A Kind of Prayer
by Gianni Skaragas
Mania often thinks about happiness although it has long begun to feel like clothing she has outgrown. There have been times in her life so blessed that she didn’t want to share them with others for fear of their jealousy. It was the kind of happiness that made her pause in the midst of uttering a sentence to describe it, feeling that she would be punished for that abundance. To recollect these moments makes time go by slower, and right now she’s only trying to make each day feel like a year. She can’t tell if these moments have vanished or if she has forgotten them. Sometimes her mind is free for just an instant to hark back to them, but she feels guilty: What will happen to her family if these moments engulf her mind? What if she never finds her way back to the present?
The Greek coffee begins to boil and as it rises up into bubbles, she realizes that her happiest memories are not worth her effort to keep them alive anymore. They can hardly change her into a hopeful version of herself. Her mind drifts off into the past because she lacks the courage to cope with the present. She doesn’t need to be happy. She prays for Gregory, her son; humbly and restlessly, she asks God to help him. Until that moment—it will come, she knows that the Virgin will take care of this unlucky young man—the effort involved in this prayers requires such concentration that she can’t allow herself to miss the past. She doesn’t miss being stupid, when she used to assume that good things happen to good people.
She can’t stop looking for joys in the little things because she cannot find them anywhere else. To appreciate the trivialities of her everyday life is easier than to assess each day of it. To look for signs renders her apathetic. She prefers the perfect blueness of the sky to the cloud formations; the small talk to a dream; a sedative to relaxation: She would choose a fantasy over a promise. Easy, Mania thinks, as she slowly sips at her coffee, the silence reigning in the kitchen. If there is an adjective to describe her hopes for the future and what she wishes her life would be, she knows, that would be it.
No matter how delightfully she indulges in her daydreams, Mania has always been a pessimist, which, to her understanding, means that she still needs the strength to believe in something. A dream, she thinks, may be enough to inspire an artist, but not in itself sufficient to heal a man’s soul—or another man’s body—so she needs to find a different kind of strength. There is not a world inside her with which to coexist or in which to live. She longs for tiny pieces of evidence that she can establish some kind of order in her house as competently as she would rule a kingdom. She needs to satisfy her three men—considering her dog as being a male member of her family—and make sure that their world is as it should be. She is not simply a woman to serve. Three bodies depend on her, cannot conceive of existing without her, and there is no greater pleasure in the world for her than to attend to them. There is no better way to prove she is alive than to be needed.
This is probably her gift. She can take good care of people. They trust her because they know that they are safe with her. It has nothing to do with the mind; trust is not about good advice. She knows it back from the time when she still worked as a nurse in the Intensive Care. The patients there, unconscious people, usually on respirators could not open their mouth and ask for anything. The sigh of their breath blended into the strange humming sound coming from the electronic equipment, and she could understand that no one can hurt anyone with words. The only way to betray them would be if she failed to cool their body or fix the chest tubes and check the drips and the drugs. She knows now that it takes something more than good intentions to attend to someone.
Something strange happened this morning. She was slicing some mushrooms thinly and there was a moment when she knew that in a couple of seconds she was about to cut off her fingers with the kitchen knife. It was not a presentiment so much as an exercise in precision. She stopped exactly before the blade touched the skin and her muscles froze, as if her mind had already counted the seconds, and she could determine her fate. It had such an effect to her that she stood mesmerized staring at the knife, trying to surmise that it was a good sign. But then, she realized that it was just a kitchen knife, and she started to laugh. This was a good sign indeed. It had been a long time since she had last laughed.
Dear Lord,
I lack the bravery to believe in miracles. I can only believe in what I can touch. When I fix my eyes on my son, I can only see the piece of flesh that I had been carrying in my womb. The only way to recognize him is to measure the damage done to his spinal cord. Love is a muscle. It’s the potency to exercise it and grow it so that you can feel alive, so that you can touch—and serve—another muscle. Love is the feeling that you can use a stupid muscle even if you never will.