Get Behind Me Temptation

Get Behind Me Temptation

“Shut up!  Shut up! Would you just shut up for once! You are just driving me crazy!” Unfortunately, I didn’t notice the person coming from the other way on the sidewalk. She gave me quite a long look, first trying to see whether I was hooked up to some kind of device. And shaking her head when she realized that I wasn’t. I think she probably believed that my drive to crazy had finally reached its unavoidable destination. She probably didn’t have to be told that I was yelling at myself.

I was trying to silence my inner voice. It had been particularly loud and repeatedly annoying to me recently. It had taken on the job of being the voice of temptation for me, and it was wearing me out with its constant articulation of what I should be doing.

I’m glad that I don’t talk in my sleep, as Alice would hear the internal conflict that I did not want her to know about. She liked things the way they are, and I can’t say that I blame her.

Well there’s the building where I work. It’s time for me to do what I am paid good wages to do, no matter how I feel about what I am doing, and more importantly, what I am not doing and probably never will do. Well at least my inner voice does not speak to me when I am mindful of my work. Busy shuts him up, I guess. It will return to my consciousness when my day’s work is done. That happens every day, walking to and from work and certainly when I am sleeping.

           Tonight, a Friday, we went to hear a young writer speak, George Abbott. Both of us had recently read all three of his novels, and enjoyed them a great deal. We even commented on it when we experienced something that could be right out of one of his books. We can’t go to a restaurant without comparing it to the horrible place featured in his first novel, “Never Again”.

           The night’s show began well. His first words were “Are there any restaurants you would recommend here in your town? You know I like to go to good restaurants, not ones in which a major scuffle with a waiter might take place, and the food might be awfully bad?” The audience responded with almost universal laughter and applause.

           As time passed, as entertaining and insightful as he was, my inner voice began interrupting what I was trying to hear. At usual, I couldn’t shut it up. The voice of temptation can be very determined. Mine certainly was that night, so much so that I begin thinking that maybe I should go along with what he said. I couldn’t do that to Alice however, so I tried to appear just as engaged as Alice was in what George was saying.

           She wasn’t fooled however. As we left the theatre she asked me whether anything was wrong. I was prepared for the question, so I lied well, saying that the cafeteria food at work had unsettled my stomach. I made her laugh by saying, “It was like something out of young George’s book.”

           When we got home that night, Alice discovered that she had received an e-mail telling her that she had to come to a suddenly arranged meeting the next day – Saturday. She e-mailed back her positive response.

           I believe that there often is an age you reach when you think of some of the ambitions or plans that you had as a young person that somehow fell by the wayside. This is what I have been going through since I turned sixty a few weeks past, and it shows no sign of diminishing in this particular case.

           That night, when I should have been sleeping, my inner voice woke me up by repeatedly asking me in a voice even louder than usual: ‘Is it too late? Is it too late? You are getting old, you know, maybe too old.’ I could almost believe that I said those words out loud. Fortunately, I knew that Alice could not hear the voice of my temptation, and I believe fthat  Alice was too deep in sleep to hear the words of my sharply spoken replies. Otherwise she would have asked me whether there was anything wrong, as is her way. 

Just in case I could be disturbing her, I quickly got up and headed to the living room and engaged in sudoku as a way of overriding the temptation presented by my inner voice. Fortunately, filling in the numbers was a good distraction, I focused enough on the numbers to dim the sounds of temptation.  I eventually fell asleep on the couch, where I spent the rest of the night.           

           Should I tell Alice about the temptation that is haunting me? The problem with that is that she is too kind to me. She would tell me ‘go with it’ even though she might upon reflection think of it as a big mistake, at least financially, within a few weeks time. I think that that would be unfair to her, exploiting her kindness to get what I wanted deep inside.

           We didn’t speak much the next morning, just a kiss and the words ‘take care’ exchanged between us. Once I was alone, I kind of played games with my temptation. I looked at my high school yearbook and read the poems published in it that I had written when I was a teenager in my graduation year. Should I confine myself to writing poetry again? Perhaps that would be enough to satisfy my inner voice of temptation. I still liked what I wrote back then, but I knew that writing poetry was not what I wanted at this stage of my life. The inner voice would continue to plague me to write something much larger.. I was pretty sure of that. Temptation would continue to speak to me with demanding tones.

           Alice came home with a big smile on her face, and a slight whiff of alcohol on her breath. She soon spoke up, “Alfred, I have great news. I have been promoted to a high level executive position. It means that I will be paid a lot more money. What do you think of that?”.

           A big hug immediately followed. She certainly deserved her promotion. She worked very hard. She then guided me to the living room couch, and sat down beside me, her left arm stretched out around my shoulders.

“And that good news for me is going to spread to good news for you as well. I don’t know whether you know that you talk in your sleep, and have done since you turned sixty. The words have almost always been exactly the same. This has happened almost every night. 

I know what has been tempting and troubling you. And I have an answer for it, one that you will undoubtedly like. I think that you should quit your job, and spend your time writing the novel or novels that has tempted you over the last few months. You supported me when we raised children and I did not work. Now it is my turn to support you with your literary children”. 

I began my first novel that night. The opening line was, “She didn’t discover that she had super powers until she was well into her fifties.”