The Mountain Shadow

‘The thing that Rish heard from somewhere, and said to me.’

‘What thing?’

‘Resentment is unmet need or desire,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.’

I thought about it. A writer’s worst instinct, and too often the first, is to look for the flaw in any written or spoken thing that looks good. I didn’t find it.

‘That’s pretty good,’ I conceded.

‘Pretty good! She should get the Nobel Prize for Saying Cool Shit.’

‘Okay,’ I smiled.

‘It ripped my mind apart, Lin, I gotta tell ya. It made so much sense. I suddenly understood exactly why I was feeling so resentful, these last months. I was really out of it on resentment, you know? Like, when you get to the stage where you get irritated by things that used to be cute, only now they’re not cute any more?’

‘How much not cute are we talking about?’

‘A lot not cute.’

‘A lot?’

‘I was muttering,’ she confessed.

‘You were muttering?’

‘I was.’

‘Muttering?’

‘I thought you must’ve heard me, a couple times.’

‘About irritating things I did?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, for starters –’

‘No, don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know.’

‘It might be helpful to your process,’ she suggested.

‘No, I’m good. I’ve already been processed. Go on. You were muttering.’

‘See,’ she said, smoothing out the bedcover in front of her folded legs, her feet asleep against her calves. ‘When I heard those words, resentment is unmet need or desire, I knew how to think about what I was feeling. Do you get that?’

‘Think-feeling. I . . . think I get it.’

‘I had a frame, you know, for the painting of me. I knew what my unmet need was. I knew what my unmet desire was. And when I knew that, I knew it all.’

‘Can you divulge the unmet need?’

‘I need to be free of you,’ she said flatly, her hands pressed into stars on the bed.

‘The new you gave up sugar.’

‘I don’t need it. Not any more,’ she said, tracing a circle on the bedcover with her finger. ‘I don’t have to sugar anything, especially not what I tell myself.’

‘And the unmet desire?’

‘I want to be one hundred per cent inside my own now. I want to be the moment, instead of just watching the moment pass. You know what I’m talking about, right? You get me?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Now. This now. My now. All my nows. That’s what I want. Do you get that?’

‘You’re in the now. I get it. I swear, Leese, if there’s a guru involved in this –’

‘This is all me. This is all mine.’

‘And it’s what you want?’

‘It’s the beginning of what I want, and I’m completely sure of it.’

She was tough. She was superb.

‘Then, if it’s really what you want, I love it, Lisa.’

‘You do?’

‘Of course. You can do anything you put your heart into.’

‘You really think so?’

‘It’s great, Lisa.’

‘I knew you’d get it,’ she said, her eyes blue pools of relief. ‘It’s just that I want a special now, one that’s mine, instead of a constant now, that I constantly share with someone else’s now.’

A constant now, that you constantly share with someone else’s now. It was a pretty good definition of prison.

‘I hear you.’

‘I want to know what it’s like to be me, when it’s just me.’

‘Go get ’em, Lisa.’

She smiled, and let out a weary sigh.

‘It sounds so selfish, but it wasn’t. It was generous, you know, not just to me, but to you and Karla, too. It let me see us all clearly, for the first time. It let me see how much you’re alike, you and her, and how different you both are than me. Do you understand that?’

In a damning way, in a kind and loving way, she was telling me that Karla and I were made for each other: Karla’s edges fitting my scars. True or not, strangely hurtful or not, it didn’t matter, because those minutes weren’t Karla’s or mine: they were hers.

The fall and summit within, what we do, and what we choose to become, are ours alone, as they should be, and must be. Lisa was deep in that serene, uncontradictable stillness born in resolution, and she was gloriously alone with it. She was clear, determined, brave and hopeful.

‘The new you is really something,’ I said quietly.

‘Thank you,’ she said softly. ‘And the new me, broken up with old you, and not sleeping in the same bed as the new you, needs to rent the guest bedroom to sleep in.’

‘Well,’ I laughed, ‘if your now isn’t too compromised by it, no problem.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said seriously, snuggling in beside me, her head on my chest. ‘But I do think, now that we’re separated under the same roof, we should have a few rules.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Like with sleepovers. We should have a sleepover rule.’

‘Sleepovers? Your now is getting more crowded by the minute.’

‘We could hang a sign on the front door.’

‘A sign?’

‘I mean, a sign that only we understand. Like a garden gnome, for example. If the garden gnome is on the left side of the door, one of us has a sleepover guest. If it’s on the right side of the door, no sleepovers.’

‘We don’t have a garden gnome. We don’t have a garden.’

‘We could use that cat statue you don’t like.’