The Weight You Can Put DownChapter 17 of 225 min
What does not depend on you
The phone is back in its place and you are still standing in the kitchen.
Somebody rang about the twenty-eighth, about who is coming and what time, and near the end they said the thing they say. That it was a long time ago. That he was not a well man himself.
None of it was new. You have been standing here a while anyway.
Four things first, and they are not withdrawn further down.
What was done to you was wrong. Not partly, not in the context of the times, not less so because the person who did it had their own history. That is not reopened anywhere in this chapter.
Remembering it is yours. The detail, the order of it, the whole of it. Nothing here asks for a single part of it.
The anger is yours too. It has not gone on too long and it is not waiting to be outgrown.
And wanting to be believed is not a weakness. Nothing here asks you to stop wanting it.
You do not have to forgive anybody for any of this to work. You do not have to be in the room on the twenty-eighth, or say a word to anyone at that table. And if being near him is not safe or not bearable, then that is the end of that, and no part of this chapter touches it.
So this chapter is about one thing only, and it is not any of the above.
Somewhere a long way back, it became your responsibility that it stays wrong.
Not the remembering. The keeping.
Here is how you would know.
Whoever else is left has their own version, and between them it has been smoothed into something that happened to everybody and was nobody's doing. The ones who knew have died or moved or stopped mentioning it. The world has made its own arrangements, the way it does.
So there is one place left where it is still what it was. And you are standing in it.
Which means that every so often, when the afternoon has gone well and three hours have passed without it coming up, something arrives that is very like disloyalty. Not to the people. To the thing itself. As though it were being left unattended.
If that is not how it goes in your house, you can leave this one; it was written for somebody else.
Now the part this chapter is for.
There are two things in this kitchen and they have been one thing for most of your life.
The first is what was done. That is finished. It was wrong on the day it happened, and it did not need you then.
The second is your keeping of it. That is not finished. That is something you do, in the present, most days, and it costs an afternoon at a time.
The first does not rest on the second.
You can test it, and the test is in your own life rather than in anything this book says.
Think of an afternoon when something on the television had you laughing and it did not cross your mind once. Not for hours.
It was exactly as wrong that afternoon as it is this one.
Nothing slipped while you were not looking. Nothing was conceded. It did not become a long time ago, and it did not become something that happened to everybody, and it did not become something he could not help.
It was true while you were asleep last night, and it will be true tomorrow afternoon whether or not it comes up.
You are not what is holding it up.
That is not the same as it being over, and this chapter is not going to pretend the two are close.
Whoever said it on the telephone was wrong. It will be said again on the twenty-eighth, and it will still be wrong then, and it does not become your fault for having let the sentence go past.
And it has not been put right. Nothing that has happened since has made it smaller, and no part of this chapter is going to pretend otherwise. Where it stands is where it stood this morning.
So you say it out loud, once, standing in the kitchen in the middle of the afternoon.
It was wrong. It was wrong the whole time.
That is all of it. Nobody has to hear it.
And then nothing happens, which takes some getting used to. No forgiveness arrives, and none was ever wanted from you. Nothing is dropped. The claim is exactly where it was.
The only difference is that for a moment it was not being attended, and it did not move.
What comes off you is not the wrong and not the anger.
It is the disloyalty of a good afternoon.
You can have an hour in which it does not come up. You can laugh at something on the television tonight and go to bed having not attended to it once, and nothing will have been withdrawn by morning. It does not need the vigil. It never did.
Most days this will not hold. The keeping is older than one afternoon in a kitchen, and nothing said here is a match for how long you have been doing it.
But the phone is back in its place, and there is a good part of the afternoon still left.
It is not being left unattended. There is nothing to attend.