Haunted and Hunted

A guest essay by Heather Bartos about time and possibilities at midlife

I had a dream a few nights ago. I was standing at a corner and crossed the street. It was dark, so I was walking toward home, paying a little more attention than usual, picking up my pace. A tall, bald figure in a white shirt started following me, almost close enough to touch. I doubled back and started walking the way I had come, and he seemed to swoop closer, now more of a bird than a man, gliding in pursuit, making graceful circles around me. He didn’t speak. I couldn’t hear his footsteps. He wasn’t in a hurry like I was, intent on going somewhere. He had all the time in the world. I knew that if he caught me, I wouldn’t be going home that night. 

Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

I’ve always been hunted and haunted by time. 

I remember such a sense of wide-open possibility when I was young, like living on an open field, the Great Plains of potential lives, with pathways splintering off into different directions, horizons stretching as wide as my eyes could see. Maybe I would end up with a cute husband. Maybe I’d go into the Peace Corps, do important work in a foreign country, learn complicated and beautiful languages, and be shaped by a different culture. Maybe I’d have four kids, or two kids, or no kids. Maybe I’d write meaningful and lovely things, travel to Paris, act in plays, go to cast parties late in the night with people who would become close friends.

I would practice my future in the mornings, tell myself about all the things I would do and accomplish. 

“That was after I spent two years in Costa Rica, teaching English,” I told my reflection in the bathroom mirror. “I took a break and backpacked across Europe, and after I got home, I went back to graduate school and earned a degree in environmental biology.” 

I got engaged at age 22, and I remember looking at that little diamond from the mall, sparkling on my finger as I sat through yet another university class, trying to keep my attention off the cedar trees I was drawing in my notebook and on the lecture. 

I remember crying at age 23, a few months before the wedding, because I might not be traveling as much as I had dreamed, because I might not be a flight attendant or a Peace Corps volunteer, because my decisions would be tied to someone else’s, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to limit their one life like that. 

You just have cold feet, my mother said. You’ll be fine. 

I think I cried less about the fear of linking my one and only life with someone else’s, even someone I was deeply in love with, than about the sense that even then, by age 23, the act of choosing in and of itself meant that other choices and calls go unclaimed, unanswered, unexplored. And that golden age of endless opportunity and possibility, with wide open fields and unbound horizons, was already starting to narrow and tunnel to a close. 

Adam Phillips, in the introduction to his 2012 collection of essays Missing Out, writes:

“Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken…The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we ever do…we can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.” 

I knew that even when I was in high school, that the goal was to end up with as little regret as possible, to play as many of the cards I was given in the way that would maximize the most satisfaction, the highest score. I was a stressed-out seventeen-year-old because I already knew this, that my life was finite even though the choices appeared to be infinite, an illusion in a hall of funhouse mirrors. It made it hard to relax, hard to meander and wander, because I was afraid to make mistakes and choose wrongly. At the start of every semester, I would get headaches. I would go to the library and study employment ads, trying to figure out the best way to support myself, which paths would be safest and which paths would be steepest. 

And those experiences seen as integral to college and young adulthood—partying, traveling—I had to gather some of those too, before I was tied down, before I had kids and responsibilities. It was always serious business for me, that time of being young. I had to figure out my career. I had to find a partner and fall in love. I had to choose a direction. The sense of panic that I would not, could not get it all done, that I would miss some essential experience and regret it, drove me to live faster, plan more, move more. 

That man was already following me in the dark, making graceful circles, years ago. 

As a young woman in the 1990s, you could have it all—all except acceptance and peace. 

I used to wake up in the night, planning to travel to Paris. 

I wake up now, wondering why I never went, not full of regret so much as an odd sort of acknowledgement that I might not like Paris even if I did go, that maybe the time for that life has passed, and that this quieter, more rooted life is what I need instead. There is calm and order in knowing where your extra batteries are, that they are hidden under the kitchen counter in a cabinet, there for emergencies. There is satisfaction in knowing you have stockpiled in preparation for the storm, that you know where you buried those acorns and nuts you foraged in the fall. 

A few summers ago, I had an ultrasound that showed a shadow on my ovary. 

It’s probably just the cyst we’ve been watching, said my doctor in her MyChart message. 

Of course, if you are worried about it, we can always take it out. 

I thought about that shadow, about the endometriosis that has already claimed my other ovary and my uterus. It’s probably just the cyst we’ve been watching. 

Or it could be something else, something discussed in hushed voices, something not named. The things not named are always feared the most. 

Let’s wait six months and have you come in for another ultrasound, she wrote. Your CA-125 blood test came back negative, so that’s reassuring.

I remembered Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73— “consumed with that which it was nourished by.” The estrogen that influences the sound of my voice, that carves the curves of my figure, that protects my heart and bones, can also turn sour, turn predatory. It can follow me in the dark, making slow, lazy circles, preparing to pounce, to consume what it has nourished. 

This self I see in the mirror, which used to plan my life down to the random left hand turn on an ordinary Tuesday, is temporary, a loaner vehicle, alone. I change the oil, eat the broccoli, inflate the tires, but it’s not meant to be driven forever. It will be replaced by newer and improved models down the line. 

I decided to wait six months for another ultrasound, more hazy pictures of what we couldn’t be sure or certain of. Surgery for something that was most likely not cancer seemed too drastic. 

Six months later, waiting in the hall for the second ultrasound, I remembered my student who passed away at age fifteen, given less than a third of the years I have lived. I remembered his funeral, asking myself why. 

I know what tragedy looks like. Would I be disappointed, angry, if my scan came back and it looked like cancer? I’m a human being, so probably. Would I think it’s a tragedy, given the time I’ve already been gifted, time I did nothing to earn or deserve?

No, I don’t think so.

We all stand in the rain. It seems ridiculous to expect you will be the only one who doesn’t get wet. 

When I saw the radiologist’s report, I grinned, although I’d done nothing to claim a victory. I was just fine.

Doing a touchdown dance in the end zone is tempting fate. The house always wins in the end. 

But I’m going to dance while I can. I’m going to play the cards I’ve been dealt the best way I know how. The phrase “woman of a certain age” always makes me laugh. I am more certain now, of so many things. Someday, there will be a last day, but there are all the days before that day to live. 

After that initial scan, I started to write, a lot more than I normally do. I’m pressing and preserving what I can harvest now, because that bird is already circling above. No hurry, but there, those silent footsteps that increase the pace of my own.

Heather Bartos writes fiction and nonfiction. She's published essays in Fatal Flaw, HerStry, McNeese Review, Instant Noodles, and elsewhere. She's also published short fiction in Baltimore Review, Ponder Review, Orca, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, and other publications.

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