So much to answer for
In the dream this morning, I thought, “why not invite him over to dinner?” The house was empty now and I was trying to piece everything together, my life, the grocery store trips, how much food to allow my household of one. My old dormant crush, the man I now know only in my dreams but who could still hold a place in my heart (diminished by knowledge and years and age, jammed in between the other things from my twenties that I regret), was coming to dinner.
Before he made it (in the omniscience of dreams, I saw him walking along the sidewalk, this Yorkshireman – never underestimate the power of an accent – with his wiry climber's build and surprisingly grey hair), I woke up. 4:44 a.m.
I was relieved to wake up so late. Last night, restless after a day at home with a sick boy and a never-ending stream of movies, I was having a hard time getting to sleep. I had to bring out the Buddhist Scotsman with his gentle, almost sexy whisper-voice (“and now allow the muscles of your thighs to soften”) in order to get my spastic mind to quiet itself, to take that internal tension, so automatic at times, and smooth it out. I soothed myself with images of a night of extended sleep, expecting all the while that I would wake up at 2:30 or 3:00. But I made it to almost 5:00 a.m. and that was good enough for me.
I don’t have enough to do, enough to feed on. Don’t envy me. I’ll be envying myself in six months. Or, really, I have things to do but I am having a hard time getting interested in them. Oh, there’s the usual cleaning, the stuff sorting, the life organizing, But I could also be exploring and writing and entering life more. I have to structure my time and make myself a life and I am just realizing now that I don’t have to stay in the house as a form of atonement, a way of showing that I am not a layabout wasting time (as I waste it). There are wonderful things about controlling my days, but not if I let them slip away.
Don’t laugh at me or roll your eyes – or, at the very least, don’t tell me that you are doing so, and I'll pretend that you aren't – but I think I am holding on to this emptiness as a penance, that the structure I set up against myself is a form of payment for my sins. I am not a religious person. I was not raised in an environment of structured guilt. But I carry around guilt anyway and I cling to her, the old me, the one who was alone, who took her anger and directed it inward. I’ve mentioned at least once here the idea that my thoughts could kill. In a recent tearful conversation about my first child's birth/death, one therapist nailed it when she asked me if I thought that I killed that child with my anger and hate. I had a lot of that at the time, a lot of adolescent resentment. I was sixteen and on my own. I knew then – and know now – that killing with thought and emotion is impossible. I know and I don’t know. It’s so hard to shake, this feeling of responsibility. I hated and wished for release and then he died. It's a twisted logic, a spurious connection between a, b, and c.
My second son's birth was a trigger. Not that my life before parenthood was some sort of free romp, but it was much less self-constrained. Then the boy who got to live arrived, along with the overwhelming reminder of what I was capable of, my dark powers. I’ve been trying to make it up to the ones I’ve wounded, the ones who are no longer here, including the adolescent me who was stuck with the responsibility, the burden of someone else's death.
I used to have dreams about the baby I forgot. There he was in the antiquated crib in the high-ceiling room with the wispy curtains floating in the breeze. By the time I remembered – to get food, to change a diaper, to check in – he would be dead. I haven’t had those dreams for years, thank goodness. That’s part of the healing process, the joy of having a child now and doing right by him.
I am grateful for my ability to pick apart my emotions, for finding the why. Once I know the why, I can deal with it, and I am, ever so slowly. This new discovery of my self-imposed prison both as penance and as a way to hold on to the girl that was, is useful. I can cry over her and then allow myself the freedom to live.
So why the dream visit from the Yorkshireman, the occasional Mancunian? He used to represent freedom to me, freedom and desire, the world of art and living on the edge. He’s an outdated symbol (nothing personal Mr. H/C/T) who was showing up for the final supper, our last meal together.
It’s been a long leave-taking from my caged life, but I am halfway there. The second half, which is all action and forward movement, is going to be the most difficult. It will take willpower and a sense of direction without knowing my ultimate destination. I can do it, though I may be writing about it ad nauseam until I get further along the path.
A note on the title: "So much to answer for" is a line from the Smiths song Suffer Little Children, which is about the 1960s Moors Murders. It fits Manchester, my dreams, and guilt.
Image: Me, last night, verging on sleep.
New year's rulins
It was a thin night of sleep, my dreams kept poking through the weak spots in my consciousness and my heart refused to leave me alone. It reminded me of its presence, knocking at my chest, pushing its rapid beat into my head, my fingertips, my toes. These reminders of life aren't so bad: I am here, I exist, my heartbeat is palpable underneath my skin. The blood continues to flow through this interconnected highway of arteries and veins. It feeds me.
The moments are fleeting and beautiful. I need to stay in them, to experience them fully, while letting them go all at once. Each letter is a moment, each word, each breath and they propel me into the future whether I want them to or not.
In anticipation of the coming January, the long remains of winter, I've been thinking about writing a happiness list, a list of things and actions and ways of being that will keep me in the moment while reminding me that I have a future. What better time to start making that list than New Year's Eve? I suppose these are resolutions, though I've never thought of myself as a resolution sort of person.
Happiness List
- Read more novels: they remind me of the depth and meaning of life and also take me out of myself
- Get out of the house more often to write or just to free up mental space
- Avoid all glowing electronic appliances -- the computer, the smartphone, the rare TV exposure -- after 8:00 p.m
- Keep open to other people; listen to what they say and how they say it without projecting my own thoughts and anxieties on to their words, their silences, or their body language
- Assume the best, but pay attention to warning signs that the assumption may be wrong and act accordingly
- Stop wasting food
- Be authentic to my emotions without wallowing in them
- Recognize my needs and give them a voice: they have a right to exist and I have a right to fulfill them as long as I do no harm
- Listen carefully and respond thoughtfully when the time is right
- Be grateful
- Be gracious
- Trust when trust is merited, but don't make the requirements for trust so onerous that I trust no one
- Be trustworthy
- Be reliable
- Give more money away
- Respond more quickly to email from friends
- Talk on the phone to people other than my immediate family
- Return Adam's calls promptly
- Stop telling telemarketers that Jennifer isn't home and start asking them to remove me from their lists
- Let the love flow ... when that feeling of warmth emanates from my heart (it's happening right now, it's lovely), nurture it; direct it to the people I love, the people I like, and even those who have caused me pain
- Forgive myself
- Understand that everyone has their own troubles, no matter how smooth things might appear from the outside
- Be compassionate
- Do more of the things that scare me (a return to driving lessons, for example)
- Recognize the core of strength, the length of pliable steel that centers me and has kept me protected since childhood
- Teach myself new forms of self-protection and preservation that keep me open and connected to family and friends
Sure, I don't have items like "Help win war -- fight facism" or "Wash teeth if any," but I am no Woody Guthrie. And this is just the beginning of my list, a start, a way to frame 2012.
Happy new year to you. I wish you happiness, luck and love. Be brave, be honest, be kind. I'll try my best to do the same.
Woody Guthrie's 1942 New Year's Resolutions courtesy of Boing Boing, with thanks to Holly for bringing it to my attention.
Pent-up heart
Last night before going to sleep, I wrote a bit in my journal (so much to say, so little ability to say it clearly right now) and then listed the things I wasn’t going to let myself be woken up by, but maybe I would let enter my sleeping mind because my waking mind is all pent up. OK, self, I wrote, you can have the dreams about loss and guilt and invisibility and other long-term themes. One of us has to confront this stuff, and if it has to be you, my sleeping mind, my subconscious, so be it. If the dreams are important, you may wake us up, but not if you don’t have to. (Write interrupted at minute eight by the boy coming downstairs to tell me he threw up [a common occurrence during his illnesses – apparently he drank some water too quickly; as I type this I hear one of the cats throwing up … another common occurrence], getting him situated on his sick couch, talking with the groggy husband. Now to begin again.)
3:30 a.m. I was up. I was trying to go back to sleep. On with the meditation track, the slow climb of relaxation up my body from toes to scalp (thank you for the CD recommendation, Betsy). Not quite asleep, not quite asleep, and then in came the boy, not as feverish, still a little whispery with whatever imaginary scenario was playing in his head. Somehow we both fell asleep and then my dreams were of driving. He was driving, I was coaching, until I realized that the maneuverings of the car were too complicated for him. So I took over, tried to get out of the parking lot, but was blocked at both exits, so I drove back and forth between them, until the semi moved or the pick-up drove off, and I was going up the ramp too fast and then I woke up again.
The boy had fallen asleep with one of his arms around my back. The soon-to-be toothless cat Nick was howling his angst to the ceiling, and I had dream hangovers, this bereft image of sitting alone in my high school cafeteria, followed by the slight rush of the dream me at the wheel, parenting, taking over. I want to choose the last dream as the one to stay with me, but it’s the other dreams that are more representative of my internal state. I am invisible to myself at the moment.
My heart is compressed. My eyes are dry.
But sometimes my heart opens up. Yesterday early afternoon, I felt it, the blossoming, the sudden access, a reaching out that I can’t explain. I felt the connection, I was in the moment, I enjoyed it while it lasted, this portal to another. The day covered it over, but I know my heart is in there, waiting for me to let down the gates again. I just need a good cry first.
From the prompt "What a loser."
Image by naosuke ii.
The sweet momentary disappearance
For the last two years or so, I’ve been an insomniac. The form of my disease has shifted from crazy early wakeups to middle of the night wakeups plus crazy early wakeups. I can be in the middle of a dream, notice I am in the middle of that dream, note my deep sleep contentedness, and then: boom. Awake. Totally awake. For hours, as my brain does its thing and my heart pounds and the walls fall in on me. It’s debilitating. I am tired of it (ha ha). Sleep or the lack thereof becomes an obsession.
