Damn, this day. I don’t even know how it happened. All I did was wake up.
Have you seen “Stranger than Fiction”? That scene where the professor tells Will Farrell NOT TO DO ANYTHING all day and see if the plot is driven forward. He sits at home, watches TV, doesn’t answer the phone, pees in a bottle and then the wrecking ball comes crashing through his wall.
Today was not nearly as dramatic as that, but you get the point.
It started with a bad dream. Actually is was a good dream about my friend’s kids – until I woke up to realize it’s wasn’t remotely close to reality. I haven’t seen them in months. My only hope is they’ll remember me. They were more than just my friend’s kids – they were family. I felt like I had some claim to their happiness. They aren’t mine, but I love them.
Every time I dream about my friend or her children and then wake up, the loss of them tears me to shreds. It’s like the first dagger all over again. I wish I could train myself to dream in some deep coma – just for right now – it’s too painful to have them so close inside me.
And it started there – moved to a writing rejection, my own rejection, my feelings of failure, displacement, getting lost in my own poems and not knowing how to get the wrinkles out. I kept hearing Anne Lammott say “imagine putting the doubting thoughts in a huge glass jar and screwing the lid shut.” But I couldn’t find a jar big enough – at least not today.
I cried a lot even though it was sunny and nice outside. I watched the birds – sparrows and our beautiful cardinal. I tallied the iris – marked how many have opened their purple hearts to me and wondered if I could ever open my heart the way I did before.
I read poems, which is the best possible thing to do when you are stuck writing or feeling worthless writing, because reading poems sparks me in such times. They make me feel like I can do anything.
I read Elaine Equi and she wrote in her poem “Destinations #2”:
Your letter
is full of energy
as though you were
inside a color
a whole flock of them
but I slept
on the day
I was born
and see sleep
as others see the world.
A lamp filled with
the oil of dreams
hisses, stone chatter.
—–
and this made me feel less alone in the world. Even though I do – part of me feels very alone without her. But maybe part of me has always felt alone. Yes, everyone feels partly alone.
After reading that I could write – at least for a little while until I had therapy and I didn’t want to go, but CLEARLY I NEEDED TO GO – if you’ve made it (reading) this far, CLEARLY I NEEDED TO GO TODAY and it was helpful and I cried a lot again and sweated like I always do when I’m there. Apparently I’m where I need to be between loss and forward motion – if there is such a place, but I’ve realized that I don’t have a road map for what has just happened. I’m driving blind and I think that’s why it’s been so difficult for me because I have never been in a place quite like this. I get lost a lot – I do. But I have a pretty kick-ass sense of direction.
All of that and it was only 2:45. Now, I’m working a night shift, eating red vines, chex mix and coka-cola zero with ZERO calories because I don’t need to burn anything else off today. Hopefully I’ll make it to 11:30pm.
If you read this far, I’ll give you a pretzel.
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