me, when Desperation took hold of me and befriended me. I became like my hammock, swept up and forgotten. I was so long thrown away that I reeked of desperation. Desperate became me, and in doing so, Desperate was too gone. I emerged so empty that to be filled was like breathing, that to gain was like singing, and that to understand was like loving. My relationship with Desperate brought me full circle: from want to be, to can’t be, to never will be, and finally, free to be. I became so open, so expansive, that I was able to fill every corner of my being with relationships. I was able to be desperate to fulfill and to be fulfilled, to be myself and not to become anything more.
When I returned to the lake several years ago to see my hammock lost away, Desperate overcame me for a fleeting moment. I desired more than anything to be held by my hammock, to experience what I thought would bring me the most happiness. I was desperate to fill the holes, replant the posts. But, I looked down and saw only grass in place of my memories. The once earthen holes were filled in with soft tufts of green.