Sometimes my dreams are to blame. The most recent culprits have included one where I knew I was going to get caught for strangling a man years ago (my mother's take on this one: "Were you hot?" [actually, I was]; my therapist's take: "Tell me about getting caught," which was surprisingly fruitful), one in which a businessman with a shotgun was picking people off at a Metro stop and I had to protect the boy, and another one where I was about to give birth in a deserted hospital ward when a wizened old woman came up to me and asked "Have you got character?" (Yes, yes I do, I answered back.)
But it isn't just the dreams. It's me. It's that feeling that I have to hold on to everything, to contain it in my mind. It's the need to let go without the confidence that I can. What will happen if I stop being vigilant, if I stop keeping it together? What would happen if I left myself be vulnerable and open to losing myself to the night, to the forgetting of self?
I go to three separate mental health professionals, two once a week, one once a month (that’s my check-in with the psychiatrist who prescribes my antidepressants). I dig out the essential remains of the past while honing my present, making sure that I don’t fall back into the abyss or sink into my own personal quicksand. Our couples therapist is the one who has decided to focus the most on my sleep, probably because it comes up often -- trying to have an engaging conversation after 8 p.m. with someone who has been up since 4 in the morning is not very satisfying. She’s great, she’s sympathetic, and she has been giving me sleep pep-talks.
So now I write down a list of things right before I turn off the light, things that my mind doesn’t need to work on in the middle of the night. I listen to a seven minute deep breathing meditation track and then I fall off into quiet. Three nights of this seems to be helping. I still wake up, but I am able to go back to sleep. I’m not calling it a sweeping success yet, but it is promising, a way to soothe my overactive mind.
As for the falling, letting twilight enter, letting the armor drop as daylight falls away...I'm still working on it, the vulnerability, the sweet momentary disappearance, the temporary dissolution of self.
From the prompt "I am currently obsessed by ..."
Painting "Insomnia" by Jen Bradford.
Visitation
Before he appeared I had been standing by the sink in film noir lighting, looking at the dishes piled up with their memories of something fine, of conversation and small glasses of wine and garlic and breadcrumbs browned in butter. A dull knife rested on the cutting board. It had left its impressions upon the wood, made its mark repeatedly over years of chopping and mincing. This is home, I thought, what I’ve been missing.
All the actors had left the stage. They were sleeping in rooms cooled with night breezes, dreaming of the future landscape, a world without them. The younger me was sitting on a stoop at another house, a paperback copy of Anna Karenina balanced on her knees. The older me, visiting the imaginary past from the present, the me that yearned for things that didn't exist, things I created out of rose-filtered memories and hopes, knew I was being watched. A paper ornament hanging from the window -- was that the cut-out of a man? -- trembled. But the windows were closed. There was no breeze.
Show me a sign that you are here. The paper man twirled on his string. OK. But please, please, don't appear in front of me.
Kevin didn’t listen. He reconstituted himself on the couch as if he had been sitting there all along, waiting for me. I was grateful to see him, actually, to hear his voice. To have a conversation. And now he was saying something surprising. Good money to be made in the afterlife? Since when did Kevin care about money?
Can I ask you a philosophical question? Or maybe it isn’t a philosophical question – I mean, I now know the afterlife is real, that it exists, but, well, do you think it might be culturally determined? Like the idea of making money in the afterlife seems so … American. So capitalistic?
We talked philosophy, about the different possibilities of life after death, of the mysteries even the dead couldn't answer. This was home, too, the discussions that died with him, the way ideas mattered, and searching for the truth was a moral imperative. The only thing different was that I was no longer afraid to speak my mind. I could stand up to him if I needed to.
When it came time to leave, his pushed himself up gingerly from the couch. I’m not sure if I want you to touch me. He was more solid than life, more present.
I know. I’m cold like a zombie. He smiled.
It wasn’t that I was afraid of the touch of death, though it did give me pause. I was afraid of the unknown, of the truth, afraid of accepting that he was dead and not dead all at once, that these connections we make while living extend beyond our corporeality, that they reach out and out. How could I discount connection then, turn my back on it in some cowardly attempt at self-presevation?
He reached for my hand anyway. His was cool and clammy. Dead but not.
I woke up.
The next morning I had to call my mother about this, the solidity of Kevin, the strange things coming out of his mouth. Well, I’m glad to hear that he’s finally making money. We laughed and discussed the possible structures of the heavenly economy, and then she reminded me that it was Kevin's son's birthday.
In the world of dreams, in between life and death, our subconscious speaks to us in symbols. Kevin is a symbol, he was a person, he is part of my history. I'd like to believe it was really him stopping by, playing a lighthearted joke with an underlying message on the eve of his boy's birthday: don't discount connection. Keep your heart open. Trust your intuition. I am still here.
From a photo prompt of a dying rose. I've written the dream as it was.
Image by nimrodcooper.
Fiasco
I’m not a car person. I grew up with clunkers that didn’t tell you when it was time for an oil change, with gas gauges that didn’t work, or windshield wipers that flew off in fits of pique at the first drop of rain. Sometimes there was no car, so my mother and I walked or took the bus. For a short period of time she chugged around Smithburg on a yellow moped. No car is fine with me, though it would be a pain to live that way here, with the children and our various needs. Still, since I don’t drive, I should be able to live without.
Like the character John Self, Will drives a sporty wreck of a car, temperamental, expensive to maintain. Will's car is white. There are a lot of white cars around here, dirty white cars sooty and grey like city snow; white cars more cream than blank sheet of paper; white cars with mufflers pulled to the edge of uselessness. Shiny new ones. Scuffed and rusty old ones. Most of them look alike to me. It was only lately that I committed Will's car to memory. He drives a Fiasco.
The Fiasco is about seven years old, all rounded edges, a memory of aerodynamics, sad with former glory, the track star gone to seed. Until I memorized it (the tail end -- he is always driving away), I thought that every white car belonged to him, that he was waiting inside, that maybe he saw me as he passed, even though he never saw me at all, or maybe his vision was spotty, he saw parts of me so clearly that I might as well have been under a microscope, but the rest of me was covered over in fog, in a haze of want and assumption.
Apparently his white car is failing, along with the rest of his life. The women that don't show, the clotted business deal holding up his money, the child who ducks his phone calls -- they've taken their toll on his body. Stop telling me this, I tell my friends, I don't care anymore, but I still listen for the rumors, the updates. He's not looking well. His skin's gone yellow and he's returned to the annoying habit of pulling at his ear lobes. His belly hangs over his waistband. None of this seems to bother Will, who shuffles about with his usual sang froid, a man trapped inside his own head. I vacillate between sad and thrilled at his decline, remind myself of his tenderness in still moments, the way he took to my care.
He still invades my dreams, inserts himself into my sleep, though never in his car. He is just there, cagey, waiting, the knock at the door, the sudden appearance on my couch. He pushes his way into my space. He tells me how it should be.
I remind myself that the characters in our dreams are actually parts of ourselves, that we need to look at them for how they function in the dream, not what they may be in real life. Still, this morning at 2:15 a.m. I woke up angry, my psyche and emotions cut open from within, my composure slashed and my worries spilling out.
I left him in the shabby apartment with the crowds. They all wanted something from me without giving anything back and I decided I had had enough of that to last a lifetime. And then I woke up.
From the prompt "The car."
I stumbled into the Round Robin late this go round, replacing someone who dropped out. But I don't have the time to post daily (which is probably better), so the writing prompts will be occasional additions to the blog.
Image by a fool, a girl, a gullible dolt.
Ringing true
Nora led me on the slow walk along Dwight. She concentrated on sidewalk scents, the deep contemplative sniff, totally ignoring the grumble and gunning of car engines and their acrid exhaust. She’s getting older and I cut her some slack, let her enjoy the spicy roots of roses and street trees, the metallic bitterness of security gates. Outside the store, I tied her to the stoplight post, knowing from experience she hated to be left out. She jumped and barked and pulled at her leash as I entered the double doors.
Bamboozled is for last chances, last-minute alcohol, milk for when you run out, bananas for a burst of health after the fried fish sandwich. Most people come here for six-packs and lottery tickets, for the cigarettes behind the register.
The girl at the counter, glossy black hair, cinnamon skin, was speaking into a mobile phone in a language I didn’t know. Somewhere behind her my pack waited, anticipating the tap-tap of nervous hands, the ceremonial unwrapping of cellophane, my trembling choice: which one would burn first? Even through the closed door I could hear Nora's yelps. The girl made eye contact. I put an empty hand to mouth and inhaled deeply, pantomimed the satisfaction of holding and releasing smoke. Phone crooked between ear and shoulder, she turned to the cigarettes, letting her hand pass from brand to brand. I nodded when she got to Camel Lights.
This was the start of my escape and I noted the details: the dog's distress, the store's faint odor of disinfectant, the rows of 12-packs in the sunlight, the layer of dust on the cans of Coco Lopez. I dug into my back pocket for a ten and one of my fingernails bent against the denim. The girl and I slid our offerings across the counter, my cash for her cigarettes. A pale scar divided the back of her hand in two. Someone stuck his head in the door to ask if anyone knew whose dog that was, the distressed one tied to the post? She's mine, I told him and ran out to Nora, leaving my change behind (oh, her dance of recognition, of joy in not being abandoned she gave as I freed her from the post). We continued our walk to University, past Indian restaurants, cafes, and small grocery stores, turned left, and went to the water.
Cesar Chavez Park, a former landfill, juts into the bay. The grass is uneven, the ground underneath lumpy and booby-trapped with gopher holes. As Nora obsessed over gophers and ground squirrels, I looked across the water. San Francisco glittered in the distance, a taunt for what I could never have, another thing to bemoan, and my chest ached.
But suddenly the feeling changed. This is the mystery, the real topic of fiction: that moment of change -- is it a moment? A process? What brings it on? What is the key to the transformation? Did the kites flying above push me toward acceptance? Was it the family picnicking near us, two silent and exhausted parents watching their chubby toddler rip up handfuls of grass? Had I been working on it unconsciously all along? This was when my heart shifted toward truth and yet I can't get at the truth of the moment, at least not here.
