Oh how we strive for those portraits. Those green symbols can usher in the highest peaks of attainable bliss and lowest possible reaches of despair in our human experience. I didn't have enough rectangles with pictures of Benjamin Franklin or Ulysses S. Grant to buy and save my grandparent's house. It's as simple as that.
In the weeks after my grandmother passed away, I forgot the evils of my Aunt Nancie, her coldness, her inhumanness. That no longer mattered. There would be time for reflection and anger, that wasn't it. When the time finally came, and I realized my godmother's betrayal had run too deep, the hatred and animosity came swiftly, in waves of seething passion that tugged and seized my ankles, pulling me further into the rip current of despair.
Money mattered, it was not just paper and portraits, it was freedom. It represented more than what it could buy or what it could provide for a family, it was freedom in the purest sense. I knew money couldn't solve all problem, no one thing could ever wish to do so, but I knew it could solve a lot of them, way more than anyone without money would want to admit. When someone had money, it relieved stress and lengthened lives. Those people breathed.
I felt as if I struggled well below the surface in a sea of stress, pumping my legs and arms in its genetin-consistency, slowly slipping further into the abyss. I thought of my Aunt Steffie, the moment she saw her winning lottery ticket, what other emotions may have come with the adrenaline that flowed through her body. How each successive matching number led closer to the realization that their lives were going to change.
"Money don't mean nothing to me"? My Uncle Chet really said that? That notion felt impossible, unbelievable, even insulting to me. What that money could have accomplished was beyond what they could have imagined, far beyond giving it to the two casinos in Connecticut. If that white and pink piece of paper were in my hand, things would be different, it would have been enough to make things right.
The statement manifests itself in the deepest parts of my brain: Of course the million dollars went to someone whos "lifestyle is perfect already." Is it sad to think this? But this is too presumptuous of me to say. I am lucky to have been affected by it at all, lucky to have been so close to its benefits.
The power is in the paper. But talk is cheap...sorry, it's all I can afford.
No comments:
Post a Comment