tuckova

I keep thinking about her and wanting to say something that is as deep as her feelings, something worthy of her pain and her sacrifice, her love. And because there is nothing really to say beyond the fact of herself, and nothing more important in my mind, I find myself nearly mute.

She came from the future, I start, because how else could she have continued into a future that offered her little other than one disaster, one rejection, one sad ending after another. How could she have gone on unless it is because she knew she went on. Her dedication to each thing, and failure, and dedication to the next thing, it's almost too much to bear unless I think that like me she sees the future and knows that her dedication will ever be enough but it is what she has to offer, and offer, and offer. Hands crippled by one love nevertheless reaching out in optimism? or certainty? to take up the next goal, purposeful. 

Even in love, I don't begin to understand the strength she had. To love a man who took her name when she took his; it must have felt at the time like she was the equal she knew she deserved to be.  She learned his life so that she could help him lead it; learned his language to help him preserve it. And he listened to her, believed in her, credited her. And yet when I mention her to others she is most famous for how he betrayed her, again and again. 

What would it be like, to watch your husband leave to do work you find important, to watch your son die, to write your daughter cheering letters because it's the only thing you can use to sustain her in prison? What would it be like to know you'd given up your own freedom, things you were promised with ease, in exchange for this? I mean, he won; she won. She had five years of knowing they won, but that whole five years she had to remember all the things she lost to get there. I can't imagine. Or rather I can't stop imagining.