As we left the park, I sent the pack of cigarettes sailing into a trash can, a sacrifice to note my sacrifice, an acceptance of the delicate balance in my life between ambiguity and love, novelty and stability, lightness and darkness. Cleansed by bay breezes, baptized by the city's exhaust and the hum of the highway, Nora and I returned to the humid familiarity of home.
That night I woke to chains dragging and ghosts howling, the sound detritus of a rowdy party up the street. But I was having a dream, too, of coming to the edge of the impossible, flirting with it while knowing it was impossible. I kept changing my clothes, rejecting my outfits, my disguises. Nothing fit or it was dirty or ripped, long out of style or season. The impossible and his progeny waited for me. In the end I told them to go on ahead. I would make it to our destination on my own in whatever identity fit.
Yesterday morning I did tell my husband I was going out for a pack of cigarettes (har har har). It was day four of the boy's illness and my husband was also laid up (and continues to be) after hernia surgery. I felt trapped by other peoples' needs. A dog walk, some studying, some time almost-alone, and a little more sleep helped shake the feeling. There is nothing to escape. This is my life and I am committed to it and to whoever we will become, me, the man, and the boy.
Besides, I already have a pack of cigarettes in my desk, a remnant from the truly horrible spring of 2011. The pack is almost full. I’ve never finished a cigarette. But I like the fact that it is waiting for me in a drawer, that I can take on the role of rebel or angry girl or self destructive harpy without taking it on at all. Because I am not any of these things.
It doesn’t mean that I can’t return in my mind to the time when home meant my erasure, that I can't wear the dark coat and scuffed boots even on a sunny October day. The cigarettes and stories act as a pressure valve for my dark side. I dance with the impossible in my dreams and I return to reality when I awake. In my first version of the cigarette story, the fictional me got to the edge of the bay and kept on going. The water submerged her. The dog barked as it swallowed her up. But there was no point to this ending, no transformation, just the further disappearance of self.
It didn't ring true.
I got very absorbed in this one -- probably best to think of it as a work in progress.
Image by meddygarnet.
She visits in the night
Restless, I woke at 3:37 this morning to a thump at my room door. At some point in the night, the dog had gone from my side to the blanket on the floor, but she was still asleep. I knew that the woman was eyeing me, just like I knew she was beside me last night before I dropped my book and turned off the light.
I’ve been reading about beauty and brutality, about the forces that make us who we are, about what it means to be human. It’s a mix of fact (the psychology of personality, though I think calling it “fact” may go too far) and fiction (The Bone People by New Zealand author Keri Hulme, a book so sad and violent and blurry with drink, child abuse, and self-pity that I’m not sure I can finish it, no matter how luscious the writing). Maybe the book influenced my night, reading that last scene of whiskies and beers and bottles of port all consumed before tea time, the prelude to broken glass and a blow to the head. I have lived in the drunken haze of a spring afternoon in a bar where day was night, but I have never beaten a child. I have never taken my displacement, my lack of connection, out on those weaker than I, at least not tangibly, my fist against their flesh.
Still, my poor sleep last night might have been for other reasons. The house could be haunted. Someone is watching me. My checkbook disappears and then shows up again days later in its rightful spot. I lose stuff, strange things, like bottles of shampoo and favorite pens. During the rains last week, the sheets of water rattling the skylights, I woke up to a door slam downstairs (it was the wind, the wind). When I slunk to the bathroom, I refused to look in the mirror for fear something else would look back, something I could only see in reflection, the spirit behind me, my shadow's opposite. The boy woke up in a panic, too, and we spent half the night in a cuddle, both of us scared for only slightly different reasons.
Shapes flow at the edge of my peripheral vision. I am not alone. I talk to the air and explain myself: Don’t watch me, I tell it, him, her: this isn’t me. I am somewhere else, inside my head, dancing on an empty stage, performing for no one but myself.
I didn’t go back to sleep this morning. The boy is home sick for the second day in a row (he is watching The Hobbit for the 20th time as I type across from him. I like to watch the emotions roll across his face like waves, his unfiltered reactions). Tomorrow my husband goes in for hernia surgery and I’m afraid that I will be home again with the boy, unable to support my husband at the surgical center and unable to be fully present at home.
When I don’t sleep, my outlook is bleak. I remind myself that it’s the insomnia talking, giving me guilt and worry, telling me that my luck is about to run out, that I don’t deserve a damn thing anyway, that the fates will figure it out soon enough. They will take away.
The woman sits in the room with us. Her knitting is loose and disorganized, her eyes glassy with lost memories. At night she sheds years. She wears black wool. Her long, dark hair gleams again. The woman visits each of us in our respective chambers, runs her hand along our frowsy sleeping heads. She stares at us until we stir, hoping to meet the eyes of the living one more time.
Image (from a Victorian ambrotype) by colodio.
Borrowed souls
He escaped. He got out of that car and climbed up the thorny hill and I was chasing him and she was, too, and all of the sudden I was scratching a dog behind the ears in my therapist’s office while all the people I know from my local waking life, the Berkeley era, parents from school and preschool, were in the waiting room with me. Outside children played on old-fashioned monkey bars while their parents were otherwise occupied (in the city or locked into office buildings or tapping away at laptops in coffee shops or maybe they were hanging their heads, resting them in their hands, listening to the blood flowing, pumping, feeling the stress of money troubles).
They knew me, these parents. They knew me better than I wanted them to know me. They had read my confessionals, my one-sided characterizations of the past (“myopic” one ex-friend wrote to me in a terse huff). They didn’t know why I borrowed people, those whom I felt had wronged me, those I once loved or still did but couldn’t. Because they weren’t writers themselves, they didn’t know that the people who lived, that I recreated in words, were now characters, that I owned them. I took their features and my own perceptions and changed reality into a copy, a mix of impression and imagination and sometimes emotion.
Thems the breaks when you know an artist, folks. Besides. By the time I get to you, to the hidden or not-so-hidden you, you are a fiction. Not real. Mine.
Can I call myself an artist? A writer? Can I handle the pretension, the assumption of it all? I can certainly hide behind it when I write things that cause pain or reveal too much about other peoples’ lives. It’s not as simple as borrowing other people, or making them my own. The past I sometimes write about doesn’t belong only to me and the people I pepper my writing with are sometimes very real.
I don’t want to be borrowed myself, want to exist fully as a human being, to not be summed up or characterized by a few of my traits in order to fit someone else’s idea of who I am or what they want me to be. I am slowly learning to tread carefully when dealing with the “facts,” to not direct my anger in public words so obviously or without some compassion for the people I prop up and make mine. Unfortunately, I have a whole passel of melodrama out there in the world to show up a time when I didn’t even think about how others might react, where I was the glowing center (or sometimes the black hole), the god moving around the souls of other people.
All I can do is to try to do better, to be better. I'm trying.
Postscript
A poem by Kevin that has been going through my head lately. Dedicated to those whom I've hurt out of my own myopic pain.
TWO-PIECE PUZZLE
Here's one of those two-piece wire puzzles.
There's only one way to take it apart.
(If you don't have the patience, don't start.)
It belongs to my son who would dazzle
all of us, doing it right.
He can't, I couldn't have either
when I was seven. I found it on the floor
of the bedroom after he'd spent the night.
I remember I'd had one like it
and I sat on the bed for a long while
fooling with it before I put it down
in frustration. I'd thought: Don't force it.
If you can't solve it, at least you'll
not spoil it as you did the other one.
--Kevin Sheehan
From the prompt "What I know about writing." The last prompt of the Round Robin. The end of the madness. I'm not sure if I will take the next round, so my posting will not be as frequent for the next several months. Unless I cave and take the class.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of disembodied marionette heads at Marionette Museum in Hohensalzburg Fortress the by Curious Expeditions.
Harmless ghosts
She was so skinny that I couldn't pet her without wincing, her spine and ribs an insult under dull fur. I pointed her out to my companions – my mother? my son? – and then saw that Zoe hadn’t touched her food. She was starving herself to death, too old and confused to remember where her food was, but when I pointed the bowls out to her, she ran to them with her characteristic trill and attempted to crush the pieces with her weak old teeth. It was a losing game.
The dream was real, too real, Zoe and the guilt. It was tangible. Until I woke up within it and told myself: enough! Zoe is dead. This is not Zoe. You don’t have to dream about Zoe like this. You are no longer responsible. You loved her. Her life was generally good.
Did it work? Did she disappear from the dream, or, even better, fatten up in front of me, become the cat she was for many, many years before her decline? I don’t remember, but I hope if she visits again she will be healthy and happy. I hope she comes with the rest of them, the animals I’ve loved. I want to see them again, to run my fingers along their warm coats and scratch them under their chins. We lived together once. We loved each other. They can help me forgive myself, take away the irrational responsibility I sometimes feel for killing them by not doing enough.
Because I should be able to cheat death, to keep the ones I love from feeling pain. I am the shield between them and the world and myself and the world and the responsibility is egomaniacal, it’s ridiculous, and what a relief to let it go.
Last night, Zoe tottered on too-thin legs. There were ghosts in the stairwell (“Did you see the humanoid figure on the landing?” I asked my mother after a dream-within-a-dream night of haunted sleep. She confirmed its presence, that thing we ignored and avoided.) and somehow I was losing my grip on the boy and when I woke up it was in night panic, in the acknowledgement of all the anxiety about the future that I keep packed up in order to keep on moving.
My mother had bad dreams about a bad man for a very long time, someone who had hurt her physically and emotionally. He stalked her in the night, showed up unannounced, drunk and full of vengence. Until the night she pulled a dream gun on him and told him to get out. He hasn't been back.
