Catherine Broadwall’s “Ironies”

Many are the jokes about Alanis Morrisette’s song “Ironic” not actually offering examples of irony. Many are the temples massaged by English teachers, so I’ve heard, over students’ misunderstanding of the term. Rain on a wedding day isn’t ironic, the jokes and corrections insist, unless it was a day chosen for its good odds of having sun. Setting the stage for one thing to happen, only to get the opposite. The undesired thing.

I don’t think I fully understood this myself until recently. The understanding came with green eyes, clean paws.

*

Ripping your heart out, putting it in a glass case where you think it will be safe, only to have the whole cliff it sat on crumple into the sea. That is irony.

*

Once, at 14, a friend showed me his grandfather’s pocket knife. I was holding its handle with my right hand, cradling the blade with my left. Before I knew it, the knife had drawn a red line across my whole palm. “Oh,” I remember saying, staring at the gash. Blood started running down in drips.

“Jesus,” my friend said. His eyes held panic. “How are you not reacting?” he demanded, scrambling to fetch some gauze.

I remember being a little irritated with myself, but other than that, unfazed.

*

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes that tears can form a river, transporting people where they need to go. I’ve always liked this idea, that tears don’t indicate lost momentum, but propulsion. Forward flow. That tears might nudge us somewhere necessary, someplace essential we must reach.

What shore was I resisting, then, staring at my palm?

*

The cat didn’t want to be an indoor cat, despite our best efforts and intentions. Prior to her adoption, she’d grown up free-ranging, and made a break for our alleyway whenever we opened the back door. Wriggling between our ankles, fast as an arrow. We’d holler and try to chase her down. I’d read convincing arguments for keeping cats indoors, and wanted to abide by them. We’d had one indoor cat who loved nothing more than loafing, sprawling in sunbeams, snoozing on the couch. How hard could this possibly be?

But that cat had passed, and the new one wanted none of it. Her spirit was fierce. Adventurous. When we lugged her back inside, she’d sit at the door and caterwaul for hours. I tried a compromise: a bright pink leash. She’d somehow escape this too. After years of struggle, I finally accepted it. She was happiest slinking after grasshoppers and dragonflies. Happiest wandering the green.

She never goes toward the street, we observed. She’s fine, right? She’ll be fine.

*

In the Pixar movie Inside Out, all the characters represent aspects of a young girl’s psyche. When her imaginary friend loses his treasured rocket, it’s not the urgings of Joy that enable him to move forward and find relief, but the stillness and patience of Sadness. He weeps, and she holds him, and he’s able to breathe out. That ancient sigh felt in one’s bones, that wind that dries the swimmer fresh from the river of tears. I know this. I know this. Watching the scene, I felt my heart squeeze with recognition: Yes, we so underestimate sorrow. Enough of this superficial, pumped-up happiness that tromps over grief and its needs.

Still, I did not let myself shatter when the glass case went over the cliff with my heart.

*

Moving out of state to a second-floor condo following the volcanic breakup, I let him keep the cat. I sob about this until my body doubles over. I think I am doing the right thing. He wants her, and I do not feel worthy of having her. With me, she would have no grass, no sun. I cry until my eyelids are red.

But when I learn from a friend that she has been hit by a car just a few months later, my voice becomes small. My larynx shuts, a reed capped by a thumb.

“Oh,” my teen self says, staring at the knife wound. “Oh,” my mouth says on the phone at 36.

*

My mother tells me that whenever I talk about the cat, she envisions her spirit running up to me. “She’s right there with you,” she says.

For seven months, I sit like a bag of broken glass. Thinking if I don’t move, the pieces cannot shift.

*

Irony: the one who’s always expressing the importance of sadness to others balking on the shores of her own river. Irony: refusing to cry when crying is the very thing she needs. It takes seven months, but one day, at last, I lower to my knees and cry and cry and cry. I let myself be transported along, have faith that there is a destination.