As the woman’s story develops in my journal, she comes across as mostly feminine. Not terribly so now as an older woman, but still, something female flows from her—a glow, a hue, a trait that has become more subtle with age.
She seems feminine and, at the same time, frustrated at her inability to hold onto so much of that quality as she hopes. At first, she shows her femininity through her youthful figure and smooth complexion, and with those and other qualities, she attracts her husband. Later, she performs miracles by cooking and decorating the house with products obtained from the farm. Her touch gives their humble home a petticoat softness, and her husband takes pleasure from walking into it after working in the fields.
As the years slip by, though, her focus shifts to the children and, in the tough times, to survival, and her feminineness wanes as she expends energy on everyone but herself. She watches in disbelief as changes sweep over her—the dulling hair, the cracking skin, the spreading crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes—and she is saddened by having possessed her youthful bloom for such a shockingly short time.
She attributes some of the unpleasant transformation to a lack of money. Visiting a hairdresser might improve her mousy hair, but what can she do about the blotchy skin on her neck and dark circles under her eyes? At times, heavyheartedness overcomes her, and she stops what she’s doing and stares into the distance.
She does not resent her husband’s suggestion that they put a second bed in their bedroom. Together they carry into the house the frame and box springs of one that is stored in the shed by the barn, but the corners of the mattress have been gnawed by mice, so they take the pickup to town and bid on a used one at the auction hall. When they get it home, they discover it to be infested with fleas, so she prepares a formula passed down by her grandmother, sprinkles the liquid on both sides, and leaves it outside overnight before allowing it into the house.
The secondhand mattress does not bother her so much as the abruptness of the change. Sleeping alone is new, and although she does not object, she feels lesser because of it. She insists that her husband take the strange bed, not because of the fleas, but rather because she does not want to be the one to move.
Occupying another spot in the room and adjusting to different angles of light at sunrise are against her nature. She is accustomed to nudging him when he snores, and now she has to call out to him to shift positions. When that doesn’t work, she uses bobby pins she hides under her pillow, throwing them at him in the darkness and then pretending to be asleep. This minor harassment is the only dishonest thing she ever does to him.
Messy roads bring people to where they are. No one has a clear path. No one comes through unscathed. I attempt to help the woman as I write, softening the edges of her life and injecting into her some of the youthfulness that she has lost. The minute I do so, though, her character flattens, and the spirit drains out of her. The point is to give her an existence, or at least to facilitate her pursuit of it. Her fullness seems to come from her suffering, as if life’s ups and downs work as artist’s strokes to render a three-dimensional composition.
So I accept that she will not be everything I might allow, and I begin to weave simple details into her story that will round her out, but she doesn’t want that either. Despite my efforts to better her condition, her sadness turns to emptiness, and I feel her hanging precariously from the edge of my journal.
I begin to doubt the manna. After writing thousands of words, I watch in dismay as the woman drops off the page. It’s not that the manna lets me down; my experience gathering it is proof enough of its efficacy. Yet this time, as I collect and process it, it seems to betray me, and the woman disappears, tumbling out of my journal into a frightening abyss.
Unapologetically, the manna entreats me to descend into the chasm and bring her out. I crawl through the darkness and reach over the edge. The rock wall is sheer and smooth, and I fear that some misshapen thing will grab my arm and pull me in. I do not find the woman within reach, and I withdraw my hand.
I think I hear a female sobbing in the depths of the fissure, but the swirling wind makes me distrust my senses. I peer past the ledge into the darkness, and a woman’s wail wafts up from below. I creep along the side of the abyss, feeling down into the darkness with one hand. Finding no stairway, I force one onto the page with a descriptive paragraph, but after cautiously descending a few steps, I am overcome with dread and retreat to the top. The stairway is contrived, so the danger is real. A true abyss has no stairs, and the notion of caution is antithetical to its concept. One does not descend gradually into such a place. One falls there.
As always, my journal challenges me to trust. Manna is ever-present and abundant, but trust makes it visible. I close my eyes and imagine myself confiding in the manna, and I maintain a vain hope that when I open them again, the abyss will be gone, and the woman will once more grace the pages of my journal. But hope, especially of the vain variety, is no substitute for trust.