I soothe myself with the thought that these dreams have meaning, they are my self-conscious tugging at me, a reminder, and that I have control, that my reactions show how I am changing. The old me is gone. Zoe is dead. I call out to the ghosts and they can't hurt me.
From the prompt "Gone."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends (and it ends soon, thank goodness). Minor editing for clarity and to make it just a teensy bit better. And then edited it again later in the day for flow.
Image of cat sculpture at the Eastern State Penitentiary by e_monk.
No place like home
In my sleep last night, I created new homes, new spaces where we tried to fit in old furniture. Some rooms were filled, others empty, and we hadn’t gotten it down yet, how to fit it all in or talk about how to do it, and I fumed, looking at where he put everything, without consulting me and where was he, anyway?
Before sleep, as we hurtled here and there and looked at the view, after we pushed through sand (the finds! a pale sea star, tiny, near death, that slowly caressed my hand; a mussel covered in purple barnacles, exotic ladies with their fans that my mother tossed back into the ocean) and then went up and down the steps to the lighthouse, I thought: I miss home. Not my home –- though I miss that, too, the stately townhouses of DC and the fields and water of the Eastern Shore – but a sense of home.
I am disconnected, floating along, detached, and a person can’t live like this, in the emptiness. In my mind, a home, a personal culture, is often a shared thing, and I don’t know how to do it anymore. Is it fear? Is it something else? What am I looking for? We are cowards. We are delicate, easily bruised. We are all wrong.
This is what I grew up with: me and her, me and her, my mother, my grandmother. The men were interlopers and the best times were when we were alone. The last man was bad and also good. We shared something, the three of us. But he’s dead now and that life has been gone for ten years. Then it was me and my man and then me, my man, and the boy, and I realized: I don’t know how to do this. To make the world larger. To contain a family. I flirt with it. I want it, this sense of shared self, but it is as dangerous as a riptide, and unfamiliar.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re getting somewhere. But I feel like I am treading water and I am alone and I can’t do it alone but I can’t do it together either.
Yesterday we stood in line as a foursome, waiting to get a peek at the lighthouse lamp. My legs trembled like they never have before. They were tired. They needed more fuel, more food. We watched my knees shake and felt the tremors in my thighs. But I kept going. I waited. I stood. And when the ranger's talk was over, my mother and I tackled the stairs, walked thirty stories up without stopping, barely looking behind us, knowing the man and the boy were somewhere down below. Five minutes later, there they were, fifty pounds of boy on his father's shoulders, clinging against the wind.
Together we started the long walk back to the car, the tired stumble, preparing for a quiet ride against the earth's contours, the long ride home.
From the prompt "Undeniable."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I expanded this one a bit, though it feels unfinished. Funny how groggy I can be when I sleep in until 5:30. Groggy but slightly more refreshed.
Image: The boy and his father at the Point Reyes National Seashore. Hipstamatic by me.
Seventies dream landscape
I woke up thinking of choices and communication and how to do things better. I tossed and turned and when the boy came into our room, I changed venues and covered my head under his sheets before my brain quieted and I went to sleep again.
Other peoples' dreams are often boring, especially when we don't know the scene (water flowing over rocks on the Brandywine, the paths alongside, the old bridges and the race, the cars parked on clear spring afternoons with blaring music, the Victorian era zoo with its sad roaring lion). I apologize. And why was my mind resurrecting this world from childhood, from a long-ago time?
My mother is in town and we picked the boy up from his first day of first grade yesterday. Ah. When I was in first grade, we lived on Lovering Avenue, so near to Brandywine Park. Life was glass-fragile. I slept in a winterized side porch without any heat. My bed was skinny and I had a Mickey Mouse blanket, red underneath with various illustrations of the mouse on the white top surface. I had asthma attacks in the middle of the night in that room and bad dreams about intruders. In the summer I drank chamomile iced tea and plucked Italian cherry tomatoes off the plants out back. I practiced kissing on the pipes that ran from floor to ceiling in our kitchen. I played with the kid down the street whose mother had a greenhouse, an amazing thing in an urban neighborhood. I had a birthday party with a piñata and pin the tail on the donkey and one of our cat had kittens, while another cat was hit by a car and another chewed out his neutering stitches and died and yet another didn't make it out of kittenhood because of anemia.
It was a time of six-year olds in empty houses, walking by themselves down the street, of frustrated mothers and seventies poverty.
Does that explain my dreams?
Maybe.
There are some days when I just don't feel like sharing my prompts and this is one of them. My writing is OK enough, I guess, though it's often hard for me to tell in the moment. But it's not going up here.
Images (all posted before): Me, Frank the cat, and Christmas, Lovering Avenue, 1975-77.
Testing, testing ...
Today I am taking the GRE . The last time I took this was probably in … 1991? Twenty years ago. I took the train to Mom and Kevin's place in Wilmington and she later dropped me off at the testing site which was in Newark or in Philadelphia, where I sat with a bunch of other children in the high-ceiled room of a library, us with our scratch paper and our pencil marks and our dim light and our nervousness. Five years before, I had taken the SAT – my main memory of that is that it was scheduled the day after a Halloween party and I was tired and slightly hung over, but it went fine, because my brain was young and supple and accustomed to tests.
In the fall of 1985, along with every other junior in my high school, I took the PSATs. Except that I had to leave early for my ultrasound appointment, so that they could check on the age of the fetus, which I fudged the whole time, holding on to my lie until the pregnancy’s sad end six weeks later. All I remember about this pretest was the auditorium, my unexplained secret, the way we had to talk to the guidance counselor about my early dismissal without actually telling her the reason I had to have a doctor’s appointment right then. Now I wonder if I really have to have it then. We were in emergency mode by that time and skipping one half of the PSATs probably seemed unimportant.
I remember the before, sometimes a bit of the during, but I hardly remember the aftermath of these tests. Generally, I did ok. But here I am, over 25 years from a math class, knowing that I am going to totally screw that part of the GRE up. I’m worried and not worried about it at the same time. It’s like the logic midterm, knowing that I am going to toss myself over the side of a cliff and knowing that there is little I can do about it.
I failed the midterm, but luckily almost everyone else did, too. This is where my connection to my fellow philosophy students, all young men who were at CUA on a special scholarship where they were in the seminary (none of them became priests) while simultaneously getting a bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy. They used their power (not that they had a lot of it – these were tough years for these guys) to toss the results of the test out. It was true, our instructor was an ethicist, not a logician, and often would write long proofs on the chalkboard only to have a student point out a flaw in his formula, necessitating an entire rethink. There was a lot of crumpled paper in that classroom, a lot of groans. In the end, I got a C.
Last night I went to bed before ten p.m.. I read my escapist romantic book, A Town Like Alice, and I dreamed of phone calls that didn’t go through and children waiting for absent parents. In the last dream, I was in an elevator that was fluffy with loose insulation. I took it down to the basement, to the place of secrets where the walls were ripped away, showing their vulnerable insides. I watched the men working. I worried about their lungs, about the fibers floating in the air, about the way we contain the past. I waited for a sign that it was time to go back up again.
From the prompt "Surprise, surprise!"
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Edited slightly beyond the 12-minute mark.
Image by randomduck. This picture makes me homesick. The Childe Harold is no longer there, but I spent a lot of time in that basement bar in my 20s. J's cousin was a bartender there. My husband and I had at least one early days date there (I even remember the conversation) and a coworker took me there for a final beer after I quit my last full-time library job. Zorba's, the Greek restaurant to to the right of the Childe Harold, was where I went for an (illegal) Guinness on my first or second night in DC in the summer of 1989, drinking, eating, and reading under a Dupont-blue night sky, watching the people go by.
I need to visit. It's been too long.
Listen to the silence
One or two times a week, my husband or I sit down with our son to practice his writing. We're gentle. We're nonthreatening. Still, the pressure comes from within: nearly every time he dissolves into tears about selecting a topic. The subject is too large for him to narrow down. He claims to know nothing about x, a subject he's been talking about for days. He rejects all suggestions. There are too many choices (this is a child who is plagued by choice), too many things to be anxious about: the topic, the creation of sentences, the frustrating way that his brain still flips letters, the actual sounding out and writing of words. We push through and I try not to get frustrated myself, to remember that this is for encouragement, to help him in a no pressure environment. No matter. I end up feeling like a torturer. Still, we generally get through it. He's learning perseverance as well as getting comfortable with writing.
And what about me? I’ve put off this write since 6:00 this morning. Perhaps I don’t want to think about the sound of my narrative voice, don’t want to let the outside world into my head (the rumbling of a muffler on the fritz, the whine of the washing machine, the actual buzz in my ears that is a side effect of the medication). Or perhaps there are too many topics, from real to metaphorical, that I don’t want to write about, topics pressing at the edges of my skull that I am not yet ready to let out.
Last night I had a dream where I was staying at a hotel with three friends. The hotel was fancy and expensive and we each had our own room. But two of us were placed in an annex of the hotel, a long walk outside to a cinderblock structure that was dirty and cold, more motel than hotel. It took some time to find it, and my fellow Siberia-dweller wandered off to the bar. I knew she’d be getting drunk and I was hoping to get there with her once the whole room thing was straightened out, even though I knew this was bad, that I was encouraging her alcoholism. I prepared myself for a confrontation with the staff, felt my anger start to burn before I badgered the bored desk clerk for room changes, for what we paid for, was finally making a stand when … I woke up, right before the boy came into our room for his nightly sleep migration.
This happens more than I’d like, my wake up moments before the boy appears, my dreams interrupted and then interrupting my ability to return to sleep while everyone else in the room dozes. Did the sound of him wake me up? Am I "listening" to the boy in some other way? Are there other ways of hearing? And were the three of us in that dream different parts of me coming together again?
