WILL EVERYTHING BE OKAY? I’ve been waking up with that question on my mind, going to sleep with it, ignoring it, remembering, trying to forget. The question reminds me of problems I have yet to solve.
Mistakes I have made. Uncertainties. Fears. Missed opportunities. Stupid me. Stupidity. The question brings me to my knees, back to childhood, to that desperate innocent craving for certainty and security that never comes. Will everything be okay?
I should explain all the vagueness and one-word sentences. As much I am able to explain in my drugged-up, spaced-out condition. I am listening to Sufjan Stevens’s All Delighted People while being embraced by an unfamiliar fug of antibiotics and extra-strong painkillers.
Being generally anti-antibiotics, these are the first such tablets I have taken in years. They are only in my system now because I went to the doctor with a child in my arms, mentioned in passing that there was a fiery golf ball lodged in my throat, and he took a look and pronounced that I had a “tonsil infection”.
But no, I had them out years ago, I told him. Memories of the aftermath of that operation on tonsils and adenoids seep in like dry ice under the doctor’s door. Being in hospital, eating ice cream, immediately bringing back up the sweetest smelling sick I’ve ever sniffed. There was a handmade card, signed by my whole class in primary school, and a present of a bumper packet of markers in previously unimagined shades.
The base of what’s left of your tonsils is infected, my doctor said, taking another look. As he spoke I pictured a leg amputated, and the stump objecting years later to the removal of the limb, becoming a bacterial burden by way of revenge. I wasn’t sleeping because of the pain. I’d been laying there in the dark, the question creating another lump in my throat. Will everything be okay? I knew these days would come.
As sure as Micheál knows deep down he will never be taoiseach. As sure as Enda knows that he probably will.
I go to the chemist. I pick up the pills for me and the medicine for my daughter who lies limp and dopey-eyed in the car seat. At home we take our prescriptions and flop together on the bed. We sleep. We wake. We moan. We hold each other. She looks at me and I see it in her eyes, even through the prescription fug the question weakly shines. Will everything be okay?
We are not alone. It’s in the eyes, not of everyone, but enough of the population to make a noticeable difference to the general environment.
On the street. In the audiences of the TV current affairs talk shows.
It’s like a giant thought bubble attached to the heads of everyone on the extended dole queue I walk past with my head down, not wanting to catch anybody’s eye. My problems are not their problems but they bounce around in the same general ball park. My problems are completely of my own making. Their problems, the plaintive “will everything be okay?” of the dole queue, are most certainly not.
One day a woman in the National Gallery tells me she likes the way I don’t write about the doom and the gloom and the idea that this country is going to hell in a handbasket. I smile and say thank you. But what I should really say is that my head is in the sand and that the only reason I don’t want to think about it or talk about it or write about it is because maybe then it will all go away.
And anyway, like the woman in the gallery I don’t really believe in the doom or the gloom, the hell or the handbasket. Life is just circular and cyclical and this too will pass. Take it away Sufjan. A beautiful musical distraction: “All delighted people raise your hand.”
When the sickness lifts, the atmosphere changes. Will everything be okay? It might. At any rate, when I am feeling physically more robust, the question fades into the background, hovering on the fringes of my life, providing balance if not exactly ballast. Although there is still fear around the question, it isn’t quite so paralysing.
And then a few days later I come across the question somewhere online.
A link that leaps out at me – willeverythingbeok.com. I am amazed. The simple question to which I have no satisfactory answer. I stare at the link for a few minutes afraid to click. What is the point of clicking? I decide not to click. Then of course I click.
After the computer thinks for a few moments I find myself looking at an empty page. Well, empty except for one word.
That word is: Yes.
In other news .. Róisín is reading the small but almost perfectly formed The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa for her book club and watching saved-up episodes of BBC comedy Episodes. Both highly recommended