I spend weary days and sleepless nights in a quandary as to how to rescue the woman. Her continued absence from my journal makes me consider giving up. After all, the scenes in which I envisage her are few and may be too simple to create a full story anyway. Perhaps I should finish the tale with the material I have or relegate the draft to one of my boxes of sketchy writings that no one will read. After some thought, however, I conclude that I cannot abandon her, because I may be the only hope she has of attaining an existence.
In actuality, I have no obligation to help her relate her story, although she clearly has a right to tell it. She can communicate it through someone else, or she can recite it to herself in the abyss, either of which might be enough. But the fact that her image remains indelibly imprinted on my mind places me in a dilemma. I must consume the manna I find. Examining it and casting it aside on the expectation of running across better stuff is wrong.
Although I think I must rescue her, I harbor no illusion that I shall be some kind of hero. Clearly, she is the hero, and the story I tell is hers. Be that as it may, the manna confuses me, as if it considers me to be part of a greater drama of which I am scarcely aware.
That expanded performance seems to be comprised of three acts—waking, dreaming, and journaling—that serve up the living manna in which I move and breathe. As my journal grows, and the woman either falls out of it or ignites its pages with her story, I begin to see everything as connected, like a sea filled with currents, eddies, tides, waves, and maelstroms, each of which is transparent and indistinguishable from the others when viewed from without.
But I am not without. I am wholly contained in my waking life, my sleeping dreams, and my free-flowing journal. I have little control over the first and none over the second, and I maintain sporadic delusions that I master the third. These three elements blend into something I see only vaguely—an immense, powerful, miraculous presence that humbles me. Overwhelmed, I retreat to my journal, which is the only thing that I can fool myself into believing I understand.
The principles governing these three aspects of my life seem alarmingly deficient. I yearn for the existence of another dimension controlled by different rules, but nothing in my experience points to the reality of such a place. My wakefulness is filled with blessings that can be abrogated in a blink of an eye, my dreams tell me that life might be thought of in different terms, and my journal reveals only that which the manna divulges at the moment.
By the grace of the manna’s creator, I have touched the life of the woman in my journal and have dared to desire that her story earn her a definitive place in the universe. I want that for her, but she has vanished. Something remains, though, that may suffice for leveraging her into being, and that is the eternal memory of her sadness at having lost her lifelong partner.
The manna speaks of the woman’s husband indirectly. What I know of him comes to me entirely through her. I sense that he must be special, though, because he commands every ounce of regard that the woman can muster. Thus, she has a toehold on existence that is based on the vitality of her love for him and the intensity of her sadness at losing him. I do not know which of these emotions is most likely to preserve a place for her in the cosmos.
What I am sure of is that love and hate are not accomplices in all of this, notwithstanding the philosophical notion that opposites beget one another. Thus I take the liberty as the author, as a limited delegate of the manna’s maker, to assert that love and sadness are the progenitors of the marvelous value of which we are a part. Sadness derives from the inevitability of love’s end, and paradoxically, love, once created, is eternal. The memory, a cosmic wisp that remains in the mind of God, the recordation of love, is all that really matters.
The Woman In My Journal © is a four-part story comprised of The Appearance, The Crawl, The Wait, and The Memory, by Douglas R. Eikermann.
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The woman continues to be lovely, even in her aging. I am sad when the man wants a separate bed, as this takes away the comfort of the loving presence in her life. God certainly is our only solace in his grace and mercy. Interesting that even when we are with others we are alone in his creation and rely only on his for our existence. I have enjoy the Woman and your creative approach to knowing her.
How lovely is your writings, but I have pity on the man in your “Journal,” because he is just like a journal (senseless) with women on his pages. In the “Appearance, Crawl and Wait,” the woman is his lovely lady: she is stronger and has the image of a queen. “She is everything I imagine her to be and more.” In the “Memory” it is sad to read about the only way he could see her. He displays a lot of the uglyness that comes from her aging. They both cry and fall. Could be that the crying is because the discovering of his character? And that they both fall because they have been kicked out by him? “He is a god with rules” and he seems to think that he is one. He knows what is good for them. There are plenty more women on his journal. I´ll be looking for the next one.