Lately I’ve been feeling a strange connection to someone I thought was a lost cause. This feeling is bodily, visceral, the feeling of music coursing through me, the "sound" of connection. I can't verify it, feel almost crazy to attribute it to what will remain unspoken. But I know what it is.
We cut ourselves off from the sound and beauty of the world around us. We block the signals of other people, switch off our receptivity and in the process lose ourselves. I’ve been tuned out for a while, scared by what the world might reveal about me. I've been afraid of other peoples' needs negating my own. I can't live that way forever, risk becoming dead inside, cold, like marble, like a smooth stone drowning in a rippling creek.
I am emerging, I am sending off welcoming signals. I am me and you are separate and beautiful. You shine in the dark, not waiting, but knowing that I'll be there soon.
From the prompt "The sound of ..."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. The words are not coming to me easily this week. Maybe I've been talking to my husband too much (a joke, a joke). Maybe there are many things percolating, waiting to ripen in my mind. This one took some work and I'm not sure how I feel about it. It certainly does meander.
And because this is the first song that came to mind when I was thinking of a title, here's a link to Transmission by Joy Division.
Image by theclyde.
Box it up
These are recurring dream settings, the vast above-ground finished basement that we never venture into because of what was left behind, the dark corners and creepy bathroom with wall-to-wall shag and a shower stall like a movie version of a cryogenic freezing chamber, the jacuzzi tub clogged with unfamiliar hair. Last night I took a friend downstairs to show her why we kept the basement door locked. She counted thirteen rectangular windows in the sitting room. We walked into the bedroom together. His stuff was still there: a stiff and formal robe, the shapeless sweatsuits draped over a golden-quilted bed. Up by the pillow was a copy of Dutch Life, some sort of travel magazine. He died in this room and they took him away and no one ever came to pick up his things.
Maybe it was grief or maybe they were too busy. Maybe those left didn't think he cared about the room, the medicines on the side table, the layers of dust accumulating on the clock radio. He left behind echoes of his humanity and suffering and maybe he was still there, maybe he wasn't, but it was time to take care of the room and what he left behind. I stripped the bed, put his last outfits in the wash, made plans to reclaim this space, to sell off the stuff and fill it with things of my own taste. I was going to sit in this room in the mid-afternoon light and bask in the sun with my eyes closed, curled up like a cat, a book resting next to me.
I have to hand it to my subconscious: it lacks subtlety, it knows how to hit me over the head with a metaphor, shows me that what I am doing, all the blah blah blah and the 6 a.m. pill and the being here now (when I can) is having an effect. I'm cleaning out the haunted house! I'm reclaiming the space! Sure, sure, sure. It may feel like I'm doing it one thought at a time, so slowly that progress seems impossible, but there are changes.
Still: why can't it tell me the outcome, lay out a path for what I should do? I expect too much of my subconscious, expect my dreams to be oracles, emotional barometers, to show me what the future brings. I want to believe in fate. It's a comforting feeling, that some of this is preordained and I have to follow the path set out for me by the cosmos or laid in some random pattern by an unseen being that I don't believe in. I reconcile my gut feelings, my intuitions, with the fact that sometimes our guts are mangled by experience, are hair trigger in their decision-making skills. I scrape away the past, expose how my fears can control me, but ... but ...
The ride continues, I steer sometimes, I try and fail and hope that the next try works. My future consists of the hours in front of me, the appointments I've made for the next week. But my subconscious is optimistic, is pulling for the cleanup. I'm just not sure what kind. At least I'm sleeping. I'm dreaming. And in the morning, if I am lucky, if the time is right, I tap out my thoughts and send them to you.
No time for writing lately. We were away for several days and since we've gotten back it's been me and the boy hanging out. And I've been sleeping! Almost eight hours for the last couple of nights. I wake up a little after five and then the kid is up and the day begins. Missing the words, but know they will come back. And it won't be all about my dreams next time.
Image by rpeschetz.
Why I've gathered you all here
I still walk, I wander the streets of Berkeley and Albany. I take in the flowers, the bungalows in various states of repair, stuccoed in purples and calming greens. This is my secret life, going from appointment to appointment, from therapist to counselor to doctor, observing the lives of others, their public faces. It's the slow way to travel, though I am a fast walker, and my mind records and remembers. Here is where I waited in the rain, my head filled with me, with friendly warnings for the coming earthquake, waiting for the car with my husband and son to whisk me away from the flood.
The sidewalks are empty and the houses silent. I wander during weekdays when the rest of the world is gathering cash and stress and knowledge and I go to my helpers, the people who prop me up and make me hopeful, like an old lady grasping the arms of youth, one on either side, as she attempts to make it up the hill.
I have dreams about children running away from me and lost pets, about clocks that don’t work and friends who tell me that they won’t invite me over. Last night, my heart trembling, I broke out in a sweat and dreamt of the end of the world by machine, the last of humanity stamped out by falling metal. I woke up from that, and from the next, an old friend in a ratty apartment by the ocean, the dangerous walk to her place from a bus stop. She’s a mother of two now, two southern babies that I’ve never met, and I’ve consigned her to the past, to memory, have kept her there like a fine piece of china, delicate and easily broken.
I’ve consigned you all to memory, I make up my mind again and again, keep you trapped here. You can’t talk unless I tell you to, and eventually you listen to my ramblings, to my explanations, the perfect imaginary audience.
From the prompt "Whispering."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by striatic.
The nightly freakout
But now I remember the dreams. Me in a Whole Foods produce section desultorily piloting my cart. The space was all matte linoleum floors and rustic wood boxes stacked with unblemished fruit and vegetables. I was dressed down, way down, with holes in my clothes and shapeless pants. I hadn't showered. My hair was lank. And then I bumped into my exhusband. He looked sleek, well-dressed and happy. We had a pleasant conversation about his life and family. I slunk off feeling happy for him but unsettled about my place in the world.
There was a stint in an office building (a recurring dream setting), me waiting in this black modernist lobby for an elevator with all these men, some of them rumpled types that worked at my last employer, a think tank, some besuited or be-khakied and be-oxforded. Pressed and neat. But that dream didn't go beyond the lobby, or at least my memories of it have faded. Usually the dream building contains my old office. I show up, but don't have a job anymore. Or the elevator is unreliable. Or the elevator is huge, buzzing with people like a mobile cocktail party. Or the top floors are connected via a set of steep precarious escalators.
The final dream: I was alone on a beach, a dirty little stretch of coarse sand with a shack behind and a rusty container ship off in the distance. I was too close to the edge. The waves lapped at my feet, got my things wet, and then they pulled my phone into the surf only to spit it back out at me with the next set. The phone was waterlogged, maybe ruined. It squelched with wet when I shook it. How would I call home now? Why didn't we spring for the phone replacement package, just in case? Then I remembered: my assignment was to drive back from this beach, drive by myself back home, a long journey. I imagined fast highways, me rippling along, panicked behind the wheel. I couldn't do it. I barely knew how to turn the wheel. And now I couldn't call my husband for help because my phone was ruined, because I had been careless with it, unprepared, and what about the highways and then I woke up.
The dreams make sense to me, they are a part of the puzzle of my current life. I must prepare. Design the new blog, think about a job, learn how to dive how to drive again. I must take care of the present and prepare for the future, feeling the fear while not letting it take over, while my subconscious does its nightly freak out.
Image: Steps to the slide at a local park, taken with the Hipstamatic app on the iPhone. Like it for its washed-out dreamlike quality and the feeling of movement (or of choice of direction).
Shifting ephemera
My freaky dreams: Like the one where I'm walking on a rocky creek shoreline in bare feet and come across a series of very bloody, very fresh footprints. I step carefully, my eyes scanning the rocks for broken glass. I'm paralyzed with fear, of what might happen to me, of what has happened to the other person.
Or the one where my husband, son, and I are in a small rowboat on this oceanic street in Emeryville, caught between a fear of sharks and a fear of place. The bridge behind us is from another one of my dreams, where I'm in a small souvenir shop in Chesapeake City. In the back of the shop is a door that leads to a spindly ladder that takes you to that bridge. Maybe that bridge can lead us home, or at least back to Chesapeake City, down the ladder, into the shop, into a past life.
Or the one where I'm riding on a train with my high school class (all of us middle-aged now), talking to a man I haven’t spoken with since 7th grade, about the recklessness of Reagan, his foolish use of weaponry. I’m topless, I move my knees closer to the man's. I wake up.
Author Richard Price: I love author Richard Price. Not just because of his well-drawn characters or his true-to-life dialog, but for the way he talks about research and writing. I also like the fact that, for a while at least, he was so unsure of his own words that he read them over the phone to his editor: I used to be a lot worse. My editor before this, John Sterling, I read all of Clockers and Freedomland over the phone. Everyday he would have to listen for forty minutes. It’s not like he had anything else to do, just run a publishing company. This guy is on the phone, listening to this oral reading. (2003 interview with Richard Price on Identity Theory) But reading Clockers -- a book about the crack cocaine trade in a fictional New Jersey town, on which The Wire was partially based -- before bedtime is a bad idea, no matter how compellingly written it is.
I've been gathering interviews, reading and listening, taking it all in, but haven't been able to distill it into a post. If you haven't read him, do. I'd start with Samaritan or maybe Freedomland. He's painful to read, but so real.
Blogging the things that scare me: This will be the basis of my next blog, facing down the fears and writing about them. They run the gamut from driving a car to taking a yoga class to interviewing someone to writing crap to being needy. I'm trying to think of a clever blog title, too. Stay tuned -- the blog will probably go live next month.
Furniture rearrangement: I've been changing my back room lair into a family space -- moving the TV and stereo in. Soon we'll take apart the bed back there and put in a sleeper couch, the one that's currently in the living room, and we'll have a slightly more grownup couch out front. My writing desk (pictured above) is now in the living room, in the light, in a more open space.
