The walls of my father’s house might as well not be there, they do such a bad job of keeping the noise of the TV out of my room. But my dad is deaf in one ear, so maybe he cranks the sound up. And my stepsister is 16 years old, so maybe she cranks the sound up. And my stepmom has to yell especially loud at 7AM (and then at 7:05, and 7:10, and 7:15) urging her teenage daughter out of the bathroom to take her to school (the same school I went to six years ago when I looked forward to leaving the city and not coming back). And none of these people has any reason to start being any quieter.
And when they are all three out of the house I so relish the silence above all else–above writing, reading, and blindly submitting my resume to places I guess might be tolerable to work at. I do all of those things, however, when they come back and there’s no other escape from their noise.
Should it be the other way around? Should I enjoy their company while they are here and use my solitude for solitary pursuits? Why does their sound bother me?
The members of my family, and by extension my stepfamily, all seem to have very little in common with each other. The fundamental thing uniting them all, though, is their shocking satisfaction with being tremendously unhappy people. It is the thing that attracts them to each other, seemingly, since they are lacking in more normative attractive qualities. Spending time with them, I now have the feeling of being lazy, of all things–lazy for being satisfied with the same things they satisfy themselves with: all the hallmarks of a defeated lifestyle. And by spending time with them, I have come to realize, I give them the perfect grist to lash out at me for not trying harder. In me they see themselves, and since they will not change, they become angry for my sake. And as noxious as their misdirected anger is, it is the greatest gift they can give me. And I have come to believe that when I completely seclude myself from them–when I am not under the same roof, and when I have gained complete financial independence from them–I will have broken the mirror they use me for, and they’ll have no other choice but to rebuild themselves rather than focusing on me, their projected image.
And maybe then solitude won’t feel so much like respite.
But families are as disposed to inertia as everything else in the universe. In fact they require it to sustain themselves. I wonder if it is the unconscious fear of my father and mother that I should ever become completely independent of them, and so without realizing it they put me in a position to fail. I wonder if they do everything to resign me to a life like theirs without even pausing to imagine that it should be anything otherwise, because they think of me as the unsatisfied one. On one side is the paragon of an unexamined life, and on the other is me at my desk rearranging my resume so that I look like I’d make a good assistant, and the osmotic link is the noise coming through the paper-thin walls.
And I probably would leave if the noise weren’t there to press me into action. And they’d probably ask me to leave if the silence from inside weren’t so cozily reassuring to them.
I have the idea that I’m searching for the thing that will reclaim my independence for me, but I will only have that when I no longer need their unhappiness to spur me to look for it.
