Elizabeth Berg - The Pull of the Moon

Dear Martin,

I know you think I keep that green rock by my bed because I like its color. And I do like its color. But the reason I keep it by my bed is that oftentimes I wake up frightened, and it comforts me to hold it then. I squeeze it. I lie on my side away from you and I squeeze the rock and look out the window and think that outside are rocks just like this one, lying still and strong and silent. They are beside rivers in Egypt and in fields in Germany and at the center of the desert and on the moon. The rock seems to act as a conduit, drawing out of me whatever it is that is making my heart race, whatever is making me feel as though my own soul is one step ahead of me, saying dont come. Dont bother. Martin, I am fifty years old. The time of losses is upon me. Maybe thats it. I dont know. I saw Kotex in the drugstore the other day and began to weep. Then I saw a mother with a very little girl, helping her pick out crayons, and this, too, undid me. I had to leave without buying what I came for. I drove home and I thought about Ruthie standing next to me as I lay on the couch one day. She was two and a half, holding Legos in the basket of her hands. I had a mild case of flu; I was mostly just exhausted. And Ruthie dropped the Legos on me and used my chest to build a small city and I was perfectly happy. I think I even knew it. It was that Chinese thing, that when your mind is in your heart, you are happy.

You know, Martin, when Ruthie was a freshman in high school, I was driving home from the grocery store one day and listening to the radio and I all of a sudden realized that in four years she would be gone. And I felt like screaming. Not because I have nothing else in my life. Just because she would be gone. I pulled over and I wept so hard the car was shaking, and then I repaired my makeup in the rearview mirror, and then I came home and made dinner and I never said a thing about it, although maybe I should have. Maybe I should have started telling you then. I was afraid, I think, that you would say, Well, shell visit, and the feeling would have been of all my eggs being walked on by boots.

Im sorry the note I left you was so abrupt. I just wanted you to know I was safe. But I shouldnt have said Id be back in a day or two. I wont be back for awhile. Im on a trip. I needed all of a sudden to go, without saying where, because I dont know where. I know this is not like me. I know that. But please believe me, I am safe and I am not crazy, I felt as though if I didnt do this I wouldnt be safe and I would be crazy.

I have no idea what will happen next. I am in a small Holiday Inn one hundred and eighty miles from home. I have a view of the pool. Beside me I have a turquoise journal, tooled leather, held closed by a thin black strap wrapped around a silver button. I bought it the day before I left. Normally, that kind of thing would not appeal to me. But it seemed I had to have it. I opened it, looked at the unlined pages, closed it back up and bought it. It was far too expensive, forty dollars, but it seemed to me to be capable of giving me something Id pay more for. I thought, Im going to buy this journal and then Im going to run away. And thats what I did.

I dont mean this to be against you. I dont mean any of it to be against you. Or even about you. I have felt for so long like I am drowning. And we are so fixed in our ways I couldnt begin to tell you all that has happened inside me. It was like this: I would be standing over you pouring your coffee and looking down at your thinning hair and I would be loving you, Martin, but I would feel as though I were on a ship pulling away from the shore. As though the fact of your sitting there in your usual spot with cornflakes and orange juice was the most fantastic science fiction. I would put the coffeepot back on the warmer and sit opposite you and talk about what was in the newspaper, and inside me would be a howling so fierce I couldnt believe the sounds werent coming out of my eyes, out of my ears, from beneath my fingernails. I couldnt believe we werent both astonishedmade breathlessat this sudden excess in me, this unmanageable mess. There were a couple of times I tried to start telling you about it. But I couldnt do it. There were no words. As even now, there are not. Not really.