Why I should go to PTA meetings: For the writing material they could provide, the adult drama that underpins school life, the hidden relationships, the broken psyches, the flow of emotion underneath the dry surface.
And now off I go, to do something that scares me: contact total strangers to talk about stuff I barely know about.
Image: My desk in its new spot.
Edited to give the fiction its own post, later today or tomorrow.
As speechless as this dripping heart-shaped stone
This morning's 3:50 a.m. wake-up involved a man -- not necessarily my man though we we clearly together in some way, were an almost-item -- who lived in a house attached to a library. He disappeared one afternoon with a pack of friends while I sat in on a lecture in the conference room and listened to library talk. When the lecture was over and the sky dark, the man still hadn't returned. I went upstairs to his room. I wandered the house, walked past piles of laundry. I paced. I waited for him as panic rattled my chest. Abandoned.
Or the less fraught dream where the library was an annex to a childhood friend’s house. In a room off the kitchen, her father sat surrounded by cats. He stroked an orange tabby. A calico tossed at his feet. The friend and I, in the full bloom of middle age, walked past him. She had her library books in a satchel tossed over her shoulder. I wanted to ask her about her mother, who has been dead for a decade now, but instead we talked of the mundane, of childhood paths through the woods and decades-old David Bowie videos. The library annex was dark and stark and full of people and I remembered how much I missed the smell of books, the hum of computers, the clearing of throats.
Or the good dream, the feeling of being at home in my grandfather's house. It was a thrilling realization: this was my place. The Little House had been razed and rebuilt. It was now a public building, three stories tall with a thin aluminum skin and walls of glass. Part of the roof was turf and on the middle level an art gallery reception room jumped with people. I watched my mother climb the metal steps to her top floor apartment and reminded myself to tell my husband how the Little House was gone forever, how comfortable I felt in the main house.
Hopeful dreams – feeling at home, watching a place of pain transformed – are chased off by those that make my heart ache: that evening spent looking for this nebulous acquaintance, the worry of the wait, my worthless abandoned heart.
In preparation for an assignment for a class I'm taking in creative nonfiction, I was looking up interview questions, ways to think about asking strangers about their lives. On one site devoted to interviewing elderly relatives was the question: Have you ever had your heart broken? It was such a ridiculous question that it made me laugh (derisively, I admit, a short bitter laugh). Who hasn’t had their heart broken? How can you be alive and not have had your heart broken? I pity people who die never having had a broken heart. They've missed out on a key human experience.
My heart has been broken twice, both times long ago. J was the first to break it, followed by the philosophy student in a quick one-two punch. After that, I wised up, though not enough to avoid a bruising a few years ago. Since I am a married woman, future heart breakage is presumably unlikely. Yet I find myself guarding my heart anyway, protecting it, thinking that if I ever were alone again, I would hide it away forever, knowing even now it huddles deep inside my chest, thankful for its cage of bone and muscle, still hurting and unsure.
This is what a dream of abandonment brings to life again, though I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately anyway and writing about it in various roundabout ways. It’s tiring to hold back one’s heart, to keep it protected. And what am I missing because of it? Only the world, love, life. Family.
I need a guide to help me set it free, to pull it loose from bad memories.
Image by Melina.
My new therapist search began today. I'm also looking for a psychic, which tells you where my head is at the moment. Floating off my body. I keep on editing this post, too, which makes me wonder if it's really finished.
A note on the title: While I was writing this, one of Kevin's poems was going through my head. It's short, so I will type it here. It seems that having Kevin write a poem for you or a poem mentioning you was generally bad news.
POEM FOR MY WIFE
Above the sleepy river
branches touch and whisper.
Earth is telling of a dying.
Let me touch your woolen sleeve
and tell you what I've lost.
Beneath the iced-tea water
my skin looks like persimmon.
"Here. I am as speechless
as this dripping heart-shaped stone."
Fantasy interrupted
The other night it was an acquaintance, someone I've known peripherally for a few years. He is an attractive man, truly tall, dark, and handsome, and I’ve always had a bit of a crush on him. There he was, in the flesh, soon enough half-naked. Things were progressing when I put a stop to it: my husband would be there any minute. The acquaintance kept coming up with schemes to get together at another date, every one involving bringing our children somewhere for a rendevous.
It wasn’t going to work and I felt horribly guilty about it anyhow. I don’t have it in me to be unfaithful. I woke up, in fact, still feeling that warm tingly make out feeling that comes with new love intermingled with guilt. Although desire and guilt are a classic combination, I prefer to experience them separately. But the thrill of it all . . . not just the physical thrum of kissing someone new – it was the emotional thrill of being attractive, the idea that this person liked me and wanted to kiss me, too.
I love my husband and what we have together. Keeping my family intact and spending the rest of my life with this man are important to me. I can't imagine my life without him. But then I get these crushes, have these dreams, and I think: I am alive, I want the rush, the fluttering heart, the chance to kiss someone new. I want just a little taste again of falling in love and I want it without any of the fall-out, the doubts and worries followed by mundane reality, the clashes, the little irritations, the chores. Each relationship starts with the threat of loss, the end is written in the beginning, and couldn't I just skip all that and go for the endorphins?
So I develop crushes (long term, generally -- I am faithful in these, too), which isn't particularly satisfying, but allows me to indulge in escapist fantasy, where I am the object of desire, but also a paragon of virtue and fidelity. Sometimes I distract myself from the slog and drag with imagined scenes of a different life, exciting and dysfunctional and fueled by pursuit. In this life, I would yield to melodrama and romance. I would love and hate and fight dirty. I would experience fleeting joy (and intense sadness). I would stomp out a path of destruction, but surely life would be interesting.
I've been thinking lately about what purpose these crushes serve. A way to escape reality? Yes. A method of distraction? Of course. Compensation for the fact that, as a stay-at-home mom, the only males I've hung out with for the last five years are my husband, son, and cats? Yes: I miss men. But some of this feels like an attempt to recreate my father in other men. I want to be seen, to be noticed, to be interesting to certain kinds of men, incompatible ones who ignore me, despite my desire for attention (just like my father? well, close enough). My long-term crush was cool, unemotional, truly unreachable. My (imaginary) pursuit of him was fueled by a desire to be seen. His coolness kept my interest at a low burn for years. It was a relief when I finally figured out the mechanism and let the crush burn out. Fantasy interrupted.
I soothe myself with the idea that I tamp down these desires because of a stronger desire to do no harm, and because I already have love. I experience more moments of happiness than I often feel I deserve. Still, a small part of me wonders if I haven't taken the darker path because it isn't an option, because I am not attractive, a boring little wren of a woman, not worth the pursuit.
So I write about desire thwarted, evaded, rekindled. I duke it out in my mind. I pick apart the impure thoughts as I push them aside. Nothing is simple. The thoughts have a source, the source has a reason, and over time I uncover it and cover it up again. I file my wants, I organize them and pack them up.
I focus on the beauty of life outside me.
From a few prompts: I woke up, Down to the wire, and the photo, which is by the talented Jane Underwood.
Back to the old house
The house meant safety and comfort. It was predictable, constant, the place my mother and I returned to when life was falling apart, where my grandmother would take care of me when my mother was working or needed the time.
Then, when I was nine years old, my grandmother died. She collapsed in a chair in the kitchen while I stood watching. With my grandmother unconscious and my grandfather unable to use the phone, it was up to me to call the ambulance. My grandfather and I waited for the Volunteer Fire Department, a long, horrible wait. We watched the men struggle to lift her substantial body onto the stretcher. Would things have been different, I wondered, if I had gotten the cat off the chair sooner, if had understood my grandmother's gasps and flapping arms more quickly?
Sometime between the card games (solitaire, spit, go fish), the many phone calls to friends and relatives, the shopping trip for a burial dress, blue just like she'd wanted, and the wake where an uncle pulled out a cousin's loose tooth, the family decided that my mother and I would move in with my grandfather. In less than a month, we were out of our one-bedroom student housing apartment and back in the house at Hollywood Beach, my unemployed future stepfather along for the ride.
My grandfather’s house was cigarette smoke and chemicals, sugar and coffee, sawdust and mildew. It was porn magazines next to the candy in a cabinet in my grandfather’s room. It was my stepfather’s workout den in the unheated guest cottage we called the Little House. It was séances and Ouija boards, the yearning for a sign that my grandmother was still watching over me. Sometimes it was fights around the dinner table, arguments over food or housecleaning. It was nights in tight spaces, me in the sleeping bag under the bedcovers, in the attic with the pull-down steps, on the inflatable raft under the picnic table. It was sadness and anger and grief, the knowledge that I was on my own.
They sold the Hollywood Beach house in 1990, but I still visit it in my dreams. It stands for itself, it stands for part of me. The dreams used to be yearning, worried, guilty. I forget to take care of my (dead) grandfather. My mother and I bury body parts in the front yard. My uncle and aunt show up and I hide from them. Then the dreams changed, got a little better. My grandfather and I coexist in the house. We have a companionable sit at the dining room table. I leave before my aunt and uncle arrive. Interestingly, the Little House is never featured in these dreams, despite its importance in my own personal history.
Last Thursday night, I had another house dream. It was a beautiful summer day and various neighbors were busy with yard work or socializing. I felt comfortable, a part of things, visible and connected. My mother and I were discussing the renovation and eventual sale of the house, reminiscing about good times. I worried that the foundation would need to be redone, but she thought it was sound. My aunt and uncle arrived and went to work moving furniture from the house out to the lawn. Thinking this was a yard sale, a large crowd gathered in the grass and started dickering over the furniture. I yelled that it wasn't a sale, just the preparation for renovation. Suddenly I was happy about it, the prospect for an improved house, the same house but better, remade. Maybe we didn't have to sell it. Maybe we could add another floor, tear out the mildewey carpet, put up drywall where 70s embossed paneling had been, and come back to this house to live. It could be itself, a summation of memory and experience, and it could be something new at the same time.
What to make of it? The house is me, I am the house. The house is what it was, a place where things happened and people died, a holding place for my memories, a symbol of false security. My childhood was difficult, full of moves, losses, and bad men. Once my grandmother died, I had no adult advocate, and so I constructed a framework for myself, one where I made sure to rely on no one for my emotional needs, where I took care of my physical needs on my own as soon as I was able. I've let go of some of this. I have friends, a husband, good relationships with my parents. But I am still self-sufficient to a fault and quick to mistrust others. The framework gets in the way. It feels as much a part of me as my bone and muscle, organic and necessary to my existence. But perhaps I can work around it, make it into something new. The old house needs renovating. The foundation is sound. I'm ready.
And I'm not nearly as melancholy about it as Morrissey:
Image: The old house, undergoing renovation a year and a half ago. The Little House is to the left, obscured by the digger.
Shadowy figure
I’m having the dreams again, the ones where I can’t find you, where you leave the room moments before I walk through the door, or where I end up lurking by your apartment eavesdropping on your roommates or loitering around the lobby of your office building, hoping for a glimpse. When did I get so creepy? Last night's dream was one of full pursuit: I tried to track you down after an evening of my dissolution, a night in which we didn’t talk, we didn't even see each other, but I drank and annoyed. Not you -- no, as usual you were locus unknown, hanging out somewhere in the boxy house with pristine walls where we were staying. It was my other friend who got the worst of me. I was drunk and I ignored her and somehow missed you. But I was determined not to lose you again.
That wasn't the only dream you haunted last night. In the other one, my former boss, L, was giving a tour of the old school building where she worked and lived. Was she still a librarian? Did it matter? The school was small and square. Brick. It was proportioned for a different time when people were skinnier and had fewer belongings. (The 1930s?) L took me through long corridors and into strange empty wings. Two times she pushed me into an abandoned classroom while she stayed in the hallway, asking me if the trash can was full. I didn't notice the trash can -- I was too worried about ghosts. Why was the trash suddenly my responsibility?
There seemed to be no end to this school, with its linoleumed corridors and cramped rooms and stairways with cold metal handrails that left a tinny smell on my hands. Finally, we ended up on the top floor, which was another open office space. This one, lit by fluorescent tubes, was light without being airy. The staff was young, a few years out of college. Some of these people looked familiar and I realized this was where you worked when we first met. But you weren't there anymore.
I’ve been expecting these dreams, with their yearning and mystery, dreams where you are a recurring character in absentia. My subconscious is working something out (although what that might be is still a mystery to me). And I'm torn between accepting you as a symbol (of me? of my squashed desire?) and giving in to the yearning.
Hope you are well,
J
Image by zen.
A tale of necessary sadness, in two acts
Act I
Something is going on with me. I’m sleeping terribly, cry at nothing. Last night at dinner my son asked for another Dress Me Monkey story: “What else would Dress Me Monkey do?” This is our cue to come up with some fantastical new tale about how the toy would spend the proceeds from treasure he never manages to steal. I said the first thing that came to my mind, that Dress Me Monkey wishes he could go back in time to the nights when he ate with his mother and father and they told Dress Me Human stories. "His parents are far away now, and Dress Me Monkey misses those days. He would like to go back for a meal or two."
The dinner had been a difficult one, with the kid complaining about his food and telling me how the refried beans on his homemade nachos looked like dirt, like something worms would eat. I'd spent a lot of the day fighting my initial crabby responses to his normal kid behavior. I was tired. My past has been coming back and poking me lately, spilling out, and meals are one of those difficult times for me. So I came up with a Dress Me Monkey story that fit my mood, inappropriate though the story might have been.
"Why did Dress Me Monkey want to have dinner with his parents again, like he was a little monkey?" the boy asked.
“Because everybody wants that,” my husband said and started to cry. The boy was concerned and snuggled up close to his dad. We explained that Daddy was crying partially because he misses his mother, who has been dead for twelve years, but that also sometimes adults miss the past, the sweet simplicity of the family table. Then it was my turn to cry, because my childhood mealtimes were mainly horrible. The emotional tenor of my those dinners depended on my mother's mood and the man she was dating. She had only three boyfriends over the course of my childhood, but each of them had their own issues, would make me stand at the table or wouldn't talk when I was there or would pull me apart, show my every flaw. When the last one, Kevin, came along I ended up eating dinner alone most of the time.
So. I want my family meals to be happy. Full of love. The food I prepare is part of that love and I try hard not to force the boy to eat things he doesn't like, which is why he eats macaroni and cheese almost every night. Last night the meal was something he has eaten before, but it didn't appeal to him and the whole situation got to me.
I know that his rejection of my food is not a rejection of me, but sometimes I still have that visceral reaction, that and "You have no idea how good you have it, little boy." And I get angry at myself for thinking such a thing. He doesn't "need" to know that. He needs to grow up secure and happy and loved, without the burdens of my childhood thrust upon him. But right now the past is spilling out of me, surprising me with its emotional abundance. It can be overwhelming.
Last night, as I was getting him to sleep, he asked about our day. This rundown of our daily activities is a bedtime ritual. Sometimes I learn more about what happened at school or we go deeper an earlier discussion. When I got to the dinner portion of my synopsis, I apologized for the weirdness of it and asked if he had any questions. "Why did you tell a sad Dress Me Monkey story?" was the first.
The real answer was because I am sad right now. I am processing something deep and fetid, airing out emotions that don’t easily surface. I’m not sure why it's happening and while I don’t like the effects – waking up in the middle of the night or too damn early, occasionally scaring my child, being cranky and sleepy all day – I think what I’m going through is necessary. What I told him was that when I was little mealtimes weren't always happy times and I was feeling sad about it during dinner. And then we moved on to why Daddy cried at the dinner table.
Act II
It happened again last night, the two a.m. alarm clock. I woke up sad, obsessed with an aborted friendship. After a good cry -- quiet, intense -- into my pillow, I went into the boy's room to read and hopefully return to sleep. (He had already migrated into our bed.) When sleep finally snuck up on me, I had a complicated dream. In it, my husband's family was visiting (though, in typical dream style, an old boyfriend of mine showed up, too, looking very much like a middle-aged Eastern Shore type, with a baseball cap, greying beard, and a beer belly). It was a surprise visit. I hadn't had a chance to clean and I was ashamed at how the house looked and angry with my husband for springing them on me.
My dream self went stomping off into the night. Our oldest cat, Zoe, fifteen years old now and a sack of bones, dotty, constantly hungry, followed me. We wandered frenetic city streets, joined the rush of humanity. In one square, mimes performed acrobatic feats and played with fire. The glow of a neon sign drew me into a murky bar. The next thing I remember, Zoe and I were walking home. A rainstorm had blasted through the city and scrubbed away the people, leaving behind damp sidewalks and oil-slick puddles that reflected the shimmer of streetlights. It was spooky, the kind of emptiness where you expect to hear an echo of footsteps behind you. Zoe, frightened by a stray cat, fell behind.
One minute I could see her, the next she was gone. I screamed her name over and over again. I used the dinnertime call: Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo-Zo. And then I opened my eyes, totally awake, feeling the responsibility, feeling the loss.
But at least I was feeling something.
Image: Asher with Nick's shadow. Zoe has asked not to be photographed for the blog. She's an old-fashioned sort who values her privacy, though her name actually is Zoe. She also agreed that this photo was the best fit for the post.
Does it seem like my past is always spilling out? Maybe here. This is different though, like I'm working through something big. I sometimes discount the effects of my childhood and often think I should be over it by now. But it's not so simple, is it?
Dream police
You know the type of dream: the key doesn’t fit into the lock. It crumbles into dust before you even get a chance to try it. Or the door has a series of complicated bolts and attachments and there you stand, in the rain, in the snow, on a hillock of desert sand, holding this old-fashioned key. Or a roller skate key, which at first you don’t even recognize – does anyone use those things anymore?
But I’ve never had a key dream. There is nothing to unlock. I have no inaccessible thoughts, just a stream of consciousness and overflowing bins in the mind, intermingling. The kind of dreams I have are telephone dreams: me in a phone booth, the phone an old-fashioned dial model, and I can’t quite get my fingers to pull the dial to the comma of metal, to the kissing point. Or I’m a dark room heavy with curtains and carved furniture, waiting for the pick-up, the throw-out, the end, fingers tangled in heavy plastic. I keep on trying to connect (the key word here, no pun intended), but never quite make it.
In these dreams I’m always trying to call my mother, which is funny, because in my waking life I talk to her on the phone every day (on the cell phone, where I have her various numbers linked to single digits: the only possible mistake my fingers will make is hitting the wrong one and dialing my husband or my father instead). As I write about it, I remember that these dreams are more of a thing of the past, a symbolism my subconscious has rejected, perhaps as being too trite and obvious. I like to think that the connection between my mother and me, the path of communication, has opened, is free of static and complication.
Technology has changed as well. Maybe I’ll start having keyboard dreams: me sitting at the old-fashioned desk on this chair with the pillow for comfort, cozy in a circle of light against the early morning darkness, my fingers unable to find the right letters. I turn the letter “a” into a semi-colon, type symbols when I want numbers. It could be the keyboard is against me or my own mind, that my fingers, trained in typing class in ninth grade, are starting to stumble, to forget, the muscle memory fading away. So I’ll return to the pencil, scratching out my thoughts onto a piece of paper, my grip loosening, until all I can write is a series of scrawls.
Image from Vitroid.
From the prompt "Write about a key."
And just in case you want to hear the Cheap Trick song, here's a link. After watching it once, all I can think about is how unhealthy they look.
Prognostication
In my dreams, the dead are silent. I’ve never had a good conversation with a single one of them, just offer my apologies, bake the bread, pour the coffee. What is the guilt about? The dead no longer care about my transgressions. Isn’t it enough that I hold them here in my subconscious, treat them as gently as I would a freshly-laid egg?
But this dream was different. We were going to visit Kevin, who has been gone for over seven years now. As in real life, I was nervous: would I react properly to him? Would he toss the verbal slings, so subtle and cutting, if I didn’t pick up on something, if I reacted too slowly? Or would he sit there, blue eyes glowing, as my mother and I circled him like butterflies, flitting here and there in our attempts to placate?
Kevin spoke. He used the ethereal language of dreams, of those who are now ashes and light, but in that nasal New Jersey accent that I haven’t been able to replicate in my mind for years. And he was funny, so funny, because Kevin was bitingly funny. I laughed and realized how much I missed him, how much time had gone by and then I woke up, not remembering a word of his complicated meta-joke.
Time flies on and I die a little every day, lose another connection, feel the pull of a long-ago past. Yet my grandfather still shows up at the old house. I smell his cigarettes, breathe in sawdust, too-sweet coffee and turpentine. He waits in his cell of a room, a voiceless old man in a flannel robe, unshaven and glassy eyed. I rush past the sink filled with dirty dishes, walk a path of slate to get to a mailbox that hasn't been opened in years. Sometimes we take his car for a complicated drive to Christiana. Maybe we are heading to the hospital, waiting for someone to hand me a small bundle, something I've forgotten.
The dead appear without explanation or warning. Carolin greets me in a too-bright dorm basement, fixes me with intense eyes. David Anderson sits in a classroom, shoeless, staring at the algebra equation on the board. Frank the cat meows for food that I don't have. And my grandmother, the one I ache to see, is sick of my inattention and has stopped showing up at all.
Someday, no one will know that I was sixteen and angry once. They will remember an old woman deeply lined, forgetful, with clouded-over eyes, demanding and harmless. Inconsequential. As though I had been born without desire, without the power to wound.
Image: Postcard, date unknown.
Nefarious times I live in
Forgive me, fellow bloggers, for I have sinned. I did not intend to leave this blog for almost a month while I frittered away five weeks with my son. My mother visited for ten days and I did not blog. I had eight hours of babysitting one week and I did not blog. This past week -- my son's first back at school in over a month -- coincided with the visit of an old friend and I did not blog.
But during those eight hours of babysitting, I started to think about writing again, about tackling the never-ending story in some different way, fitting in time for as-yet-nonexistent freelance work, attempting to keep this blog somewhat current (all while finishing household projects). Good writing grows best in the dark (thanks, rcb!). What sees the light here in fragmentary form tends to stay that way. Or sometimes it embarrasses me later in its undeveloped melodrama and weak attempts at capturing reality.
It's tempting, really tempting, to put up little bits and pieces on the blog. There's nothing like instant feedback to keep one going, except that I don't keep going. The past -- meh. I've dug into it, and created stories out of it, have exposed enough. Now I'm looking to take the facts of my life, the weird experiences and characters as twisted and lively as wisteria in bloom, and make them fictional. I want to harness the crisscrossing metaphors of my subconscious.
Blah, blah, blah. I'm continually on the edge of something, a change, a new way of being, perpetually on the hopeful precipice. But I've come so far from the first days of this blog, typing in the dark and yearning for more.
Image: My mother and me walking in Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.
Gut and rebuild
In Baltimore, new people are moving in, are paying top dollar to remove the Formstone. Men, almost always men, come in with crowbars, pry the fake rock off the façade, tuck and repoint the newly exposed brick, repair tumbledown walls. Often the brick was already turning to dust when the first workers set up scaffolding, draped the famous white marble steps that the fastidious Polish ladies of Baltimore kept bright and clean. Entire blocks were caged in chicken wire and lathe as the men slathered cement mix on chockablock rowhouses, transforming old world brick into new world faux.
In San Francisco, they are propping houses up on jacks, underpinning foundations, retrofitting in case of earthquake. What do they find beneath the slatted wood? The houses rest on broad oak beams or heavy hips of steel propped up on concrete columns, strong, but not enough to take the shaking that is inevitable. The workers come with their heavy equipment and digging machines, extend legs deep in the ground. They marry house and foundation, bolt them together to ensure that the two don’t separate in a moment of crisis.
I dream that I am in a house, that I am the house, a faded Victorian, gingerbread rotting on the porch. My foundation is sunk and the slightest shaking will slump me into the street, or have me crying drunkenly into a neighbor’s garden, letting shards of my window glass dangle in the koi pond.
I am my mother’s house, an alley rowhouse no more than 12 feet wide and 27 feet deep, huddled with my compatriots on Finch’s Way, a one-block dead-end Baltimore street. The brick underneath my Formstone is solid and plumb. I am bright with open windows that let in Mexican music and the sounds of the crazy woman across the street cursing the traffic and the illegally parked cars. I am tolerance smelling of English tea roses and home cooking. But be careful climbing the winding staircase at my core, where the stairs narrow at the inside edge and you must climb in darkness.
One misstep will send you tumbling.
(Image: Looking at Kevin's old house on West Street, the one on the left.)
People stop and stare
Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster
I had a nickname name for him, a code word really, so that I could write it in my notebooks without fear of discovery. Bertie Wooster. It’s embarrassing, but 100% true: I was a 12-year-old P.G. Wodehouse fan, with a huge crush on my ash-blond, hazel-eyed classmate. Even in high school, after the thrill was gone, after Bertie had metamorphosized into a six-foot tall pothead, after I fell hard for a senior basketball player (another unrequited love), I would blush when we passed in the hall.
Crushes, I’ve had a few. They have ranged from the silly (the hot dog stand guy, summer of 1984) to intense (first husband, early days). These infatuations have been distracting, fun even. Nothing, however, has persisted like my 14-year obsession with Mr. H.
We met at work, my first week at my first real job. Mr. H. was cute and asked a coworker if I was attached. And so the internal churning began. I was attached – soon to be married, actually – but I couldn’t shake the butterflies, the deep blushes, whenever Mr. H would show up in the library. There he’d stand, feet away, hovering over the fax machine (the only one in the office); or he’d actually stop by to (gasp) ask me a question. My heart would race: it races now, as I remember those chance moments. Knowing he spent time in our neighborhood, I would survey the sidewalks evenings and weekends, on the lookout. The soundtrack for that year was a strange mix of Morphine and Holly Cole. Her version of On the Street Where You Live, with its stalkeresque undertones stirred up the ironic obsessive in me.
Today I am a happily married woman. Over the years, the crush has been mainly dormant, with a few volcanic moments. At this point, it’s academic – what meaning does this person hold for me? why do I continue to have those frustrating dreams? – but I am tired of it. And so, today, needing a new writing project to fixate on, I thought: why don’t I write a letter to Mr. H? You know, lay out my feelings in a literary sort of way, show them the harsh light of reality; get them out of my system. Maybe I send it, maybe I don’t. If I don’t, maybe I get it published. Everyone’s into reading about other peoples’ sick love obsessions! I can take this useless, ridiculous feeling and parlay it into art.
Yeah. I’ve been working on it for much of the morning, and I find that the writing process doesn’t purge the feelings: it makes them more intense.
My crush has morphed into a middle-aged thing, a yearning for escape from quotidian existence. I am ensconced in my (relatively) safe life, a housewife wannabe writer, parent to one tiring preschooler. Not much excitement here, though things are quite comfortable and loving at home. Maybe I need to take up bungee jumping or fencing, something to liven up the system.
So: Jennifer, let sleeping crushes lie. Oh, and Mr. H, if you are reading this (do you read this blog? I doubt it.), write me back, OK?
Only joking.
Crushed
For a long time I thought the dreams were messages from my subconscious, a sign of our untapped connection. But they were always full of anxiety, missed moments, twisting city streets, long distances traveled for dissatisfying conversations. The longing was mine alone.
In one dream, my mind created a labyrinthine mental institution for our encounters. We were both inmates, living in separate dormitories. The buildings were part of a Victorian-era hospital, dark and complex with hidden meanings, completely separate from the external world. We would meet and part, meet and part, sometimes with a glance, sometimes managing a quick kiss, always with that awful ache for what could never be. I woke up wondering: Do you care for me? Do I exist for you?
That was the hold he had on me: the pursuit of acknowledgment, the desire to be seen for who I was, while he existed as pure symbol, out of reach and impossible to know.
Last fall, when my marriage was going through a rough patch, we started e-mailing more frequently. I liked the exchange, felt my latent crush expand, fill the spaces I thought were empty. It was innocent fun – no lines were crossed. Then, without explanation, he stopped responding.
Over time the dreams went on hiatus. Until last night. I’m not going to get sucked into this game with my subconscious again.
I don’t need his acknowledgement to know I exist.
After the fire
As the story goes, he stepped outside, lit a Pall Mall, and popped the huge blister on his stomach. "I think you better call an ambulance."
80% of his body was covered in third-degree burns. He spent nine months in the hospital, nine months at home with a full-time nurse. He suffered through over 26 skin grafts. His hearing was ruined from massive doses of powerful antibiotics. When his right foot was giving up the ghost, its blood vessels cauterized by fire, surgeons took a couple timid swipes, lopping off one toe, then a couple more. It took a third operation to amputate it just below the ankle.
Years later, a doctor told him, "I've seen skin like that on a dead man."
When I knew him, he was demanding and unhappy, a man with a limp and two hearing aids. I learned to hate his call: "Jenny, got a minute?" I was definitely not a Jenny and what if I didn't have a minute? It was the typical stupidity of youth. I wish I could go back and treat him with kindness and empathy, to understand what was destroyed in the fire.
In my dreams he's back in the old house, living off hot dogs and root beer, not yet clued in to his own death. He tries to call me, jamming his thick, arthritic fingers into the phone's dial. No luck.